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Comment by cycomanic | Hacker News Reader

French is even weirder because the adopted words are often pronounced in a completely different way than the original. We encountered that 2 days ago when my children (who are bilingual French/German) tried to explain to me about the Highland cows they learned about in a book they got. They book had instructions to pronounce the word so it sounded like "Island" so I got quite confused, if this was cows form Ireland or maybe Iceland.

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The elusive "h". It is very common (for French speaking English) to either remove an h as they did there, or insert it where it don't belong as in "hot hair balloon" or the city of "Hamsterdam".

Nothing used to annoy my Essex friends as much as telling them they sound French because they treat “H” the same way

It’s fun, after being taught about the H, to see that fellow French people don’t hear the presence or absence of H until they are taught; It’s like white noise, we assume the guy needs to breathe.

That h? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6oeAdemFZw

After 20 years of speaking english (french mother-tongue here) someone finally told me that you don't pronounce the "h" in "hour". I (and, I think, most french people speaking english) really do have to think of the spelling of a word before pronouncing it. And there I was being extra careful with that h at Hour. Now I have to be extra careful not to pronounce it…

But on a positive note, discovering all these small quirks are like "Achievement unlocked" kind of moments if you like learning languages.

I am French too and I am trying to understand how you pronounced "hour" before (my dog, cat and wife are already looking at me suspiciously).

You pronounced the "h" like in "hot"? (with the "h" making actually a sound?). I am quite surprised because we do not pronounce and "h" when it starts a word (usually at least), and I've been learning English in the 80's with Brian and Jenny (kudos to the ones who had the same manual) and it was not taught that way either.

English has a similar confusion with the word hotel. A loan-word from French, the correct indefinite article is counterintuitive. An hotel, a house.

As a native (American) English speaker I would never write or say "an hotel" and I don't think most people would. I confess I didn't realize this was even a debate. An hotel is apparently an older English grammar rule that it appears is considered largely obsolete.

ADDED: You do see a remnant of this with "an historical" but even that is generally not preferred in most dialects. https://www.alphadictionary.com/articles/drgw007.html Basically, it has to do with whether the initial "h" is pronounced in a given dialect of English.

It might also have to do with avoiding confusion with the word "ahistorical".

In English you almost always pronounce an H at the start of the word. In fact I can't think of any examples other than Hour for when you don't pronounce it

e.g.

Hot Happy House Hotel Humble Hundred Help Hippo

Herb, whether you pronounce the H depends on whether you speak British or American English.

Honor, heir, honest. Together with herb and hour, those are the only ones I can think of.

Also homage. This page gives a list, which is just those plus derivatives:

https://yolainebodin.com/the-language-nook/english/english-w...

That's a good point - thanks. This would explain "hour" in OP case.

Yes exactly like for hot. And I was even "proud" of not forgetting to pronounce it…

How-er

25 years in Canada and I still pronounce the L in salmon and all the letters in Bomb. To amusement of everyone but its still understandable :-)

And then there's knight and knife :-O

Were your kids pronouncing island like "iz-land" or "eye-land"? Just asking because other people in the thread seem to be focusing on the "H" sound rather than the fact that "Island" is the German word for Iceland. Another fun layer of confusion for multilingual kids :)

The particular problem you're describing is our (I'm French too) very specific issue with the sound "h" I think. Same with "th".

Heh. I was watching this TV series, in French, about some retired superheroes in a village. In the first episodes they were talking about a supervillain, but I couldn't quite catch his name, it was something like "zoolord", "zolord", "zelord"...?

I looked it up on wikipedia and of course it was "The Lord" XD

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero_Corp#Main_characters

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