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Comment by smrq | Hacker News Reader

Not trying to be "that guy", just figured you might want to know-- although it's pronounced "tamber" it's spelled "timbre". Thanks, english.

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I think this one you can blame on the French.

The word sounds exactly how it is written when you say it in French tho, not our fault you adopted the word and say it differently ;)

I blame the English aristocrats. Why eat cow like a peasant when you could have some beef like a fancy person?

And why spell it "color" like the Romans did when you can blithely attempt to imitate the French aristocracy by injecting arbitrary "u"s into random words, thus giving you license to complain about CSS keywords for the rest of recorded history? :P

You're my new favorite person.

also, think the french started this. a name for the animal in the field, a different name for the animal on your plate.

The Norman conquest of England brought with it pork, beef, mutton and plenty of other adaptations of Old French words. The nobility ingratiated themselves by adopting the new vocabulary, and doing so (true for most of history, I imagine) stood out as a social status signal. The way of speaking filtered down to the lower classes over time.

Huh, I'm pretty sure that it doesn't sound like [timbre] in French either :D

Whenever I hear the phrase "that guy" in a guitar/music thread I can never not hear Guthrie Govan cracking jokes (also funny, in context to your comment considering it's pronounced "guh-van" despite the spelling)

https://youtu.be/A8CoUmmOKpI

The pronunciation is highly variable and the spelling has historically also been variable. When French words are imported to English, sometimes people try to retain the French pronunciation and other times they anglicize it. This word seems to have been handled both ways.

Another thing that happens is that both English and French change their pronunciation over time. After English imports a word, the French pronunciation may change making the English word look odd or not even look connected. Not sure that this happened to “timbre” but it did happen to words like “chief” and “chef”. Both were imported from French but at different times. “Chief” when French used the hard ‘ch’ sound and “chef” when French had switched to the soft ‘sh’ sound.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/timbre https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Timbre

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