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Comment by growt | Hacker News Reader

For everyone not speaking french: "le chat" in french translates to "the cat". So I guess that's a play on words that works given the context and probably the mostly not native french audience.

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Many french will call a chat app a "chat" not with the french pronunciation.

True, but here, the insistence on using "le" (instead of just "Mistral Chat"), the "Adoptez le Chat" (adopt the cat) wording and if you go further, the little cat head inside the "M" logo makes the pun very obvious.

It's a way of using the English term "chat" while using the typically French article "Le". It reminds me of old American cartoons that abused the article "Le" to emphasize the French aspect of a character or place. The Mistral products "La Plateforme" and "Le Chat" follow this principle.

I personally make an exception for ChatGPT for the delightful phonetical prononciation that translates to "cat I did fart"

Cat, I did fart loudly.

(chat, j'ai pété fort. ChatGPT4).

chatte, which translates to pussy, is a better homophone. Also funnier but less sfw

Wait, that was my joke!

https://imgur.com/a/PCqFjOQ

(apologies to Geluck)

Even better if you pronounce the 4 in ChatGPT4 as “for[t]”.

That was a classic when playing on the french Speak & Spell

GPTOPIDQ

8 year olds will laugh at anything.

Well LHOOQ is one the most famous french art piece, so, maybe there's something going on here.

I don't think it's possible that a Francophone pronounces an English word without a "french pronounciation" :-D <3

Genuinely curious, what context would explain something relating to a cat?

My first reaction as a French native speaker was to read it as "the chat", considering that "chat" is a well-known Anglicism in French.

Yes in that context it's pretty clear, but if you encounter the word "chat" in any french text, wouldn't you normally assume that it means the animal? I have a similar example in german: The word "Fee" in german means "fairy" and when we used it to promote a product in the past, someone who came from a financial background read it as the english "fee" and was pretty confused about that sentence :)

I recognised it because of that poster for ‘Le Chat Noir’

when you use it on dark mode, it does say

Le Chat Noir_

as an inside joke!

I guess it’s like « le Big Mac » in pulp fiction.

I like to think of it as partially owning how chatGPT sounds like "Cat, I farted"

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