Hacker News Reader

Comment by Narishma | Hacker News Reader

> bit (in English) is not pronounced the same as bite (in French). The French word is closer in pronunciation to “beet” or “beat” in English.

Wrong, it's pronounced exactly like the English "bit".

View on HN

https://forvo.com/word/une_bite/

This French guy says it exactly like the English word beet.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bit

English bit.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/beet

English beet

That’s not true, at least in France. Perhaps it’s true in some other dialect, e.g. Quebec French; I don’t know.

From Wiktionary, the pronunciation of English bit is /bɪt/, and French bite is /bit/. The sounds represented in IPA by ɪ and i are not the same, which is precisely why “bit” and “beet” sound different to Americans.

I am from France. It's pronounced exactly the same here. Kids always joke about it when they first learn the English word 'bit'.

It's pronounced the same only by people speaking English with a French accent. An American, Brit, Indian, or any other native speaker of English absolutely does not pronounce "bit" the same way a French person pronounces "une bite."

Rather than measuring whose French pedigree is longer, I will put down a wager on this. ₹3? :D

I don’t doubt that you speak French. French people tend to have difficulty distinguishing those sounds because they are not distinguished in French. In English, they are: English has a much larger inventory of distinct vowel sounds than French (or indeed most European languages). In typical French-accented English, “bit” is indeed pronounced like the French word “bite”, but in native speaker English, it is not.

I am a native speaker of American English and also speak French quite well. If you neither accept personal experience, nor what is written on Wiktionary, what evidence would you accept?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com