English speakers can really enhance their vocabulary when they know French. English does have a lot of French words that most people don’t use anymore but if you use them, your vocabulary becomes off-the-charts intellectual.

I was thinking more of Spanish, but yup. Same thing.

Anglo-language conversations plus Franco-vocabulary utilization, remains a veritable trick code

De rien

I learned it trying to fix a coffee maker. It’s news to me that it ain’t a coffee specific word.

I learned that word from my dad when I was a child. we kept a carafe in the refrigerator designated for water. It’s a wine carafe but can put anything in it. My dad was an alcoholic so he had a wine carafe and a lot of other alcohol-related accoutrements like beer steins.

I was scolded by a boss for using words that to me were perfectly ordinary everyday words. Words like “cognate” or “cognizant”, say, but to him they sounded like I was showing off and making people feel bad.

Oops.

Fantastic! Stromae is actually the reason I learned verlan existed! I got to see him live in the US, and it was one of the coolest live shows I’ve ever seen. The majority of the video for quand c’est is an actual part of the live show, and I wasn’t expecting it at all

Wait, Verlan is l’envers, stromae is maestro… Is this Verlan thing just like Rioplatense Spanish’s Vesre? (Vesre basically means revés i.e. inverse)

EDIT: Just looked it up on Wikipedia and it turns out this phenomenon happens in a number of languages: Riocontra in Italian (riocontra -> contrario), Podaná in Greek, Šatrovački in Serbia, Totoiana in Romanian.

Yeah, “gon’” seems about the most efficient form of “going to” that would be recognizable.

Going to > gonna > gon’

I guess if you’ve lived anywhere where speech has drifted a little hillbilly this version is just daily speech rather than any need for speed.

If you’re eating a potato it’s going to be hot.

Potato salad has entered the chat.

No, fellow human. Of course I am not the alien. Ha, ha, ha. You are funny and I would be pleased to talk with you another time in the future. Ha, ha, ha. Good bye.

Shibboleths are amazing! Calgary is almost universally pronounced “Cal-Gary” by non-locals, locals say “Calgree”

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OMG, that makes it so much worse. If someone tells you about a specific place, and you want to look it up later, you have absolutely zero chance of ever spelling it correctly. Good luck typing lester or woster in Wikipedia or Maps.

Oh that’s just great. Two similar place names like that, and they also happen to be relatively close to each other. I can see how that could cause some confusion.

Similarly, Kuhmo and Kuhmoinen (both in Finland) are about 446 km apart, but you can easily avoid the confusion as long as you know roughly which part of the country you’re talking about.

There’s also Helsingborg (town in Sweden) and Helsinfors (swedish name for the capital of Finland). What could go wrong.

Thanks so much! I always sucked at riddles I couldn’t come up with anything lol

I’m sitting here trying to replicate what that sounds like from your description and I’ve only succeeding in sounding like a madman.

You’re skewing the results by a bad test.

Don’t “ask your partner” to say a particular word or phrase. The very act of asking that will have changed results. (This is experiment design 101 stuff here!) Ask her to read a lot of stuff that has “hot potato” in it in various places. (We tend to use sandhi in flowing streams of speech, not isolated clips.) Or, ideally, engage her in conversation and get her to say “hot potato” naturally as an organic outgrowth of the conversation.

But … make sure you record what she says. Your own brain, as a listener, fills in stuff that’s not there while removing stuff that is. You have to play it back, concentrating on only the sounds, not the words, and do it repeatedly, ideally isolating this one phoneme at a time.

Really, sandhi is a thing, and it’s a thing that literally every native speaker of every language in the world uses. There is variance by dialect, naturally (entire phones vanish or come out of nothing from dialect to dialect), but some elements of sandhi (like consonant assimilation) happen no matter what your dialect unless you’re specifically concentrating on having it not happen.

Sandhi is a real thing. (Source: I had to study this shit to teach pronunciation classes.)

It took me WEEKS to recognize that what I thought I was saying and what noises I was actually making are completely and utterly different. There’s often no relationship (like “coodja” for “could you” or “chrain” for “train”) between the intended sound and the actual sound … but since everybody does it you don’t notice until its forced into your face. The only time you make distinct sounds as per the “official” description (and even then not as often as you think: I submit “train” once again as evidence) is when you’re deliberately speaking slowly and distinctly. Which is almost never (and comes across as condescending in actual interaction).

Weeks, I say again. WEEKS. And this was under constant training that included the playback of what we’d actually said showing us what we were doing. The denial is embedded deeply in our psyche.

Sandhi is an amazing area of study. It’s doubly fun in tonal languages: all the confusion of atonal languages with an added layer of shitfuckery.