truex

Los Baguettinos

Oh, easy. Ed-in-ur-mom

Ed in bruh

Nawlins*

• St. Louis?
• Louisville?
• Lafayette?
• Versailles?
• Detroit?
• Baton Rouge?
• Boise?
• Montpelier?
• Montclair?
• Des Moines?
• Eau Claire?

There are a lot of them. If you look at a map of North America circa 1950 you'll see that the vast majority of the interior is French territory. The only reason that it's under American control now is that the British took it from the French in the 7 years war. The British colonists in North America were so grateful for this additional land that when they settled it, they generously paid taxes to the British to pay them back for the expensive war to conquer this territory... ha, just kidding. They rebelled and simply took the territory for themselves.

Balluhmer, MD

that’s because fucking missionaries came in, created the written language and standardized the spoken language then beat all the children into compliance

then their children overthrew the island and beat them for speaking at all so it almost died and the revival was focused on survival of the language over nuance

it used to have much more spoken variation

Or the much earlier h to k shift (think shirt --> skirt).

To be clear, the spelling did change with that one. I just find it interesting.

The Latin thing is only a partial explanation. Some of it is changes in pronunciation coupled with a very authoritarian attitude to orthography. Few languages out there that changed so little in 400 years.

So for instance the -ent ending for plural verbs ("ils mangent") is silent because the "ent" sounds were progressively dropped. Then the written suffix logically started disappearing, and only then did the Académie bring it back because it was more Latin. If it wasn't for these reactionary fucks that rule would have been reformed centuries ago.

Unfortunately in the intervening time, knowledge of orthography became a very strong social marker. Because spelling French is so hard, the dictée came to disproportionately affect grades (seriously, old-fashioned schools still do it daily and it's all graded and very severely), which coupled with the industrial revolution and alphabetization of the lower classes meant that shit spelling = prole = bad. So now orthography is at the center of the traditional value system which has all the conservatives pearl-clutching at the idea that children can't spell "nénuphar" properly. Children's purported inability to spell properly is like the number one moral panic that has sprung up every few years for the last century or two, but also orthographic reforms are woke (derogatory). The point of orthography, to conservative types, is for it to be hard so you can show off your perfect spelling to justify your social standing.

Oh hon hon.