Learning number is one of the first thing everybody learn, so, of course, this one will stay with people 🙂
For those liking this kind of word play, in France, one of the master of the genre is Bobby Lapointe. But be prepared to scratch your head, even with the lyrics 😁 (I don't think a beginner will be able to understand all of his songs).
He even tried to play, a little bit, with english :
Provided to YouTube by Universal Music Group From Two To Two · Boby Lapointe L'Integrale Des Enregistrements ℗ 1966 Mercury Music Group Released on: 1998-01-...
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A fun one : De Broglie is pronounced like De Breuil. But because some people knows it and some people don't, in Strasbourg, the De Broglie tram station is announced with both pronunciations 😁
You also have the different way to pronounce a Z at the end of a name like in Metz. In Lorraine, we pronounce it like in
Messe but the rest of the country is pronouncing the T and the Z. When we were younger, playing Age of Empire 2, my brothers and I spend a lot of time scratching our heads to understand from where this
Jean de Metz fellow came, because his name was not pronounced like a someone from Metz would pronounce it but like an actor from the rest of France would. Still about the Z : a family's friend has a house in a small atlantic coastal city,
Les Moutiers-en-Retz and I think they don't pronounce the Z at all.
Another one : we have a bunch of lakes in the Vosges mountains and near those lakes are a couple of cities with
Mer (Sea) in their name but one of them is not pronounced like the other. So in
Longemer and
Retournemer, Mer is pronounced like in
Mer (a bit like in
mère i.e. mother) but if you do the same with
Gérardmer it's obvious you're not from here 😄 (I think the leading theory is that
Mer in
Gérardmer is about a garden, not a sea)
I don't think we have as much accent in France than, let's say, the UK, but it's not the same thing as saying we don't have accents. What can give this impression is the fact that Paris has such an important role in France, national TV / radios only have one accent and people with another accents can be mocked, even if they are France's Prime Minister like Jean Castex is, or subtitled...
The
Académie may think that, but it's not true. For one thing, its authority is barely recognized in France (and if it is, it's only by conservatives so up their own ass than they refuse to use a feminine title to speak about a woman's title), and other french speaking countries are laughing their ass off about the
Académie. And those countries also have their own apparatus to work on french.
We do so too in France (laughing at the
Académie) : its last complete dictionary is from the last century (and not like the end of the last century: it's from 1935) and they are working on the 9th version since 1990.
Le Robert and
Larousse are publishing revised dictionaries every year, used by millions of people, from children with
le Petit Robert or
le Petit Larousse to adults.
And the only time the
Académie tried to publish a grammar book, they were mocked endlessly by grammarians. One even write a whole book, debunking all the mistakes inside the Académie's grammar book. It was in 1932 and the
Académie never tried to publish another one.
The
Académie is so sloppy that it took them months to speak about the gender of Covid 19, while, as far as I know, in Quebec, they (I don't remember who) were faster to say it should be a feminine word (because it's a disease and we say
la maladie) (I think
Morrigan lives in Canada and will have a better understanding than me on this subject). Now, in France, we use both
la Covid and
le Covid because people started to say l
e Covid and the
Académie said latter "
oh, it should be la covid
, but I guess now people are used to say le covid
, so use what you want".
This video is really long but interesting and is about the
Académie :
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It's in french, but it's subtitled and the automated translation tool seems to do a good enough job even if it doesn't cover everything (no subtiles to translate when walls of texts appear on the screen).
