@@rubedog961 you'd think that but even then it's a bit inconsistent. Like, a lot of people say that h is mute when from a latin word, and aspirated from a germanic word... But then, haricot is probably from latin too but aspirated. And worse than that, it probably shares the etymology with aligot... which doesn't even has an h.
Even most English literature or language arts teachers wouldn't have a great explanation for some of the rules of English 😅 like you have to practically become a linguist or get a master's degree in ESOL before you realize everything... And even then it's still not everything
The reason they are different is the "h" from homme is from Latin. When French started being a written language, this "h" was already silent. On the other hand, the "h" from haricot used to be pronounced in French a long time ago. It was a Frankish word in which the "h" was aspirated. This Frankish "h" later became silent like the Latin "h", but it left a mark in the article before the word.
@@Ezullof The rule above cited by OP is generally true, but there are some weird cases (because languages are always weird like that). For example, we say "le haut", but "haut" comes from Latin "altus". There was never any "h" to begin with even in Latin! We think it's because it was influenced by the Frankish word, which had a pronounced "h" (see "high" in English, "hoch" in German, etc.). "haricot" is more complicated, because the origin is very uncertain, but there are theories that do say it ultimately comes from a Frankish word, or was at least influenced by it ("haricot" could mean a type of stew, and for that meaning, we can trace it back to Frankish, and it's possible that, while having a different origin, the "bean" word was influenced by it, but again, it's also possible the "bean" word comes from the "stew" word as it was a common ingredient, or that it came from the same Frankish word through a different path). But from what I've gleaned, there aren't really any theories about it coming from Latin.
Just to add, I just reflected about this phenomenon , and I found le hasard and l'harmonie... And harmonie is, I think, origin latin and hasard is more of the saxon origin... like i english hazard... but I am just german... what do I know... 🤷♀️😅
I pet peeve with French is this: : Le participe passé conjugué avec avoir s'accorde en genre et en nombre avec l'objet direct quand cet objet précède What the....?!
@@afiiik1 yeah that's hard because with "l'auxiliaire être le participe passé s'accorde mais avec l'auxiliaire avoir il s'accorde pas sauf si le COD se trouve avant le verbe" as a french person it's really hard to do it every time and don't forget this rules (I understand you 100 pourcent)
Trying to understand english is like trying to understand a goat talking about the last salty cliff it licked... Jokes appart, people need to understand that languages aren't "made" to be efficient or simple to learn by foreigners. Languages just...are. They're the results of millenias of linguistical crossovers and mutations and they usually really do the job. French is a decently easy language to speak, it's just that l'Académie Française is trying its best to ruin it. Prononce the haricot however you like it, french people will most likely get it.
Don't worry, no one is ever going to tackle you on haricots pronunciantion, seeing how even the french academy agreed that you could pronounce the plural "les [z]aricots". If you stick to grammar, Loïc is right. In reality, no one cares, and most french locutors spell it wrong anyways. Keep learning french, forget about that part, no one will care in an actual discussion ;).
@@jdmoncada8205except that it’s not actually pronounced in French. There’s no glottal stop in “haricot”, though English speakers often put one there, since English has hard attack in many dialects.
@@jdmoncada8205 except glottal stop are absolutely not phonemic in French. In fact as a French native I had a hard time understanding what glottal stop even was
We do have them. At least I think so if I've understood the description correctly. It's called a glottal stop. You can hear it in words such as "Hawaii" at the end of the word (the vocal stop before the II sound). Or... I could be completely wrong. (But I doubt it.)
1. Glottal stop is not an aspirated "h". 2. Hawaii is probably not the best example of a glottal stop as in this particular instance it copies Polynesian phoneme written down as ʻ [ʻokina] → Hawaiʻi). And no, it's not an apostrophe. Better example although quite stereotypical would be Southern English pronunciation of "bottle of water" or "butter" where /t/ are replaced by /ʔ/ - glottal stops.@@jdmoncada8205
It does. That's why we say, "a human," but, "an hour." The difference is our aspirated h is actually aspirated. We just find it confusing to learn that modern French has a "silent h" and a "non-silent h" that also is silent.
@@jdmoncada8205 you’re completely wrong about it: there’s no glottal stop in French, and there’s no glottal stop in the English word “Hawaii”. There is a glottal stop in the Hawaiian word “Hawaiʻi”, but it’s between the two /i/ sounds, not before them. Many dialects of English do have glottal stops, though, either as a realization of /t/, like in “mountain” or “bottle” (less common) or “bet” (more common), or between vowels across a word boundary, like in “the apple” or “uh-oh”.
We need a video about how America is dumb for having their K make the “CK” sound, their C make the “CK” sound, their C make the “SS” sound, their S make the “SS” sound, and their X make the “KS” sound
Silly rabbit, if we didn't have the K at the end of CK combinations, how would we know that it's supposed to be a hard C sound when it's in the past tense or comparative? Kick → Kicked Quick → Quicker → Quickest Otherwise we'd have confusion: Pick without the K would become "Pissed" or "Pīced." And I have no logical defense for the variants of X; it's a "CKS," it's an "X," it's a "Zzz," and occasionally it's a "Shhh."
You're saying that as if it wasn't the case in French or in other languages as well. Although, it's true it can be a little inconsistent and confusing, like why is "dessert" pronounced "dezert"...
@@eldorados_lost_searcherOr, we don't have a c in English at all and ch is a letter all its own. Then kick is kik or kikk and is kikked instead of wondering if the c sound is an s or k
@@cannibalbananas Thank you! I've been saying this for years. C should just make the CH sound and K and S can do it's job where appropriate. Drop Q and X. Then bring back ETH.
Apparently, the real reason for the distinction between H aspiré and H muet is that words that are H aspiré are lumped together in a category of "non-latin words". Words like 'haut', 'hache', and 'haricot' are from ancient frankish. 'hasard' is from arabic thru a spanish borrowing. 'héros' is from greek, and 'handicap' is from english. So that's ultimately the reason why a H aspiré/ H muet distinction exists.
that doesn't make much sense because "haut" is from "hault" which cognates with Spanish "alto", which is obviously a latin-rooted word. We also have "altesse" and "altitude" from the same root word, the only reason why we kept the H there is because otherwise it'd be quite ambiguous with "eau" (water)
@@abarette_ according to the etymology I've read, the french word 'haut' didn't come entirely from latin 'altus' alone'. The frankish word '*hauh, is related to german 'Hoch' and english 'high' and, according to the etymology I've read, the frankish word was _conflated_ that is to say frankish '*hauh' and latin 'altus' _combined_ together because they had roughly the same meaning. (Latin 'altus' is often translated into english as high or tall) This explains why there's no *H* in 'altesse' or 'altitude' since the first word 'altesse' was borrowed from italian 'altezza' (whereas the less common today, but native french 'hautesse' keeps the *H* from 'haut') and the second word 'altitude' was borrowed directly from latin with no frankish correlation.
In case anyone is wondering; this happens in words with germanic roots. I should know, because I live in a country that literally everyone calls by it's germanic name: Hungary. In French: la Hongrie.
Except that "haricot" has no german roots. "Haricot" is "Bohne" (or "Bohnen" in plural) in german. Plus, you don't pronounce the "t" at the end of "haricot". It remains silent in french.
@@CarolineH363 maybe the 't' is silent now because it is a very old word, having Frankish (and therefore Germanic) origins. it has been around for 1,500yrs and the way it was pronounced changed a bit over time.
oh.. I have thought that hungarian, or magiar (as it is known from where I'm from) is the ugro-finnic language, quite different as compared to indo european languages; probably I missed the your point
@@asdfghyter From what I understand it can be either a glottal stop or actually silent. It's more about etymology than pronunciation, the silent h is Latin, while the "non-silent" h is Germanic.
As a french speaking person, whenever someone asks me why do you spell this word that way, I always respond : Just because. No logic, it just is and you have to learn all of that by heart 🤪(we have it by instinct because we learned it from birth)
That goes for every speaker of every language of earth. Just because you internalized the rules and logic of the language and you don't have to think about it, doesn't mean it isn't there. You ever notice textbooks on how to learn a language for a native speaker (in school) are so fundamentally different from textbooks of that language for people from other countries?
The backstory, for anyone who's interested, is that the h in _haricot_ historically went silent later than the h in _homme_ - this is because the h in _homme_ is a relic of the former pronunciation of a word descended directly from Latin (_homō_ in this case), whereas _haricot_ is a later borrowing. Of course, this isn't necessarily a practical help for French students unless they also happen to be comparative linguists, though.
@@korwentenn3066 Actually, that's a funny story - the reason why the h in _héros_ is aspirated is that the liaison in this case would have led _les héros_ to sound like _les zéros_, so educated speakers started consciously, well, avoiding that pronunciation. It makes a lot of sense.
That’s how Puertoricans pronounce some S’s. I always had trouble explaining it to people, bc we don’t ignore the S altogether. Now I can say it’s an aspirated S. Thank you!
It's not really the same though. The rule in English is that if the first word of the noun sounds like a vowel, it's 'an' and otherwise 'a'. Which also goes for your examples: - uhmbrella - Y/Juser - hat (pronounced h) - our (silent h)
@@ShaharHarshuv Well no, you say that it's the same in English. My point is that English doesn't have such inconsistencies with silent h's and their articles. The consistent way in French would be l'haricot
@@ShaharHarshuv Indeed, but it's 'an' hour because it's pronounced 'our'. There are no words like this with an exception where the reason would be 'because there's an aspirated h'.
Ah this actually makes sense. In our local French dialect, the aspirated H is more strongly pronounced. And now I understand why. Eg "haut" is pronounced kinda partway between the English words "hoe" and "how."
"Sir, the group chat has been leaked, what do we do?" "There is nothing we can do." Dans mon esprit tout divague, je me perds dans tes yeux Je me noie dans la vague de ton regard amoureux Je ne veux que ton âme divaguant sur ma peau Une fleur, une femme dans ton cœur Roméo Je ne suis que ton nom, le souffle lancinant De nos corps dans le sombre animés lentement Et la nuit je pleure des larmes qui coulent le long de mes joues Je ne pense à toi que quand le jour sombre, que s'abattent sur moi Mes tristes démons, dans l'abîme sans fond Aime-moi jusqu'à ce que les roses fanent Que nos âmes sombrent dans les limbes profondes Et la nuit, quand tout est sombre, je te regarde danser Je résonne en baisers, le long de ta poitrine Perdue dans l'avalanche de mon cœur égaré Qui es-tu, où es-tu Par les pleurs, par les rires de ton ombre effarée Je résonne en baisers Dans mon esprit tout divague, je me perds dans tes yeux Je me noie dans la vague de ton regard amoureux Je ne veux que ton âme divaguant sur ma peau Une fleur, une femme dans ton cœur Roméo Je ne suis que ton nom, le souffle lancinant De nos corps dans le sombre animés lentement Et la nuit quand tout est sombre je te regarde danser
@@sparkyheberling6115Rather simple: there is absolutely no difference in the pronunciation of the h letter in homme or haricot. In French it is called « h aspiré » but it is not aspirated at all. This is why the French cannot pronounce the English h correctly and say « ome » instead of « Home ». The fun of the video is that he tries to explains a rule that exists only in theory but nobody even knows why. In short: Learn the exceptions by heart (le haricot, le hibou, le hêtre…), no other chance 😮
Mes professeurs m'avaient appris en primaires à pas m'emmerder avec ça, tous les mots avec H avaient le déterminant complet et c'est tout. La règle du H aspiré je l'ai découverte il y a genre 2 ans
it's like when a Karen tried to convince me there's a pause between the syllables in the word racecar. Their proof? A recording of them saying racecar and putting an artificial one second long pause in the middle, right after sending several voice messages where they said racecar normally
If some languages can have affective communication with limited number of sounds, when you really don’t need all those sounds. Italian has a fraction of sounds of English, and it gets the point across
Feels like this guy could travel to any country, spend a day there and just randomly start speaking in the language they use there. Like anywhere in the world 😂
Lol, as an English speaker, that actually makes 100%, and I can totally agree with that logic. I can still hear the 'hah' at the beginning of the word so it doesn't sound silent to me, so I can actually get on board with French on this one. It is honestly really interesting that French has a rule to shorten articles to eliminate double vowel sounds between two separate words. Even more interesting, given that it even extends to include silent letters, since a silent letter can make things verbally sound like it starts with a double vowel. Most English or even other languages, the letters that are silent are ignored and have no rules or variations to make pronunciation sound less confusing when spoken. I tried to learn French for a semester and had no luck, but after watching this video, suddenly, everything in the language suddenly makes a lot more sense. I cannot belive professors/teachers don't go over these mandatory explanations on how the articles and other rules affect the words and how to identify their differences. Now I understand why some words in French shorten with L' and why others begin with Le. For instance, English always chances "a" to "an" if the next word starts with another vowel. But on those random words with silent letters at the beginning still technically should be written with "a", even if the next word sounds like it begins with a vowel due to silent letters. I always hated that awkward moment so much as someone who loves literature. Example: "An article" sounds natural to break between double vowels, but technically, "A herb" is techically correct, yet no one ever uses "a" with herb. It is always "An herb". (Though the correct version can sound proper depending on how someone pronounces herb. Most people pronounce the word with a silent H, though there are a few regions that do pronounce the H. It is a really awkward thing in English dialog.) I need an entire video with this man detailing French and its rules, how to comprehend the language with its spelling, how to translate written words to proper pronouncements, how to identify when a letter is or might be silent, explain a direct alphabet with all the common sounds, and any common letter pairs that always make a specific sound. (Such as "Ch" or "Th" almost always pronounce the same way in all words they are in.)
