Comment by tshaddox

5 years ago

Apparently my knowledge of French pronunciation is nowhere near sufficient to figure this out. Based on the Wikipedia article, it seems the first line is supposed to sound like “Humpty Dumpty.”

5 comments

tshaddox

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routerl  5 years ago

You didn't fail, it's just that this supposed translation makes a lot of assumptions about how it will be read.

I speak French, and did not immediately recognize "Un petit d'un petit" as "Humpty Dumpty"; the "correct" reading relies on knowing that a native French-speaker might pronounce "hump" as "ump". It is not simply a mapping of syllables to phonemes.

In other words, it's an extremely targeted joke, intended at people who have specific expectations about how both French and English are read and spoken.

  • ksaj  5 years ago

    I know another French joke that is extremely targeted in exactly the same way. It's from Canada, and it pretty much only works when read aloud.

        Eh, did you notice there's no h in 'ere?
    It's 'cos they left it in h'Ottawa.

    For people who don't know the accent, French people don't typically pronounce the h initial in words like 'here', (or 'humpty' for that matter) and they add an h to vowel initial words like 'Ottawa'.

    Another joke we have refers to how the French pronounce the English word "happiness."

bshimmin  5 years ago

If you read the English line first with a ridiculous French accent (like you might hear in Monty Python) and then read the French in an equally silly way, with a bit of imagination they sound broadly quite similar. Basically if you can make "Mots d'Heures" into "mother", you're well on your way!

pedrosorio  5 years ago

You need to imagine a French person speaking English with strong accent (e.g. Michelle in Gilmore Girls) to get “Humpty Dumpty” (which is obvious I guess, since the poem is in French, I suppose you couldn’t make it sound like an English or American accent)

cryptonector  5 years ago

At best it sounds like hunpety hunpety. It's said to be homophonic, but at best there's a resemblance. I suppose it matters how you're pronouncing the French -- in a modern pronunciation there's really no resemblance.