Please, feel free to be awed by my cosmopolitan refinement
Please, feel free to be awed by my cosmopolitan refinement

[t]
… tch. Imbecile.
“Can I have one of those Croy Sunts please?”
“What? I don’t know what a Quasson is”

Its a spelling attempt at the French pronuncitation of croissant.
That makes zero sense.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnAoRcnY4xs
The examples of English pronounciations she gives there are truly bizarre.


Croissant pronunciation in French — Lesson written by French Teacher David Issokson with native audio recorded by Marie Assel Cambier.
www.frenchlearner.com/pronunciation/croissant/
I fail to see the connection to ‘cwah-sont’, apart from the first and last letter being the same, but if that was a sufficent criteria then one might as well write just anything, like ‘convalescent’.

Croissant pronunciation in French — Lesson written by French Teacher David Issokson with native audio recorded by Marie Assel Cambier.
Well I guess I was just trying to show that the French barely pronounce the R. It’s very soft at best and English speakers often hear it as more of a “kwa” or like “quoi” is pronounced (or like, maybe “cwah” if you like a hard C in your drink.)
The phonetic pronunciation in French is: [kʁwasɑ̃] (if that doesn’t come through, look at Wikipedia
The ʁ (upside down R) is guttural or uvular, and in some pronunciation guides it can even be dropped.
Anyways, you seem upset at their butchering of the pronunciation guide they’re giving to show how badly they butcher their imitation of how the French pronounce croissant (there’s no hard T at the end, for example) and I think that makes this particularly funny.
The t is silent. The end sound is a nasal n so more like kwah–sahn with the final n being very nasal and soft.
I actually find the french r to be super difficult though. Way the hell back in the throat where letters aren’t supposed to be formed.
where letters aren't supposed to be formed.
I think you'd have a "fun" time with Arabic (CTRL+F "Pharyngeal" for the fun).
No no no no no.
It’s croissant.
It is actually fairly irritating to me when people do this. It’s not a proper noun. It’s honestly wild to completely change your accent for the pronunciation of a single word in your sentence.
If you had a trans-atlantic accent, you wouldn’t suddenly roll your rs when pronouncing “burrito”, or do an impression of the Japanese when saying “sashimi”. If you did, it would probably sound disrespectful af.
So why does everyone do it with “croissant” and act like it’s totally normal?
“Trans-atlantic” is a forced/learned accent that used to be more popular ~100 years ago. It was basically meant to represent people that were born in the US, but educated in the UK (or vice versa). Essentially, it was supposed to signify that you were wealthy enough to have connections on both sides of the Atlantic.
People intentionally learned to speak that way, though, and it became common on radio broadcasts (so you could also hear it referred to as an “old-timey announcer voice” or something similar).
Exactly! Rapidly changing accent for single words leads to poor understanding, which is the whole point of speech.
A loanword is not a word randomly spoken in another language, it’s a word taken from one language into another, which often involves a change in pronunciation.
If you dont acknowledge that, you’d have to acknowledge that the entire French language is just poorly pronounced Latin, which is insane.
“Burrito” is a Spanish word for a little donkey, but it’s also an English word for a food item, and they are not typically pronounced the same. Someone fluent in both languages will pronounce them differently depending on which language they are speaking.
Yeah, but I would argue that when I say “pass me a tortilla” I’m saying “tortilla” in English, which has mostly the same pronunciation as the Spanish (though I think the “t” is pronounced differently).
The fact that “coup d’etat” is pronounced mostly the same might just be happenstance.