Ok, so peasea asks me the other day how you’d pronounce Putin in French. So I automatically pronounce it literally - Pu (with the French u) - tin (with the vowel sound.
Then I stop. Hmm. That word means prostitute in French. That can’t be what the French call the prime minister of Russia…
So I went through various ways of pronouncing it - Pu (french u again) -teen, poo-tin (vowel ending), poo-teen. Couldn’t decide what I remembered them saying when I was living in France.
Ran into my French prof a couple days later and he told me that it had caused some jokes and problems when he was elected, but that they had decided on “poo-teen” to avoid the issue.
My question: are there any other words in other languages (or english pronunciations of foreign words) that are equally problematic?
I’m told that the Greek pronunciation of Charleton Heston’s name means something bad, I don’t remember what, like shit eater or something, so they say ee-ston instead.
Can one aurally differentiate between the pronunciations of the French word for prostitute (putain) and the Russian PM (Putin)? Yes.
In IPA*, “putain” would be [p¨¹’ t¦Ån] or [p¨¹’ t¦Å~] where the tilde (~) is on top of the ¦Å and represents nasalization.
“Putin” (the French pronunciation) would be [pu’ tin] or [pu’ tĩ] (again with that final vowel nasalized).
To amplify what Sivalensis wrote, “putain” is pronounced something like (PYU-ten) and “Putin” is pronounced something like (POO-teen). In the first case the “n” is much less pronounced than in the the second.
Vick’s cough drops are changed to Wick’s in German to get a better pronounciation. But another reason is that in German a ‘v’ is pronounced as an ‘f’ so Vick = fick. But fick in German is a verb, which means, well, pretty much what you might expect it to mean.
Also, there is a kind of a fruit/gourd in Thailand called a “fuck” (not sure about exact phonetic translation. This happens to be shaped roughly like male genitalia and used to be tied over the head of the wedding bed for good luck/fertility. The name was just a coincidence. (This last bit is second hand knowledge from Mrs. ShibbOleth, so not 100% about the accuracy but it’s not the kind of thing she would likely make up)
Don’t pronounce it “poo-teen” in Quebec, as that’s the name of a local cough delicacy, which consists of french fries smothered in gravy and cheese curds.
You know that the French transliterate Cyrillic differently? They use French phonetic spelling, so all the newspapers keep talking about le président Poutine, which is how you spell the aforementioned Québécois delicacy. It is very droll.
If any groups from our school ever go abroad, they are not allowed to wear clothing with the school name on it, cause apparently it’s quite offensive in some languages.
DougAB and betenoir, what do those mean in the respective languages?
I admit, I was kinda hoping this would turn into kind of a free-for-all of “wow, guess what this means in this language said like this” or whatever Just some stuff you can have a good laugh at!
All right, the words baiser and baisser mean respectively to kiss and to…uh…do the nasty. (Unless I’ve gotten them mixed up.) Getting them mixed up can result in hilarious sitcom-esque hijinks for foreigners.
My French teacher, when she was younger, called her mother-in-law “gateuse,” because she had just received an expensive gift, and she was trying to imply that M-I-L spoiled her. Gateuse means senile.
And finally, there’s the best one. Preservatif. You’d think it would mena preservative. It means condom. (And yes, my teacher made a huge gaffe with this one when she was younger, saying something was full of condoms when she meant preservatives.) I made an intentional faux-pas a year and a half ago, when in said class, our teacher asked what one would need to “faire la nouba” or paint the town red. But I was doing mine on purpose to be evil.
I heard that the reason why Bush Sr. always mispronounced Saddam’s name (so that it rhymed with ‘Adam’) was that it sounded like some insult in Arabic, though I can’t remember what it meant.
I heard that Mazda had to change the name of it’s MR2 model in France. When you say “m - r - 2” in French it sounds very much like “merde,” the French equivalent of “shit.”
Also, a TA (teaching assistant) I had for a French lit course a couple semesters ago showed her inadequacy when she used a fairly common rule of French for beginners: If you don’t know the French verb, use the english one and add “-er” or the sound “eh” to it. She tried this with the verb “to pick” and came up with another synonym for the f-word.
Oh, while we’re on this topic…
How come no one ever drowns in France?
Because their water is l’eau (low).
Why do French people only have one egg in an omlette?
Because one egg is un oeuf (enough).
Same in Spanish. You don’t want to ask if food is sin preservativos, since most people get annoyed when they think you’re implying they’ve put condoms in it.
