#sprachtraeume

l’actualité - current events

crise économique - economic crisis

paix - peace

la guerre - war

cessez-le-feu - ceasefire

attentat - attack

territoire - territory

ressortissants - citizens, nationals

la mort - death

espoir - hope, prospect

étrangères - foreign

interdiction - ban, prohibition

resultat, issue - outcome

répercussions - implications, effects

meurtrier - deadly

témoignages - testimonies

décéder - to pass away

viser - to target

blesser - to injure, wound

combattre - to combat, fight

mourir de - to die of

faire le deuil - to grive, mourn

négocier - to negotiate

terminer - to complete, end, fihish

compromettre - to compromise, jeopardize

It’s quite funny to look at and it’s that same pattern of oversimplifying the target language’s phonology and then assign allophones + using symbols with an approximative explanation when the first trick doesn’t cut it, but it honestly works better than English most of the time (at least it’s got a closer phonology to most of the languages I know, mostly in terms of vowel quality). It does fuck up majorly on a lot of occasions, though.

I mean I could give you examples from my phrasebooks (gonna try and find languages you know so you can more accurately grasp what it’s like haha):

Icelandic: “ég ætla að fá miða” becomes “iègh aïhtla afao métha”

“é” for “i”, “ao” for “á” it’s just... aaaaah I’m screaming, you can’t just say “here’s a diphthong, pronounce it like the two vowels in that one word, also, one of the sounds is not the correct one”

Finnish: “tänään on lauantai maaliskuun 8. päivä” becomes “tänää-n o-n laoua-ntaï maaliskououn kaHdèksaS päïvä”

“maaliskououn”, because “y” is the French “u” and “u” is the French “ou”, so when it’s long, they doubled it, like in Finnish, so now you have that vowel soup. And I have seen “kououlouou” for “kuuluu” as in “mitä kuuluu”.

(I know you don’t speak it, but I just had to include) Swedish: “hur mycket blir jag skyldig” becomes “Hu:r mükè bli:r yâ:g chüldig” except if you say the “g” in “jag” or “skyldig”, you’ll likely get a reply in English. And the French “ch” is the German “sch” except it’s not a sound Swedish has, and they use it for three different sounds throughout the book :/

I wish I had examples in English or in German, but I only have a dictionary which does use IPA and my books from uni which don’t use anything because that’s the prof’s job, but it wouldn’t be too hard to imagine something like “wie geht’s” becoming, like, “vi guét’s” or “gute Nacht” becoming “goute naHt” (you could do worse but that’s what I think a phrasebook would go for)