Luckily, thanks to Switzerland’s direct democracy model, Proton and co. will likely garner enough signatures to challenge this with a referendum. What makes me worry is how they’ve tried to introduce this without consulting parliament.
Can confirm, she was featured in a program about Swiss naturalisation that I watched the other day. There were plenty of other candidates who were trying to integrate that were much less annoying than her, yet they still were having difficulty. It doesn’t surprise me one bit that they denied her.
Yup, can confirm. Also, if it’s past 6 pm, make sure to switch to ‘bonsoir’.
If it’s someone I know, I just say ‘salut’. It’s way more casual, and can also be used as goodbye to boot.
The saving grace with French is that when you read a word, you can (almost always) divine its pronunciation immediately. I’m not saying a reform isn’t in order, as not pronouncing half the letters in a word seems kinda stupid, but in my opinion English is several orders of magnitude worse. My spouse, who practically learned English through me while we lived in an Anglophone country for almost a decade and is quite fluent, still can’t spell worth a shit.
And even us native speakers have to guess the correct pronunciation of words we haven’t heard before, which is insane. When l was young I was a voracious reader, but having never heard many of the more uncommon words spoken before, I often internalised the wrong way of saying them.
Fuck it, I’m on board. Let’s gut this thing and start fresh.
In this case, how far do we go through? Do we basically eliminate the letter ‘c’? Do we re-add thorn and eth? So many possibilities, but I doubt we will ever see it come to fruition in our lifetimes. There are too many people who are obsessed with tradition in the world.
I like this one, yet I mildly disagree. In my opinion, being that English spelling is already a complete disaster, standardized orthography is important in order for the widest range of persons to maintain comprehension.
However, I do believe that correcting people’s spoken English is ridiculous, especially if it’s their mother tongue. Language evolves, not everyone is meant to sound like some asshole from Cambridge.
In my experience, my French relatives are even worse for this, correcting their young children to always say oui instead of ouias, or asking us to say fais attention ! (written form) instead of fais gaffe ! (Informal, how people talk in familiar settings) when in the presence of their child. Nah bro I’m not going to pretend to be bourgeois just so you can feel superior.
Ouch, I wasn’t privy to the particulars, nor am I a resident of Switzerland, merely an admirer of how things are run there (usually). I guess the people’s notions of liberty aren’t as strong there as I had thought!