Chick sandwich
I was recently sent to Paris for business, and brought my husband along. Trying to get into the adventure of travel by trying the language, we stepped into a sidewalk café and ordered a chicken sandwich. I didn't realise that French pronunciation tends to "drop the last letter". I ordered un sandwich au poulet ... "poo-lett". The gentleman behind the counter laughed so hard he had to summon everyone else in the cafe. Une poulette, lit. "young chicken" is used for young girls - meaning "chick" really. They started pointing to things on the menu and made us pronounce them. But they gave us free brownies ... it was all in fun.
Sent by: Robin
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It's not really that the French "drop" the last letter; it's just that, contrary to English, they don't pronounce the last consonnant (there are a few exceptions though... wouldn't be fun otherwise!) So if you want to say petit you actually pronounce [peti], but you'll say [petit] for petite.
Just to stay on a gastronomic level, sauce poulette is a white sauce with chopped parsley - obviously not meant for a sandwich.
In between jobs a few years ago, I was studying French at l'Université de Montréal, and after a few months was quite confident in my French-speaking ability as well as picking up joual, a local dialect of Canadian French.
Anyway, some friends and I went to grab a snack after classes one day and I decided to ask for an order of poutine. This is a Québecois dish of chips and cheese curds smothered in gravy. It came out as: Je voudrais une pitoune, s'il vous plaît. The young waitress smiled broadly at that one.
Pitoune is a slang word with a few meanings. Commonly, it's a term of affection, as in 'sweetheart', or it can be a young girl, as in 'chick' in English, with the same connotation.
A lot of final consonnants are silent in French, as in Poulet and Petit. In Petite, the last letter is the E and it is silent (not pronounced the way every letter is pronounced in Spanish), but this means the T is not the last letter and so is pronounced. Méchant, méchanTe, etc.
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