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Top Comments: Your Favorite AI Bot in French [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-07-27
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A couple days ago I saw not this tweet, but a similar one, on Twitter (I’m not calling it X):
x Everyone knows that Chat-GPT means “cat, I have farted” in French, right? — Alistair Croll (@acroll) April 20, 2023
This made me lol. A lot. Because pronouncing the name of Chat-GPT in French had never occurred to me before, and it’s true!
As demonstrated above, the French word for “cat” is “chat” (pronounced Sha—most terminal consonants in French are silent). As for the letters G, P, and T, in English, we pronounce them with a long ē (Gee, Pee, Tee). In French, these letters are pronounced using an approximation to the English long ā vowel, that is, similar to ay. Hence, P and T are pronounced Tay and Pay. G is trickier because the actual consonant sound for G in French is softer than the soft G in English. An English phonetic approximation for the letter might be Jhay. So, putting this all together, Chat-GPT in French is pronounced (approximately) as “Sha Jhay Pay Tay.”
So, we already have the first syllable as the word that means “cat” in French. Phonetically, the letters that follow in their order sounds like “I have farted.” The verb to fart in French is peter (pronounced pe-Tay—I want to make that e an upside down e but don’t know how to do that). In French, the most common way to say you’ve done something in the past is exactly the same as in English: Conjugate the verb to have in the the present tense, and then add the past participle (walked, eaten, participated, whatever). In French, the past participle for peter is pété, pronounced pay-tay. The first -person singular pronoun is je, and the matching conjugation of the verb to have (avoir) is ai. However, when you put these two words together, there’s an awkward stop between je and ai, so the French drop the e, replace it with an apostrophe, and get j’ai, which is pronounced (you guessed it), Jhay.
Putting this all together then, saying “Chat-GPT” in French sounds like “Sha Jhay Pay Tay,” which sounds like “Chat, j’ai pété,” which means “Cat, I have farted.”
So imagine being a news reader on television and having to say, with a straight face, something like “Today in the Ministry of Education there was a discussion on the potential impact of cat, I have farted on students.” Obviously, the French culture will adapt, and I think it’s likely that Chat-GPT will ultimately be superseded by some other program with some other name which will, hopefully, not be a homonym for some embarrassing act. But you never know.
Comments are below the fold.
Top Comments (July 27, 2023):
No nominations or highlights tonight.
Top Mojo (July 26, 2023):
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Top Photos (July 26, 2023):
Thanks to jotter (RIP) for creating it and elfling for restoring it.
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