My light-hearted translations of French words increasingly found in the English language. My translations are not necessarily accurate, more a way of remembering unfamiliar or confusing words.
The entourage is the group of people you take to surround you when you are on tour, en route to somewhere else.
chiffon - light fabric, often see-through, often used for scarves
Crêpe-de-Chine - crepe from China, not crap, crêpe
georgette - light fabric, may feel slightly rough but drapes well and crease-free in my experience of reversible dresses which are now often viscose.
Word ending et and ette
et rhymes with ay, say, as in ballet, bouquet
ette - rhymes with bet, get, jet, let - banquette, georgette
masseuse - lady giving a massage - no funny comments, please. The e on the end hints that the subject is feminine. Masseur would normally be male, like entrepreneur.
The e on the end of masseuse tells you to pronounce the previous letter. For example, gris is pronounced gree and Paris in France is pronounced p a r e e. (I have to separate the letters because otherwise the spell checker keeps changing it to another word such as pared.)
The s-e on the end of masseuse also tells you to pronounce it as ZZZ.
(The letter e after c makes an s sound as in police, writer as polis in some languages. The letter e after g makes it a soft j sound. That applies to the word entourage above. To see both sounds in one word, for example, in the word garage, the first g is hard but the second is soft j. )
(Please don't pronounce garage in English as gar ridge! Yuk!)
Marriage and carriage in English rhyme with fridge but all three words have the letter i and garage doesn't. If you have learned French, you pronounce garage more like the French speakers, to rhyme with barge, large and the girl's name, Marge, short for Marjory.
The entourage is the group of people you take to surround you when you are on tour, en route to somewhere else.
chiffon - light fabric, often see-through, often used for scarves
Crêpe-de-Chine - crepe from China, not crap, crêpe
georgette - light fabric, may feel slightly rough but drapes well and crease-free in my experience of reversible dresses which are now often viscose.
Word ending et and ette
et rhymes with ay, say, as in ballet, bouquet
ette - rhymes with bet, get, jet, let - banquette, georgette
masseuse - lady giving a massage - no funny comments, please. The e on the end hints that the subject is feminine. Masseur would normally be male, like entrepreneur.
The e on the end of masseuse tells you to pronounce the previous letter. For example, gris is pronounced gree and Paris in France is pronounced p a r e e. (I have to separate the letters because otherwise the spell checker keeps changing it to another word such as pared.)
The s-e on the end of masseuse also tells you to pronounce it as ZZZ.
(The letter e after c makes an s sound as in police, writer as polis in some languages. The letter e after g makes it a soft j sound. That applies to the word entourage above. To see both sounds in one word, for example, in the word garage, the first g is hard but the second is soft j. )
(Please don't pronounce garage in English as gar ridge! Yuk!)
Marriage and carriage in English rhyme with fridge but all three words have the letter i and garage doesn't. If you have learned French, you pronounce garage more like the French speakers, to rhyme with barge, large and the girl's name, Marge, short for Marjory.
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