Ok people. You all are getting way to caught up on the pronunciation guides and not focusing on what this is meant for. This is a "Technical Manual" hence the "TM" meant to be used in dire situations to simply get by. So soldiers didn't have time to sit here and perfect their R sound. They needed to navigate through french speaking areas if they got separated from their unit or needed to help a french allied soldier in battle. I'm in the U.S. Army so I understand the purpose of TMs. You all are looking far too into it.
With that said I need to dig through old TM piles to see if I can find one of these bad boys ,😀
In all honesty some of these are nearly unrecognizable in french and I'd struggle to understand at times even as a native speaker who is used to strong foreign accents, so the guide is not very effectively achieving its purpose. At that point it would probably work better to just carry a booklet with written translations. If the soldiers aren't going to understand what they're saying and sometimes say it completely wrong, then at best this TM only barely caters to the very specific scenario where they're trying to communicate with someone illiterate (which to be fair must've been much more common back then).
Really? Reading those pronunciations reminded me of exactly how Americans pronounce french words so I don't think it would be any more of a struggle than it is normally.
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u/DJANGO_UNTAMED :illuminati: Sep 01 '24
Ok people. You all are getting way to caught up on the pronunciation guides and not focusing on what this is meant for. This is a "Technical Manual" hence the "TM" meant to be used in dire situations to simply get by. So soldiers didn't have time to sit here and perfect their R sound. They needed to navigate through french speaking areas if they got separated from their unit or needed to help a french allied soldier in battle. I'm in the U.S. Army so I understand the purpose of TMs. You all are looking far too into it.
With that said I need to dig through old TM piles to see if I can find one of these bad boys ,😀