K so about vlad and charles and speaking french and romanian (like I do)
There's a bunch of running jokes about how romanians try to sound fancy by speaking french or english in older and newer entertainment, but the truth is we did borrow a lot of words from french.
For example: We literally say "mersi" more than "multumesc" which is literally just "merci" taken from french but romanian is a romance language like french and phonetically consistent, closer to spanish or italian in that regard, so i guess at some point the word spread out and it wasn't just people who knew french and knew to spell it "merci" that were using it, so they spelled how they heard it.
Now, there is a play written in 1852 where the running joke is Chirița speaking french and like. Most of the jokes are basically inter-language puns. French words are sometimes written in french, sometimes romanized as if to indicate who actually pronounces it right or not or something.
You have Chirița, who keeps trying to translate "moldavian sayings" and metaphors into french— and it's fuckin hilarious but impossible to translate—her kid, who doesn't really know french but can frenchify a word to get by when asked if he knows French, the french teacher brought straight from Paris—Charles, spelled Şarl so that people know how to pronounce it—and this made me realise I might have been pronouncing Charles-Henri's name wrong all this time—
except that Chirița calls him "Monsiu Şarlă." Şarlă means... Well...
*Theo and Sariel has joined the chat*
No one ever remarks to that specifically in the play btw but I could almost hear the audience laughing in my head. The frenchman sometimes has a laugh to himself over Chirița's attempts to speak french.
That's not even mentioning things like our equivalent of "excitee does NOT MEAN EXCITED" which I'm pretty sure it's the kinda thing that happens when trying to learn french from ANY language.
Now, you would expect the arguably most famous Voievod of Romania and personal friend of Le Compte to know French
But I can't help but imagine that Vlad either can speak french but can't read it to save his life cuz it's phonetically inconsistent and he's old af and they kept adding letters till he gave up, which is a likely scenario given that he sells flowers in town, right? But it may also be that sometimes he reads a new word but when he tries to use it in conversation he pronounces it all wrong.
Also, Charles calling him le Voievod is pretty much how I'd probably adress him. Just that I imagine that if I tried to talk to him in Romanian, I could but it would sound to me a little like how Shakespeare sounds like to english people. With the "thou" and "art" I mean, not the poetic shit.
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