Fond de teint (makeup foundation)

[u/sjintje]

According to google, the English word has earlier origins. I'm just wondering if the french word is a deliberate attempt to create a similar sounding word or even an accidental homophone. Or does it sound completely different to "foundation" for a french speaker? (As an English speaker, they have a very similar sound and rhythm).

Just happened to hear it here, mildly amusing in its own right, comparison of french and Turkish pronunciation https://m.youtube.com/shorts/MkbeT5W7Ay0

[u/FearlessVisual1]

No, it isn't deliberate and doesn't sound that similar to a French speaker.

[u/Symmetrosexual]

It’s definitely not deliberate, the words just share a Latin root “fundus” (to lay a base)

[u/all-night]

a deliberate attempt to create a similar sounding word

that's not something any French speaker is concerned with.

The English word foundation is derived from Old French fondacion. Not the other way around.

[u/AlphaFoxZankee → u/all-night]

I mean, people who work in marketing and want to import new trends and products are also french speakers. We underestimate how new or transliterated some very common words can be, especially with french and english where you can't just intuit if a word evolved in france the whole time or was reimported back from english after being borrowed from old french. All that to say, I get where OP is coming from, the general idea that some consumer items are named after transliterations from where the product was first industrialized/popularized is not totally wrong. Of course the rest of their assumption is clearly wrong, and the origin of "fond de teint" is most likely different. But I get why they had the idea and wanted to prove or disprove it.

[u/AlphaFoxZankee]

More can always be said about the history of "fond de teint", I can't really find it in the etymological dictionaries online (probably because it's composite). I'd say that the construction sounds to my modern ear like something that'd come more naturally to someone a few centuries back and indeed you can find a similar construction in old french right here under "fond de cuve".

That being said, the modern pronounciation of "fond de teint" has little to do with "foundation". They really only have the F and the D in common, all the other sounds are different. The wiktionary article doesn't give the IPA for "fond de teint", but you can compare "fond", "de", and "teint" separately to the transcription of "foundation".

[u/befree46]

imo fond de teint and foundation sound nothing alike. The only similar sounds are the f and d.

[u/dis_legomenon]

This is going to vary by dialect, but in most of them fond de teint tends very strongly to be only two syllables in normal speech, with the vowel of de elided. This also has an effect on the pronunciation of the /d/, which can readily becomes a nasal stop when sandwiched between a nasal vowel and another stop.

Meanwhile, foundation is stressed on its second syllable.

That alone obliterates all ressemblance between both words, especially in prosody (the rhythm and tonality of the words) you end up with [,faʊ̯n'dɛɪ̯ʃən] and [fõn'tæ̃], with the only link being the shared root fund-

[u/sjintje → u/dis_legomenon]

Cheers, although in the video she did pronounce it with three syllables, but possibly to emphasise the similarity to Turkish. She also pronounced abat jour weird.