I'm pretty sure they know, and that's what makes it funny. There's an entire genre of internet humor based on using incorrect (because of homophone/homograph words) english-to-french translation. For example saying "vérifie les buches" for "check the logs".

Yeah that was my understanding and why I found it so funny!

Haha there are other cases where there is valid French that isn't accepted in French speaking areas because it looks too similar to English.

1) Quebec wanted "arrêt" instead of "stop" on stop signs, even though the latter is accepted as valid French and used in France.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_sign?utm_source=chatgpt.c...

2) The use of the TLD .gouv.fr instead of .gov.fr, even though "gov" is a recognizable contraction of the intended French word "gouvernement".

(No, it's not a valid defense that "'gov' would be pronounced differently from 'gouv'": the English TLD .com is a contraction of "commercial", even though the "com" in "dot-com" is pronounced differently from the "com" in "commercial".)

I don't understand any of this.

Probably because of their proximity with the USA, the french-speaking community in Québec is far more attached to using French than actual French people. That's why in France we use "Stop" and not "Arrêt".

On the other hand, ".gouv.fr" is something used in France. gouv[ernement] is completely different than go[u]v[ernement] Not only because of its pronunciation, but also because it's not a simple shortening of the original word.

We never use "aso" to talk about an "association", even though it would shorten it even more, because it just doesn't make sense. You can remove the ending of a word, creating a kind of "prefix", bug it you remove multiple part of a word it just become something different.

>On the other hand, ".gouv.fr" is something used in France. gouv[ernement] is completely different than go[u]v[ernement]

How are they different? Contractions and abbreviations drop letters. That's the point. .gov would have been perfectly fine and matched other countries. It's a clear example of being different for the sake of it.

It’s intentional and meant as a joke.

Even so, it parallels a real thing that happens in non-joke contexts, where they avoid valid French when it looks "too English":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45773624

I might have picked "desu" as the keyword, a shorter phonetic respelling of dessus. Since the super keyword is often repeated in Rust, this would lead to code like `utilisons desu::desu::desu::a()`, for some added Japanese flavor.