Language Fun : Phonetic French in Dutch shop names

In the series of Funny Shop Names(funny from a French perspective), a Dutch friend of mine sent me a couple of pictures which are rather amusing and which I’d like to share.

If you are a Dutch shop owner and you wish to use a French name for your shop (to benefit from the classy image French seems to have), you need to  be sure that your fellow countrymen will pronounce your shop name correctly even if they don’t speak French.

Francophile Dutch shop owners have used cunning phonetic spelling of their shop names to ensure that they would be pronounced correctly.

Here is the Dutchified version of Déjà-Vu

Another creative approach is to use SMS-like spelling to encourage proper(ish) pronunciation of the French.

If your English is American rather than British, you will need to pronounce the letter Z the British way, ie. zed and not zee to get the next shop name right.

Here is the Dutch  for C’est Ici (‘zed’ ici : it’s here)

Do you have any funny pictures of signs, shop names from your own country ? If so, don’t  hesitate to send them over to me if you would like to share them with the rest of the world.