That's really interesting. A friend u used to be very close to is Serbian and she told me that the letter "s" is pronounced "
sh"
That's kinda how it is for Hebrew but there's actually 2 letters that look identical except for where the dot is placed and one is an S sound and the other is a
Sh sound. But certain things in English like Jerusalem is pronounced Yerushalyim in Hebrew. Well there's no J sound so it turns into a Y sound and the S seems to be turning into an
Sh. There's another letter besides the identical pair that has a S sound but it is more of a "ce" and a "ts" letter
But j took modern Hebrew in college and some letters got changed up since I took Hebrew in a bilingual elememtary/Jr high school. There's now a j sound by putting an accent on the "gimmel" which is the hard g sound.
Sorry if all this was complicated.
They chose French because they're from Lebanon (and Syria, Iraq etc but my parents were both born in Lebanon) and Lebanon was colonized by France at some point. My French teacher in high school didn't believe me till she looked it up
Many of them ran away to France during the Lebanese civil war becsuse they learned French as a second language. Some of them knew English as a third language and eventually came to the USA.
Even up to now, my grandma speaks in arabic with random French and English words. I grew up using some french words thinking it was part of the English language or just pronouncing certain words different to the standard way.