Probably even more so to an anglophone. We're used to related modern verbs like choir and chuter, so those more readily come to mind than chier for us.
It's quite true Old French is full of funny sounding things to modern ears though, a great deal because of the different vowels sparking very odd/funny associations to modern words with very different meanings.
El païs ot un damisel
fiz a un cunte, gent e bel.
That one would work in modern French too. though the -te ruins it a bit for us as it makes it sounds more like comte than like con.
Marie de France is especially easy for people from Normandy, Bretagne and for Québécois (read aloud even more. I saw a production of Shakespeare translated to a mix of Middle and Old French many years ago, and most of it was quite intelligible). I was amazed to see it's full of archaic turns and even some words that are still present in regional speech. "Fils à" instead of "Fils de" would be an example of that. Older people might still refer to someone as La Josée à Raymond instead of saying Josée, la fille de Raymond.
Glad to see you enjoyed it. It's really a pity so little is known about her.
They're easier to tell apart when pronounced. One is more like vèr, the other is more like voué-er, or even voué-ar. You can still hear some of the é sound in some regional pronunciations of voir (the veoir spelling disappeared for good only in the 19th century).
Interesting that this one went from classic latin to the forms contes/compte (v. 980) to a cuens/cons phase, only to regain before the end of the middle-ages its form closer to comitem (under the form comte it kept since).
One of my dictionaries mention there was a very rich vein of play of words with cunnus/con in medieval and middle-French texts, helped by the high frequency of the syllables derived from cum. Cuens/cons/contes/comte isn't listed among the examples, though, but that may be because the misogynist usage of con appeared in French only in the Renaissance (in medieval French, it wasn't pejorative). It's believed it displaced the figurative use of "cornart" ("with horns", ie: cocu) as an insult for a stupid man and the mix of the two gave the derivative connard.
It didn't happen in New France. Here the fact it refers to female organs largely got lost except for literary uses (while all Frenchmen using the word as an insult are well aware of that) to retain only that of "stupid", which of course lead us to reserve con for stupid men and to create a feminine form, conne, for stupid women (The French will say "Cette femme est con", we will say "c'est un con/c'est une conne"
. The connard derivative that appeared while we were cut off from France never really took here (it's one of those words we label "franchouillard", the pejorative way to say it's French), but connerie did.
Funny also that some of the modern derivatives's (eg: connerie) first known appearances are in the novels of the likes of Flaubert, Stendhal or Mérimée rather than in satires, newspapers and such.
