Start each word and then decide it's not worth the effort and trail off
this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2024
521 points (98.9% liked)
Linguistics Humor
1595 readers
1 users here now
Do you like languages and linguistics ? Here is for having fun about it
For serious linguistics content: !linguistics@mander.xyz
Rules:
- 1- Stay on Topic
Post about linguistics or language humor & memes - 2- No Racism/Violence
- 3- No Public Shaming No shaming someone that could be identifiable or recognizable
- 4- Avoid spam and duplicates
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
See also English place names.
"Scrumbwickshireford has been continuously inhabited since the reign of Æthelred the Unready, and people could not be arsed at a rate of one letter per generation. Hence its modern pronunciation: Sheffield."
That can't be the original name. Scrumb wick shire ford? What's a Scrumbwick? Why both -shire and -ford endings? How did both get removed, and now it's a -field ending?
That makes no sense at all, surely?
Why not Scrumford? Or Wickford? Might as well change the name to Stavanger for all the sense Sheffield makes.
That can’t be the original name.
Correct, it's bullshit.
But it's illustrative of merely contrarian nonsense like Rampisham being "Ransom" or Southwark being "Suthik."
Are you saying contractions are contrarian nonsense?
You are bringing some weird takes to a gag thread in a gag community.
"Eh you got the gist, let's move on to the next word"
They begin to pronounce words, then suddenly go on strike.
It’s really weird for me as a spanish speaker. I can nearly read french since a lot of the words are cognates but when i hear it spoken i might understand one word in twenty. Their pronunciations are fucked.
Haha, I have the same problem but with spanish as a french speaker. I find italian much easier to understand.
Honestly same for me with italian.
Can I ask what you think of portuguese pronunciation? I can read it but its not possible for me to understand it when spoken... In comparison I learned spanish at school and it was the easiest langage to learn thanks to my french.
I'm not a speaker of any Romance language, but Portuguese does sound kinda Slavic to me for some reason. That part of the Eastern European Portugal meme checks out.
LangFocus has a video about that effect. It's called something like "Why does Portuguese sound like Russian". There are quite some phonetic and phonotactic similarities
Link: https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=Pik2R46xobA
There's actually a lot of totally separate parallels here, I guess they just hit a certain critical mass when combined.
Written portuguese is fairly easy to read for me. Every now and then I'll respond to brazilians in spanish when they have a funny meme and they'll write back in portuguese. Yay mutual intelligibility.
Spoken portuguese is damn near impossible for me to understand. I know a few phrases and words because my buddy is fluent and says them every now and then but the language sounds like spanish while holding marbles in your mouth. I will say that spanish also sounded unintelligible to me before i learned to speak it so maybe I just need to go live in Rio de Janeiro.
As a Portuguese we usually understand our neighbors from Spain, like they speak spanish and we can kinda more or less understand some meaning even without knowing the language, for example when traveling there, but if we talk portuguese to them their brain shuts down, they are not able to understand anything we say.
French phonology was heavily influenced by Germanic languages, unlike Spanish and Italian.
For better or for worse, the orthography (writing system) did not really keep up with the changes.
So instead of French being half way between Italian and Spanish, like you might expect, it's really it's own thing when it comes to pronunciation.
I don't know how big this effect really is but French changed their orthography during the renaissance to make it more Latin like
The woes of a rather conservative orthography and an aggressively evolved phonology.
And Portuguese is a mix of French and Spanish, but if it was mixed together by drunk who didn't know either of those languages
I'm struggling learning Portuguese is what I'm trying to say
Portuguese is my native language and I struggle with it. Hell, I have an easier time with english. German tho, is impossible to learn in one lifetime
German here. Can confirm.
I usua'y joke that it's like Ita'ian but whẽ' you just woke up ã'd your tõ'gue did not, so you prõ'õu'ce thĩ's mostly the sã' except for a few missĩ' cõsõ'ãts.
[I usually joke that it's like Italian but when you just woke up and your tongue did not, so you pronounce things mostly the same except for a few missing consonants.]
Serious now. If you want some help feel free to ask. I'm a native speaker.
That's actually pretty accurate lmao
My girlfriend speaks Portuguese natively so she helps me with it, but there's only so much she can do when my body also isn't accustomed to the nasal vowels, and I'm also an idiot lol
You probably aren't an idiot, it's just that language learning is harder than it looks like.
If you have a really hard time with the nasal vowels, worst hypothesis it's fine to simply pronounce an oral vowel + [ŋ]. You won't sound native, but it sounds less off than simply omitting the nasalisation or using [m] or [n] instead.
Watch out for the vowel height of /ã/; depending on the dialect it's between [ɐ̃] and [ə̃], but it's certainly not [ã].
load more comments
(1 replies)
Portuguese is like catalan which is like occitan (southern French). If you know one of the Latin languages, Portuguese shouldn't be too hard, really.
Portuguese shouldn’t be too hard, really
To read? Absolutely. To understand, even though I speak some other Romance languages? Just no.
Ah yeah that's fair enough. But then again that's true of all the languages I've learnt.
Learning spoken English with the BBC accent and then landing in Ireland and dealing with all the local accents... that was some craic alright!
Just learn 3-4 latin languages, and latin ofc and you should be ready to go
"Le chateau" is French for "the chateau."
It looks impossibly dainty written down, but when spoken, is just a stream of subtly articulated grunts
I learned french in the late nineties, years were hell.
Kids these days have it good, not needing to count past 25.
Vigesimal. Even their math sounds horny.
Tabarnak.
That's Canadian french!
Non, c'est du français Québécois ;)
"you got peanut butter in your mouth or something?"
you have 11 letters. You pronounce 4 of them
The remaining letters are recycled into English. Pronunciation is still based off the same 4 letters you used in French, except you don't have access to them anymore.
The last one. The french writing system in its roots.
French is what you get when your Spanish skills are so good that you speak it in fractals.
It's Italian with a mouth full of shit.
I usually say "Spanish with a mouthful of pudding," but it amounts to the same thing
And Danish is Swedish but with a hot potato in your mouth.
Le wee wee
view more: next ›