Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
“Oh really? YOU’RE going to teach me Russian? Well you better bring the vodka and caviar, *sweetheart*.” -Translation from @cripplepunk-sylveon
I love the way people’s voice changes when they switch languages.
This a legit thing. I speak Japanese at a noticeably higher pitch than I do English. Different intonation too.
Spanish I speak at the same pitch more or less but my tone and rhythm are different.
Heard one of my classmates speak in English class, her pronunciation was absolutely perfect and her vocabulary was on the level of a native speaker, but her intonation was Czech and it sounded so uncanny
It is, though! OK, so—there is actually a very reasonable explanation behind the interaction described in the video, though it’s unlikely the two parties involved were really aware of the linguistic complexities. Obviously, as a native Russian-speaker, the woman in the videoKatya was using the Russianversion of the word. And since Katya knew of the beet soup in question—which originated in Ukraine—as a major cultural staple, it was totally logical for her to presume the English-speaking waitress was just outright mispronouncing a Russian word, and then stupidly correcting a genuine Russophone. But that’s not exactly right. Yes, the waitress did correct her for using a perfectly accurate Russian pronunciation, and that’s annoying. However, the waitress wasn’t using a Russian word—the waitress was saying the word in YIDDISH.
Now, I’m not suggesting the waitress was actually a Yiddish-speaker. In fact, it’s unlikely the waitress had any idea she was using a Yiddish word at all. But, as noted by food writer Andrew Evans: “the common English spelling of borscht (with a “t”) derives from the Yiddish transliteration, since the soup was introduced to the west primarily by Jewish refugees fleeing Eastern Europe. Food travels with people, which is why borsch is now popular worldwide.”
In Yiddish (which uses the Hebrew alphabet), borscht is spelt באָרשט; that last letter (ט) makes a “T” sound. So yes, in Yiddish it is pronounced “borscht”! And because of migration and, well… antisemitism, most English-speakers now use the Yiddish pronunciation of the word. Neither Katya nor the waitress were wrong. They were just saying the word in different languages, without realising other languages even had varied pronunciations to refer to the same beet soup.
It is борщ and it is באָרשט and probably several other things depending on your region. It’s all accurate—and great with sour cream.
At the Aula Cafe in Vilna in 2008, it was šaltibarščiai, and you’d better order it that way, or say “cold beet soup.” If you ordered борщ, you’d get a stony glare from the waiters.
Except.
Julius. Julius was a university student, working as a waiter at the Aula for his summer job, easy on the eyes, and a Yiddish-speaking Jewish boychik. Julius would absolutely let you order באָרשט. And he’d smile when you did.
Julius absolutely cleaned up in tips from the Yiddish-school students that summer. Everyone went to the Aula for lunch, and everyone learned that the Aula’s beet soup was excellent, and that, if Julius was your waiter, you could order באָרשט.
I absolutely love the language of my mother’s people
I believe linguistically the term is called Comparative Reduplication! And while a lot of languages have it, including many Indigenous American ones, Yoruba culture holds a lot of influence over how Black Diaspora and AAVE have been shaped. It’s a good video.
theres lots of first contact stories, and usually they mostly gloss over the establishment of a pidgin, like theyll mention it but its not the main focus, and thats fine, not every first contact story should be about linguistics, but it fills me with a longing for more stories about trying to bridge a communication gap like that, especially ones that question the ability for advanced abstract translation at all
not every first contact story should be about linguistics
Normally I wouldn’t remark on my romps through etymology, but “hlafweard” is a compound of hlaf, or loaf, and weard, which means guardian (see also Ward or Warden, etc). Meaning that when you call someone a lord you are calling him an esteemed keeper of the bread.
HEY THERE BREADBOX PETER WIMSEY. LOAF GUARD PALPATINE. BREAD CLIP VETINARI.
Lady also derives from hlaf, but in this case hlafdige or bread kneader. She makes the bread, he monitors it. Women have to do all the work as usual.
Now, the reason I was looking this up was that I wanted to develop a gender-neutral analogue to lord/lady; there are analogues already out there naturally, but the Shivadh must be different and anyway I didn’t like the ones I’d seen suggested online.
Given that the origins of Lord and Lady aren’t all that strongly gendered anyway (they’re about what the person does, not what their gender is), I decided that if a woman is a bread-kneader and a man is a bread-guarder, a nonbinary person should be A BREAD EATER, which would be Hlafetan.
Thus I present to you the gender-neutral analogue to Lord or Lady: Ledan.
I think I found my new favorite rabbit hole. This voice actor does Shakespeare scenes in a southern accent and I need to see the whole damn play. Absolutely beautiful
if you’re not from the us american south, there’s some amazing nuances to this you may have missed. i can’t really describe all of them, because i’ve lived here my whole life and a lot of the body language is sort of a native tongue thing. the body language is its own language, and i am not so great at teaching language. i do know i instinctively sucked on my lower teeth at the same time as he did, and when he scratched the side of his face, i was ready to take up fucking arms with him.
but y'all. the way he said “brutus is an honourable man” - each and every time it changed just a little. it was the full condemnation Shakespeare wanted it to be. it started off slightly mock sincere. barely trying to cover the sarcasm. by the end…it wasn’t a threat, it was a promise.
christ, he’s good.
the eliding of “you all” to “y’all” while still maintaining 2 syllables is a deliberate and brilliant act of violence. “bear with me” said exactly like i’ve heard it at every funeral. the choices of breaking and re-establishing of eye contact. the balance of rehearsed and improvised tone. A+++ get this man a hollywood contract.
Get this man a starring role as Marc Antony in a southern adaptation of this show PLEASE.
This man is fantastic. 💕
The thing that just destroys me about this, though – we think of Shakespearean language as being high-cultured, and intellectual, and somewhat inaccessible. And I know people think of Southerners as being ill-educated (which…let’s be fair, most are, but not the way it’s said). But that whole speech, unaltered, is so authentically Southern. And the thing is: Leaning into that language really amps the mood, in metalanguage. I’m not really sure how to explain it except… like… “Thrice” is not a word you hear in common speech…unless you’re in the South and someone is trying to Make A Fucking Point.
Anyway. This was amazing and I want a revival of Shakespeare As Southern Gothic.
One of the lovely things about this, and one of the reasons it works so well, is that from what we can piece together of how Shakespeare was originally pronounced, it leans more towards an American southern accent than it does towards a modern British RP.
In addition, in the evolution of the English language in america, the south has retained many of the words, expressions, and cadences from the Renaissance/Elizabethan English spoken by the original British colonists.
One of the biggest examples of this is that the south still uses “O!”/“Oh!” In sentences, especially in multi-tone and multi-syllable varieties. We’ve lost that in other parts of the country (except in some specific pocket communities). But in the south on the whole? Still there. People in California or Chicago don’t generally say things like “why, oh why?” Or “oh bless your heart” or “Oh! Now why you gotta do a thing like that?!” But people from the south still do.
I teach, direct, and dramaturg Shakespeare for a living. When people are struggling with the “heightened” language, especially in “O” heavy plays like R&J and Hamlet, a frequent exercise I have them do is to run the scene once in a southern accent. You wouldn’t believe the way it opens them up and gives their contemporary brains an insight into ways to use that language without it being stiff and fake. Do the Balcony scene in a southern accent- you’ll never see it the same way again.
This guy is also doing two things that are absolutely spot-on for this speech:
First, he’s using the rhetorical figures Shakespeare gave him! The repetition of “ambition” and “Brutus is an honorable man”, the logos with which he presents his argument, the use of juxtaposition and antitheses (“poor have cried/caesar hath wept”, etc). You would not believe how many RADA/Carnegie/LAMDA/Yale trained actors blow past those, and how much of my career I spend pointing it out and making them put it back in.
Second, he’s playing the situation of the speech and character exactly right. This speech is hard not just because it’s famous, but because linguistically and rhetorically it’s a better speech than Brutus’ speech and in the context of the play, Brutus is the one who is considered a great orator. Brutus’ speech is fiery passion and grandstanding, working the crowd, etc. Anthony is not a man of speeches (“I am no orator, as Brutus is; But, as you know me all, a plain blunt man”) His toastmaster skills are not what Brutus’ are, but he speaks from his heart (his turn into verse in this scene from Brutus’ prose is brilliant) and lays out such a reasonable, logical argument that the people are moved anyway. I completely believe that in this guy’s performance. A plain, blunt, honest speaker. Exactly what Anthony should be.
TLDR: Shakespeare is my job and this is 100% a good take on this speech.
definitely one of the challenges I have with reading Shakespeare is that it sounds so weird to me. “The good is oft interr’d with their bones”?? Who talks like that?
Well,,, rednecks. Despite being Elizabethan English, none of this is really out of character for a man with that accent; southern american English has retained not only (I am told) the accent of Shakespeare, and the “Oh!” speech patterns, but also so many of the little linguistic patterns: parenthetic repetition (“so are they all - all honorable men”), speaking formally when deeply emotional, getting more and more sarcastic and passive-aggressive as time goes on, etc.
Interviewer: What difference in usage would you point out in these three languages [Russian, English, French], these three instruments?
Nabokov: Naunces. If you take framboise in French, for example, it’s a scarlet color, a very red color. In English, the word raspberry is rather dull, with perhaps a little brown or violet. A rather cold color. In Russian it’s a burst of light, malinovoe; the word has associations of brilliance, of gaiety, of ringing bells. How can you translate that?
- Vladimir Nabokov, Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews and Letters to the Editor. Bryan Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy, Eds.
i love it actually when nonnative speakers make mistakes that reveal how their native languages work.
lots of koreans online say they “eat” drinks which would assume they only have one word which covers the concept of consumption.
arabic immigrants in sweden (my mother included) have a hard time differentiating between “i think/i believe/my opinion is” which suggests that in arabic these different modalities of speaker agency is treated as one or at least interchangeable.
swedish speakers in english will use should/shall/have to/must with much higher nuance precision than native english speakers, to the point where they sound well awkward, because the distinction between these commands in swedish is much clearer than in english. i make mistakes between is/am/are and has/have constantly because swedish only has one pronoun covering all grammatical persons.
i’ve heard speakers of languages without gendered pronouns (finnish, the chinese dialects, and a tonne more) make he/she mistakes because it’s hard(!!) to learn two or more gendered pronouns and when to use them correctly.
how neat is that?! it add a charm to international english usage in particular and make our appreciation of both our native languages and our learnt ones stronger…!!
i love this! one thing i notice with a lot of people (native speakers of polish, romanian, french and others) is no differentiation between present simple (i go) and present continuous (I am going), because those languages only have one present tense to cover both. it’s so lovely every time i hear it
i always think one of the most fun things about learning languages is that it teaches you how weird your own is! especially english phrasal verbs (the very different meanings of stand up, stand down, stand off, stand up to), or trying to explain the difference between being up to something and being up for something to my french friend. I love it!
another tag reminded me of how spanish speakers often mix up /v/ and /b/ because in panish they pronounced identically!
I wish more people had the ability to become bilingual because you’re right, it makes you understand your own language at a more intimate and analytical level!!
There’s a sherlock holmes story where he’s speaking with a man who has no highly distinguishable accent, but holmes pinpoints the man as a native german speaker immediately because he was putting his verbs at the end of the sentence. Having about 6 years of german through school at the time, I’ve never not been a little proud of myself for picking up on that as well, even before Holmes reveals his observation to the reader
