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.
psa non chinese/white ppl, Beijing is not pronounced “"bay zhhh-ing”“ ,,, its pronounced ”“bay jing”“ with a hArd J.
and Shanghai is pronounced “sh-ahh-ng high” nOt “shay-ng high” ok pls thx bye
ok ADDING onto this bc this shit gets me heated .. Beijing and Shanghai are prob the two most well known cities in China that western countries/ other places know of and i cant recall ever hearing a non-chinese person saying Beijing or Shanghai the right way ? my history teachers, on tv, ppl i know, etc etc ..
pls make an effort to say the two easiest pronunciations correctly, its ok if u didnt kno/uve been saying it wrong but correct urself if u habe been !!! correct othrr ppl bc its rlyyy annoying thank u (edit: btw any1 can rb this!!)
This is actually super cool, I never knew I was pronouncing them incorrectly!!
for those of you having difficulty pronouncing her name, the apostrophe in her first name is not actually an apostrophe! its a bit of hawaiian punctuation called an ʻokina. because hawaiian tends to be very vowel-heavy and can have multiple consecutive vowel sounds with no consonants dividing them, the ‘okina serves an indicator of a pause between vowel sounds (a glottal stop if we’re being technical).
so auli’i would be pronounced like OW-LEE-EE rather than OW-LEE. cravalho is likely an anglicization of the portuguese surname, carvalho, which makes sense because hawaii has a pretty large portuguese population. (for example, i have a friend who’s last name, loui, is a messed up attempt at anglicizing the chinese name, liu).
usually the ‘okina is removed from hawaiian words outside of hawaii to avoid confusing people who are unfamiliar with the language’s conventions. for example, hawaii would actually be hawai’i, ohana would be ‘ohana, and luau would be lu’au (there’s actually supposed to be a straight bar above the first ‘u’ called a kahako, which lengthens and emphasizes the vowel, but im too lazy to try to format that lol).
and that concludes this linguistic primer on hawaiian punctuation, have a great day y’all.
@ every person calling Auli'i Moana girl instead of her name
A REAL LIST OF ACTUAL NAMES AND THEIR (approximate) PRONUNCIATIONS: Siobhan — “sheh-VAWN” Aoife – “EE-fa” Aislin – “ASH-linn”
Bláithín - “BLAW-heen”
Caoimhe - “KEE-va”
Eoghan - Owen (sometimes with a slight “y” at the beginning)
Gráinne - “GRAW-nya”
Iarfhlaith - “EER-lah” Méabh - “MAYV” Naomh or Niamh - “NEEV” Oisín - OSH-een or USH-een Órfhlaith - OR-la Odhrán - O-rawn Sinéad - shi-NAYD Tadhg - TIEG (like you’re saying “tie” or “Thai” with a G and the end)
I work with an Aoife and I have been pronouncing it SO WRONG
As someone who is trying and failing to learn Gaelic, I feel like is an accurate portrayal of my pain.
This is the Anglicized spelling of a people who really fucking hate the English.
No, no, this is the orthographic equivalent of installing Windows on Mac.
The Latin alphabet was barely adequate for Latin by the time it got to the British Isles, but it’s what people were writing with, so somebody tried to hack it to make it work for Irish. Except, major problem: Irish has two sets of consonants, “broad” and “slender” (labialized and palatalized) and there’s a non-trivial difference between the two of them. But there weren’t enough letters in the Latin alphabet to assign separate characters to the broad and slender version of similar sounds.
Instead, someone though, let’s just use the surrounding vowels to disambiguate–but there weren’t enough vowel characters to indicate all the vowel sounds they needed to write, so that required some doubling up, and then adding in some silent vowels just to serve as markers of broad vs. slender made eveything worse.
They also had to double up some consonants, because, for example, <v> wasn’t actually a letter at the time–just a variation on <u>–so for the /v/ sound they <bh>. AND THEN ALSO Irish has this weird-ass system where the initial consonant sound in a word changes as a grammatical marker, called “mutation,” so they had to account somehow for mutated sounds vs. non-mutated sounds, which sometimes meant leaving a lot of other silent letters in a word to remind you what word you were looking at.
And then a thousand years of sound change rubbed its dirty little hands all over a system that was kind of pasted together in the first place.
My point is, there is a METHOD to the orthography of Irish besides “fuck the English.” The “fuck the English” part is just a delightful side-effect.
Is it ‘nano ree (rhymes with tree) mo’ or ‘nano rye (rhymes with eye) mo’?
I always pronounce it ‘ree’ even though it probably should be ‘rye’. But then it took me years to stop pronouncing meme “mem–ee” so don’t listen to me.
Lol I said ‘me me’ for the longest time. Actually until I heard it spoken on Doctor Who of all things! So I do say 'meem’ now.
It is difficult to get out of a pronunciation habit though. I had to retrain myself on how to say 'Legolas’ when the lotr movies premiered.
it bothers me that Kansas and Arkansas are not pronounced the same
I’m from the UK and I have been pronouncing Arkansas as Ar-Kansas my whole life
For all my non-american friends, Arkansas is pronounced ark-an-saw
For all you American people, your country is mental.
Lol don’t hate
us australians had this actual conversation today. ‘no really. it’s pronounced ‘ar-kan-saw’!
but then we say ‘melbourne’ like ‘melbn’ so we don’t really have a leg to stand on….
To be fair, the two names come from separate Native American tribes. Kansas is named after the Kansa tribe that used to be in that area, and Arkansas is a French pronunciation (hence the soft s) of a Quapaw tribe word. So. Different tribes, different pronunciations.
If you really want to call us mental, consider the fact that a bunch of people call the state of Missouri “Miss-ur-UH.”
IF YOU CALL IT “MISS-UR-UH” I WILL CUT YOU
buuuuuut then again, we missourians have a city called nevada that’s pronounced “nuh-vay-dah” crol
As a NYC girl born and raised I can 100% certify that people from Texas mispronounce “Houston”…
In Michigan, we have Mackinac Island and Mackinaw City which are both pronounced to rhyme with ‘saw’ even though half the bloody state tries to rhyme the island with 'sack’ instead.
A tour of the British Isles in accents: for those who would be tempted to mention “A British accent” and leave it at that.
…Smart to remember, too, that all these regions will have microregional variants. The Dublin accent referenced here, for example, is only one of at least five or six that I can identify, and I bet there are a lot more I’ve never heard or can’t tell from one another. Ditto for other regions in Ireland. The “Irish accent” as normally heard in US TV and film until quite recently has never been much more than an overstated, artficial “Dublin Stage” accent.
Equally, what most people in the US think of as “the British accent” beloved of movie villains everywhere is usually the so-called Received Pronunciation or RP, a kind of by-blow of the BBC’s refusal for a long time to allow its announcers to use anything but an approved version of the Home Counties “posh” accent. (This dialectic “glass wall” has finally started cracking in the last decade.)
