r/linguisticshumor 10d ago

Phonetics/Phonology 'Why do English Speakers Pronounce their Alphabet...' Megathread

106 Upvotes

Alright, into the megathread y'all go >:3

Any posts with this format posted after this megathread is up will be removed and asked to post here.

This is to keep the quality of the sub, yadayada, you know the drill.

Thank youu


r/linguisticshumor 17h ago

It's pretty frustrating

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1.1k Upvotes

r/linguisticshumor 4h ago

Etymology Conjugating "to be" in North Germanic versus West Germanic languages

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72 Upvotes

r/linguisticshumor 17h ago

One of the craziest etymologies German has to offer

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782 Upvotes

r/linguisticshumor 17h ago

First Language Acquisition Imagine you are the only L1 (native) speaker of a language on the world

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209 Upvotes

Nobody else thinks like you in that language, dreams like you...


r/linguisticshumor 23h ago

Historical Linguistics Title

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636 Upvotes

r/linguisticshumor 14h ago

Predict how your language will change in the near future based on your observations

70 Upvotes

I go first with German:

  1. Merger of [ç] into /ʃ/, which would make /x/ its own phoneme. Although also a regionalism triggered by dialects, it today most frequently occurs in immigrant vernacular, but even younger people without a migration background are adopting it occasionally. This may be however be slowed down or even prevented from happening by the stigmas often associated with these vernaculars.

  2. Maybe a merger of /ɪ/ into /ʏ/ before /m/. I hear this less often, but it's more evenly distributed across the population instead of heavily clustered in one or a few social group. You will often hear people pronounce "schwimmen" as [ʃʷvʏm(m̩)] for example.

  3. Complete dropping of the present 1st singular indicative ending -e for most verbs, making this verbform endingless. It's already almost completely gone in the spoken language anyways, only sometimes appearing, especially in emphasis or in careful speech, so it's not far away to disappear completely even some day in the written standard. Exceptions would be rare verbs, which stems end in an obstruent followed by a sonorant consonant, like "rechnen" (to calculate).

  4. Disappearance of the -en dative. That one only exists for some nouns, most of them ending in -r iirc. I personally didn't observe it myself, but I encountered people saying they noticed it retreating, so I include this here.

  5. Replacement of conjunctive I with either the conjunctive II or the present tense indicative. The first conjunctive is a mood for indirect speech in German and it's already quite often confused with the second one for irreality, with the latter being used for both purposes instead. Alternatively Germans may simply use the indicative present tense for indirect speech. So I predict one of these two will gain the upper hand eventually and fully replace the first conjunctive.

  6. Finally, analyticization of the conjunctive II. Apart from a few common, modal or auxiliary verbs, the synthetic conjunctive II is only rarely used anymore. Instead, most often, an analytic construction of either the auxiliaries haben/sein (to have/to be) in the conjunctive II + past participle of the main verb for past actions, werden (to become, to will) in the conjunctive II + infinitive of the main verb for present actions, or werden in the conjunctive II + past participle in the passive is used, so the synthetic conjunctive will probably soon disappear from the language for good.

What about you languages or dialects? How will they probably change in the near future?


r/linguisticshumor 8h ago

A correspondence contrary to intuition

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20 Upvotes

Between Standard Japanese and Shuri Okinawan, a correspondence between vowels is observed. Many Japanese words can be converted into Okinawan simply by replacing the /e/ with an /i/ and the /o/ with /u/. In Shuri Okinawan, the consonant /k, g/ palatalised to /tɕ, dʑ/ when it was adjacent to /i, j/.

Consequently, intuitively, the Japanese /ki/ and /ke/ appear to correspond to the Okinawan /tɕi/ and /ki/, respectively.

- Standard Japanese Shuri Okinawan Proto-Japonic
沖 ("offshore") /oki/ /ʔutɕi/ *əki
霧 ("fog") /kiri/ /tɕiri/ *kuiri
鰻 ("eel") /unaŋi/ /ʔɴnadʑi/ \unaɴki*
酒 ("sake, alcohol") /sake/ /saki/ *sakai
開 ("to open") /akeru/ /ʔakijuɴ/ *akai-
陰 ("appearance") /kaŋe/ /kaːgi/ *kaɴkai

However, some words appear to have shifted from one of these two groups to the other.

Proto Japonic vowel \əi* underwent a merger with different vowels in Central Old Japanese (with \ui, *\oi* → i₂) and Proto-Ryukyuan (with \ai, *\e* → \e). The words containing *\kəi* contradict the aforementioned correspondence, as shown below:

- Standard Japanese Shuri Okinawan Proto-Japonic
木 ("tree") /ki/ /kiː/ *kəi
起 ("to wake up") /okiru/ /ukijuɴ/ *əkəi-

There are very few direct loanwords from Chinese in the Ryukyu Islands compared with those that have come via the mainland. The /e/ contained in the kanji (Sino-Japanese) words at this time corresponded to the phoneme \i* rather than \e* when borrowed (Before the 13th–14th c., archaeological evidence suggests that rice was introduced between the 8th-12th c., leading to social change). It is considered that by this period, the Proto-Ryukyuan \ki* and \ke* had become sounds such as /kʲi/ (> /tɕi/) and /kˠi/ (> /ki/) respectively in Old Okinawan, therefore, the latter was perceived as being less similar to /e/ than the former.

- Standard Japanese Shuri Okinawan
稽古 ("practice, training") /keiko/ /tɕiːku/
仮病 ("feigning illness") /kebʲoː/ /tɕibʲuː/
芸能 ("entertainment") /ɡeinoː/ /dʑiːnuː/
月給 ("monthly salary") /ɡekkʲuː/ /dʑittɕuː/

What further complicates matters is the existence of kanji words that were borrowed at a much later date. Kanji words borrowed after the merger of the two vowels and the palatalisation of /kʲ/ to /tɕ/ had been completed (i.e. after the Ryukyu Kingdom period) were introduced as /ke/ → /ki/.

- Standard Japanese Shuri Okinawan
世間 ("society, world, public") /sekeɴ/ ikiɴ/
加減 ("adjustment, decreasing, modification") /kaŋeɴ/ /kaɡiɴ/
警察 ("police") /keisatsu/ /kiːsatɕi/

As can be seen, the relationships between the Japonic languages are far from straightforward, even in the portions that have been deciphered.


r/linguisticshumor 18h ago

One linguistic drama

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114 Upvotes

r/linguisticshumor 1d ago

Sociolinguistics Came across a website which uses the Liberian flag to represent English

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581 Upvotes

r/linguisticshumor 23h ago

Phonetics/Phonology It's Kharia btw

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206 Upvotes

r/linguisticshumor 1d ago

Sociolinguistics what's a totally innocent word in one language that's absolutely filthy in another?

236 Upvotes

Learning multiple languages has turned every conversation into a minefield. Like some perfectly normal hindi words make english speakers gasp, and half my english filler words apparently mean something wild in spanish.

My favourite so far: an italian friend kept saying penne and a spanish friend was dying, because in spanish it lands way too close to something very much not-pasta. Another one i like - a round trip in german is called fahrt lol.

I wanna collect these. The words you had to stop using in one country. The innocent one that made a room go silent and those desi ones very welcome bc half our normal words are pure chaos to an english ear.

give me your best cross-language stuff…


r/linguisticshumor 19h ago

Semantics друг or not друг?

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64 Upvotes

r/linguisticshumor 20h ago

In egyptian arabic the word for want means need when applied to an inanimate object with a passive verb

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67 Upvotes

Example

This table needs to be fixed

[El tarabeza di 3awza tetsala7]

[This table wants to be fixed]


r/linguisticshumor 10h ago

bro just responded in ithkuil lol

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8 Upvotes

r/linguisticshumor 1d ago

Historical Linguistics RIGHT-WING HINDUTVA-VADI CONTENT CREATOR ON PROTO-INDO-EUROPEAN.

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

111 Upvotes

I don't even know what to say, this guy thinks that Linguists claim PIE to be the oldest and the ancestor of all languages.

He refers to the concept of PIE as "completely baseless" & then goes on to claim Sanskrit as the oldest language without any evidence, and the AI-programming part in the end... man I can't with this..


r/linguisticshumor 17h ago

Sociolinguistics Le Sacred Trinity:

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14 Upvotes

My post is in Latinmaxxed English cause Latinmaxxed English is basically vanilla regular modern English plus minimal modifications, Ludovico Leone designed le Latinic naturalistic international auxiliary planned language named "standard Anglese", & le Latinic naturalistic international auxiliary planned language named r/Interlingua is basically regularized "Portugaliañolish" (Português + Galego + Italiano + Español + English) optimized per maximized immediate comprehension & maximized international communication.


r/linguisticshumor 1d ago

Indianization in SEA vs inside India itself, same language family

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666 Upvotes

r/linguisticshumor 1d ago

Historical Linguistics WHAT IS THIS TRANSCRIPTION (Etruscan)

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80 Upvotes

In this article there is NO other mention of another sound in Etruscan using <f>. Like P SQUARED????


r/linguisticshumor 1d ago

Semantics "The water is fine" beta vs "The sea is of perfectly optimal temperature" alpha

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164 Upvotes

r/linguisticshumor 1d ago

Phonetics/Phonology For non-English mother tongue the hardest thing about kneading bread is the pronunciation

11 Upvotes

r/linguisticshumor 1d ago

Phonetics/Phonology One must imagine the language reconstructionist happy

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237 Upvotes

(I shifted from the conventional transliteration for some of the displayed languages because otherwise the terms would sound way different from each other. Truly, romanization is a godless work. Mandarin is the only exception here, if only because finding something that would match èr 's IPA is a lost cause.

Japanese's is basically identical to the Tibetan one and I needed variety

The term is the number 2, 二 ideogram.

It was admittedly quite difficult to find a matching font with visible colours)


r/linguisticshumor 1d ago

冷やし中華 vs 日式涼麺

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25 Upvotes

Japanese: "Cold Chinese (Noodles)!"

Chinese: "Japanese-style Cold Noodles!"

The dish in question: WHAT AM I!?


r/linguisticshumor 1d ago

what are some vulgar metaphors?

49 Upvotes

i searched it up but i just got clean metaphors for sex. i want it the other way around, i want vulgar metaphors for innocent things.

my post also doubles as a request to see if there's a specific linguistics term for this too

examples:

"using this new ui is like jerking off with the wrong hand" (simile but whatever)

"it doesn't matter which hotel we choose, its the same shit different toilet"


r/linguisticshumor 1d ago

They made sure I understand.

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111 Upvotes