I mean, yes, this is funny, but mostly I’m just struck by how AMAZING language and its capacity for evolution and elasticity is. This would be incomprehensible to an English-speaker living in any other time.
Y’all been getting told not to hit on the barista since before we went off the gold standard.
Personally, my favorite is finding out that people have been using punctuation in the middle of a sentence (!) to indicate expression since at least the 1920s.
Since the 1890s at least!
The Philadelphia Inquirer, Pennsylvania, February 19, 1897:
aka the only possible appropriate character for talking about angels
серафими многоꙮчитїи
Multiocular O (ꙮ) is a rare glyph variant of the Cyrillic letter O. This glyph variant can be found in certain manuscripts in the phrase «серафими многоꙮчитїи» (“many-eyed seraphim”). It was documented by Yefim Karsky[1] from a copy of Psalms[2] from around 1429, now found in the collection[3]of the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius, and subsequently incorporated[4] into Unicode as character U+A66E.
o.O seems to me like a monk meme rather than a proper letter, but hey
From the article for the Cyrillic O:
Historical typefaces (like poluustav (semi-uncial), a standard font style for the Church Slavonic typography) and old manuscripts represent several additional glyph variants of Cyrillic O, both for decorative and orthographic (sometimes also “hieroglyphic”[1]) purposes, namely:
broad variant (Ѻ/ѻ), used mostly as a word initial letter (see Broad On for more details);
narrow variant, being used now in Synodal Church Slavonic editions as the first element of digraph Oy/oy (see Uk (Cyrillic) for more details), and in the editions of Old Believers for unstressed “o” as well;
variant with a cross inside, used in certain manuscripts as the initial letter of words окрестъ ‘around, nearby’ (the root of this Slavonic word, крест, means ‘cross’) and округъ ‘district, neighbourhood’ with their derivatives;
“eyed” variant (Monocular O) with a dot inside (Ꙩ/ꙩ), used in certain manuscripts in spelling of word око ‘eye’ and its derivatives. In many other texts, including the birchbark letters, the monocular O was not used as a hieroglyph but largely as a synonym of Broad On signalling the word-initial position;
“two-eyed” variants with two dots inside (Ꙫ/ꙫ or Ꙭ/ꙭ), also double “O” without dots inside were used in certain manuscripts in spelling of dual/plural forms of the words with the same root ‘eye’;
“many-eyed” variant (ꙮ), used in certain manuscripts in spelling of the same root when embedded into word многоочитый ‘many-eyed’ (an attribute of seraphs).
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!!)
I have mixed feelings about this. Specifically, I’m uncomfortable with the framing – that people who speak a particular language and who have adopted a different pronunciation of a borrowed word from the pronunciation found in the source language in a manner closer to their own phonetics and phonemes are engaging in problematic behaviour that should be “corrected”, because they are thus acting wrongfully towards the group that “owns” the word. Due to historical, cultural, and linguistic factors, the names of countries and cities in languages outside of their source languages are often very different, such as the English pronunciation of Paris (Payr-iss vs. Pah-ree) or the French pronunciation and spelling of London (Londre) or the bizarre situation that resulted in Germany is being called Deutschland, Tyskland, Allemagne, Germania, Niemcy, Alemania, and Duitsland throughout the various European languages (as well as “Déyìzhì” or"Déguó" in Mandarin, where this also happens). Two notable Canadian cities, Ottawa and Toronto, are pronounced “Wòtàihuá” and “Duōlúnduō” because English and Mandarin phonemes don’t map well. That’s not even accounting for differences between different dialects of the same language. It’s super interesting to know how Beijing and Shanghai are pronounced in China – absolutely it is. Especially because as a combination of phonemes, it is super unintuitive to the average English-speaker. Likewise, the idea of choosing a pronunciation closer to the source language is an interesting way of expressing deference and respect to the speakers of those languages. However, it is notable that such an aesthetic preference is heavily coded as a signal of high educational attainment and all the privilege that entails. The most common usage of the pronounciation of foreign-language words with the phonemes found within the source language is as of a way of obnoxiously and condescendingly positioning oneself as culturally and intellectually superior to one’s interlocutors – which makes this post’s second recommendation, that one go about “correcting” people who pronounce these place names in the accepted manner of their language community, even dicier, because this kind of reprimand and social censure, particularly for people with lower education attainment, can be incredibly shaming. Thus, seeing as the practical harm of saying Beijing with a soft versus a hard j is entirely unclear, I would endorse that one choose for oneself which one prefers, and if one really feels strongly about the issue, modelling the pronunciation one prefers oneself, with a most the occasional light, “Hey, did you know they say it like this in China? Neat huh?” rather than embarrassing people for saying it the way they’ve always heard it said.
Yeah, like… it’s not even actually the English /j/, which in IPA is [d͡ʒ]. The /j/ in Beijing is this sound: [t͡ɕ] which doesn’t exist in English. Saying “bay-JING” is still “wrong”, especially sans the correct tones.
Languages will always have their own pronunciations of foreign words, especially when adapting sounds that are not in their phonology. Like, I’m not here in Korea telling people they shouldn’t pronounce “pizza” as [’pidʑa] in Korean just because it happens to come from an English word (the pronunciation of which is different from the original Italian). I’ll correct them in English, sure, because in English it might impede understanding (especially when “zoo” becomes “Jew”), but in Korean? That’s the word, and there’s no point in being condescending about it.
also, why is this addressed to ‘white people’ as if kenyans and pakistanis definitely pronounce beijing with a hard j? that’s so tumblr.
dear OP, i know you mean well, but please be cool. pretty sure you mispronounce copenhagen and moscow.
people who dont even care about language: how can you just CHANGE grammar??? add new wORds?? unacceptable!!! language must never change!!!!!11 kids these days cant even spell!!
people who study language: ANARCHY!! ANARCHY!!!! LANGUAGE IS FLUID AND WORDS AREN’T REAL!! change! the! grammar! rules!! burn a dictionary!!! NO ONE CARES!!!!!
i understand the historical reasons why English is the most common language
but if I was writing a speculative fiction novel
and I said “the language that most people learn as a second language, usually for professional reasons, is also the only one with a spelling system so terrible that spelling words correctly is a broadcasted competition”
you’d be like “extremely unrealistic 0/10”
i never thought of this, do other languages not have spelling bees?
no offense but! i wish american students would stop seeing foreign language classes as just an academic requirement but an opportunity to learn part of another culture!
I wish language education in english-speaking countries actually seemed to care about teaching us about another culture and learning a language for reasons other that it being useful, rather than just teaching us to pass an exam
I wish learning a second language was mandatory in the US and was taught to us at an early age when we are still developing language skills and comprehension so that its not so difficult to learn other language at a high school level.
just moving along like everyone else 