I love how potato in French is pomme de terre, which pretty much means “earth apple.”
like what stupid frenchman saw this:
and said “zis petite légume looks like a, how you say, APPLE! hmmm… but it grows in ze earth… HON HON HON! MAIS OUI! C’EST UNE…
spanish lesson for today
estoy comiendo la papa = i am eating the potato
estoy comiendo el papa = i am eating the pope
Can we talk about the word queue
How many of those letters are really necessary
I count one
MALE PRIVILEGE IS WALKING INTO A GROUP OF AMIGAS AND TURNING IT INTO A GROUP OF AMIGOS
scenesfrom-an-italian-restaurant:
I just realized that “lead” rhymes with “read”, but “lead” also rhymes with “read”.
you piece of shit.
You just broke the English language.
why is it that all the most popular posts on tumblr
are written like this
with no capitals
and no punctuation
i just really want there to be a popular and grammatically correct post on tumblr
I think the majority of Tumblr’s dialect (is there a word for a written dialect? Hardly anyone speaks Tumblr.) comes from influence within the tag system.
My theory is that the lack of capitalization is stylized, ironic laziness (same reason as the increasingly popular use of abbreviations such as idek and ikr, and particles like desu), whereas the punctuation stems from the tag system, where commas split up tags. So, “this is like, so totally cool” would be tagged “this is like” “so totally cool.”
With commas struck from the tumblr blogger’s arsenal, they rely on run-on sentences and other means to show emphasis. One such means, spacing, is another quirk influenced by the tags. If you repeat a tag, it will only show once, which is why you get “really r e a l l y weird things like this.”
Also common on Tumblr are people who show their enthusiasm through their text by pretending their haNDS ARE FRKEAKIGN OUT AN D THEY CANT TPYE OMFGGGG. This adaptation is actually pretty cool, I think, as it serves to communicate tone across a very toneless medium.
Did you hear that noise? That was the sound of my desk breaking. My linguistics boner just snapped it in half.
I love the run-on tumblr style it’s like reading poetry or having a conversation with someone who’s so caught up with passion for a subject that they’re rambling on and on breathless and wild-eyed.
Shakespeare plays and sonnets performed using 400-year-old Original Pronunciation.
This video demonstrates why historically informed performance can be so illuminating. Puns and lewd jokes, hidden in RP, leap out when performed in certain versions of OP. Rhymes that don’t work in RP, do in OP: love vs. prove, speak vs. break, etc. The ca. 1600 OP is so rich sounding; I would love to hear a production using it!
HBBO asked about unexpected “classics”. Here’s one.
YIIIIS. I use this in class and lost the video and now here that motherfucker is!
We were always taught by our literature lecturers to read Shakespeare in our local accent (Geordie) as our pronunciations are closer to OP than reading it in the classic “high art” style that you often hear in performances. Which helped a lot in understanding the text and jokes - though I suspect a performance in genuine OP would be even more enlightening.
Grammar glamour from Mental Floss.
What does English sound like to foreign ears?
We’ve all heard examples of fake Chinese or German from speakers who lack familiarity with either language. While typically cringe-worthy, these examples do raise interesting questions regarding our own language. What does English sound like to non-English speakers? After more than 40 years, Adriano Celentano’s “Prisencolinensinainciusol” remains one of the most illuminating examples.
The entire song is nonsense verse, neither English nor Italian, but the sounds are meant to resemble English. Linguist Mark Liberman wrote an interesting post about this sort of thing over at Language Log discussing yaourter, the French word for an attempt to speak or sing in a foreign language that one doesn’t know all that well. This often involves trying to sing a foreign song with nonsense or random words filling in the blanks. Liberman shares this wonderful quote from a random Internet user:
Just for the story, in France, when we don’t speak English and we want to imitate the sound, we call it “yaourter”(to yoghourt), the imitation sounds like a very nasal language, kind of like a baby crying. It mostly imitates the “cowboy” accent.
jesus christ this is actually reALLY FRUSTRATING IT SOUNDS LIKE ENGLISH BUT IT DOESNT MAKE WORDS
this is so catchy though holy shit
It goes like this: attache ta toque!
Okay literally it means fasten your hat basically but that’s boring as fuck and the real implied meaning here is HOLY SHIT HOLD THE FUCK ON SHIT’S ABOUT TO GET WILD.
You’re welcome.
Officially working the English translation into my vernacular.
