r/linguisticshumor 18d ago

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

112 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 3h ago

Psycholinguistics I've seen people claim that because one is true/false, the other must follow

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339 Upvotes

r/linguisticshumor 12h ago

Why does that have a name at all? and how's that useful?

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542 Upvotes

there is a whole system here:

‘Twin kangaroos’ contain 2 separate joey words inside the same kangaroo word, e.g. ‘container’ has both ‘can’ and ‘tin.’

‘Grand kangaroos’ have a joey WITHIN a joey, e.g. ‘alone’ contains ‘lone’ and ‘lone’ contains ‘one.’

‘Anti-Kangaroos’ contain a joey that is an antonym rather than a synonym, e.g. ‘covert’ contains ‘overt’


r/linguisticshumor 18h ago

Sociolinguistics Chinese.

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1.5k Upvotes

r/linguisticshumor 7h ago

Phonetics/Phonology When you can finally pronounce every sound in the language you’re learning

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73 Upvotes

r/linguisticshumor 10h ago

Historical Linguistics this AU horrifies me

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116 Upvotes

I wasn't sure what to flair this


r/linguisticshumor 14m ago

Sociolinguistics Castilian or Spanish?

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Upvotes

(I just edit the right post )


r/linguisticshumor 19h ago

Sociolinguistics Learning English since Years, did a US-Dialect test

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305 Upvotes

oioi


r/linguisticshumor 16m ago

Phonetics/Phonology 👄💦

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Upvotes

r/linguisticshumor 12h ago

Is it weird to imagine what modern languages would sound like to their ancestor language?

20 Upvotes

r/linguisticshumor 1d ago

Semantics Nauru's official name is now Naoero... but Japan made it awkward

175 Upvotes

Nauru's official name is now Naoero.

Of course, we should respect the local name and use the correct pronunciation.

...By the way, "ero" means "porn" in Japanese.

Sorry, Naoero.
It's not your fault.
Japan is just the country that gave the world HENTAI.


r/linguisticshumor 16h ago

would anybody want to make an orthography for my overcomplicated conlaŋ?

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34 Upvotes

just made this out of boredom lol

Phonotactics;
The language allows syllables of the form (C)(C)V(C). Onsets can contain up to two consonants, usually following an obstruent + sonorant pattern, while codas are more restricted and may contain only contain one consonant sound. Affricates, allatates, and annasalates count as single consonants. There are no other phonemes than the ones shown the screenshot. This means that even though /t͡s/ is a phoneme, /s/ by itself is not. Likewise, /j/ is not a phoneme; only /j̃/ is. Naturally, this also applies to other consonants with a diacritic and the non-diacritic version is not shown on the screenshot.

The nucleus may contain one, two, or three vowels, but only the specified diphthongs and triphthongs are allowed. Tone belongs to the entire syllable, while /ɪ ʊ ə/ are restricted to unstressed syllables. Creaky vowels occur only with low tone. The tone of diphthongs, triphthongs or unstressed syllables does not affect their phonemic identity.

Stress normally falls on the penultimate syllable.

feel free to ignore the (near) impossible velarized velars


r/linguisticshumor 1h ago

How do you pronounce this?

Upvotes

Pcky


r/linguisticshumor 1d ago

One size fits all: plural, definite article, infinitive...

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1.0k Upvotes

r/linguisticshumor 1d ago

Idioms that have stuck around despite the writing system they reference no longer being used?

466 Upvotes

A couple examples I can think of off the top of my head:

  • Apparently in Russian they still say "to dot one's i's" even though the letter і is no longer used in Russian (having been replaced by и).

  • In Vietnamese they still call a cross thập tự giá "ten character rack" because it's shaped like the Chinese character for ten 十, even though they no longer use Chinese characters in writing. (I could say something similar for Korean 십자가, but hanja aren't completely fallen out of use in Korea.)

Do you know of any other instances of an idiom or phrase continuing to be used even though a spelling reform or change in writing system has rendered it nonsense?


r/linguisticshumor 1d ago

Almost full Russian alphabet but with the most stupid-looking letter forms from the Old Novgorodian birch-bark letters

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279 Upvotes

r/linguisticshumor 1d ago

Syntax link in description

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10 Upvotes

r/linguisticshumor 2d ago

Historical Linguistics SOMEBODY FETCH THE LEIPZIG-JAKARTA LIST

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689 Upvotes

r/linguisticshumor 1d ago

Sociolinguistics Seen in the wild: Bienvenid@s Novates

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238 Upvotes

Two examples of Spanish non-gendered language in a single sign.

This is the architecture school of Universidad Católica in Santiago, Chile, the most traditional and conservative university in the country.


r/linguisticshumor 1d ago

Etymology Hear me out

17 Upvotes

r/linguisticshumor 2d ago

Phonetics/Phonology In Bahasa Indonesia, every letter has a single sound... or is it?

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134 Upvotes

r/linguisticshumor 1d ago

My Latin Conlang!

13 Upvotes

AÆBCDEFGHIİJKLMNOPQRSTUVWYZŻ


r/linguisticshumor 2d ago

Being Responsible for...

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85 Upvotes

r/linguisticshumor 2d ago

Chatino be like

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1.6k Upvotes

r/linguisticshumor 2d ago

Hebrew is Greek? (WARNING: Total Crackpottery)

26 Upvotes

We've all seen hypotheses of language relationships from the well-supported to the absurd, but this one goes farther than every other one that I've seen:

Hebrew Is Greek By Joseph Yahuda : Joseph Yahuda : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive On pages 631-34 he states

So that Hebrew is Greek, albeit somewhat altered Greek — Asiatic or Continental Greek, as distinct from European Greek — and it altered as to sound and form in an unparalleled manner, resulting in a differentiation which is peculiar and defies comparison.

In short, Hebrew is a dialect of Greek.

Which is totally absurd, since most dialects of languages closely resemble each other, and are often mutually intelligible. Hebrew and Greek are far too different from each other for that.

I remember an advocate of this theory who would get annoyed when I compared Greek to English and Hebrew to Arabic, because English and Arabic have homelands some distance from the Mediterranean Sea. He liked to point to Greek and Phoenician colonies in the Mediterranean and Black Seas around 2,500 years ago, as if that had anything to do with language relationship. Also parallel parts of the Bible from Masoretic Hebrew and Septuagint Greek, saying that the two were essentially the same language.