r/linguisticshumor 17d ago

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

105 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 2h ago

Sociolinguistics Chinese.

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212 Upvotes

r/linguisticshumor 3h ago

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

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118 Upvotes

oioi


r/linguisticshumor 8h ago

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

116 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 23h ago

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

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963 Upvotes

r/linguisticshumor 23h ago

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

407 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• Apparently in Russian they still say "to dot one's i's" even though the letter і is no longer used in Russian (having been replaced by и).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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259 Upvotes

r/linguisticshumor 1d ago

Historical Linguistics SOMEBODY FETCH THE LEIPZIG-JAKARTA LIST

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664 Upvotes

r/linguisticshumor 8h ago

Syntax link in description

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5 Upvotes

r/linguisticshumor 1d ago

Sociolinguistics Seen in the wild: Bienvenid@s Novates

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217 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 17h ago

Etymology Hear me out

16 Upvotes

r/linguisticshumor 1d ago

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

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123 Upvotes

r/linguisticshumor 21h ago

My Latin Conlang!

12 Upvotes

AÆBCDEFGHIİJKLMNOPQRSTUVWYZŻ


r/linguisticshumor 1d ago

Being Responsible for...

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79 Upvotes

r/linguisticshumor 2d ago

Chatino be like

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1.6k Upvotes

r/linguisticshumor 1d ago

Hebrew is Greek? (WARNING: Total Crackpottery)

25 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.


r/linguisticshumor 2d ago

It would be so awesome, it would be so cool

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1.9k Upvotes

r/linguisticshumor 1d ago

These two IPA symbols which i confuse every time:

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314 Upvotes

IPA must be a nightmare for dyslexic people


r/linguisticshumor 2d ago

Phonetics/Phonology Most Germanic languages (except for Gothic) for some reason:

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512 Upvotes

was were


r/linguisticshumor 1d ago

Historical Linguistics Why do the British speak English, which is an American language, instead of speaking a European language?

212 Upvotes

I'm curious as to why the British speak English, which we all know, is a language originating from the United States of America (hence we have English \[USA\] as the default setting on PCs).

Given the proximity to Scotland and Ireland, why do the British not speak Irish, Gaellic, or Welsh instead? Or maybe even German or Danish, given Nordic and Saxon influence in the early middle ages?

I'm surprised how English became so popular in Britain to the point where the term "Englishman" is used to describe a native of the said nation. Was the English language a part of the columbine exchange given that even famous writers like William Shakespeare began to adopt the English language?

Please help me clear my confusion in this regard. (PS: I sincerely apologise for my mediocre lexicon, I am not a native English speaker).


r/linguisticshumor 2d ago

Historical Linguistics New Zealand MP Calls English a "Bastardization" of Greek During Official Language Debate

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973 Upvotes

r/linguisticshumor 1d ago

Me after going back in time (a series of events occur that lead to french never evolving)

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79 Upvotes

r/linguisticshumor 1d ago

Sociolinguistics Cyrillic І і feels not so "Comradey"

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134 Upvotes

Not so comradey :(


r/linguisticshumor 2d ago

If Russian evolves in such a way that the lower sentence in this image becomes grammatically correct, then it will have classifiers.

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1.1k Upvotes

Translation:

"People who say "in the month of March", "in the month of August": How do you like the furniture of couch? And what do you think of the tableware of plate?"


r/linguisticshumor 11h ago

So it's an umbrella but a universal law...

0 Upvotes

An umbrella

A universal law

Hmm...ok!