xkcd #2942: Fluid Speech

https://xkcd.com/2942

explainxkcd.com for #2942

Alt text:

Thank you to linguist Gretchen McCulloch for teaching me about phonetic assimilation, and for teaching me that if you stand around in public reading texts from a linguist and murmuring example phrases to yourself, people will eventually ask if you’re okay.

  • MajorHavoc@programming.devEnglish
    28·
    7 months ago

    Nice. There’s lots of areas I’ve lived where the locals drop specific consonants from the names of places. So anyone who actually pronounces the place name “correctly” is immediately recognized as new to town.

      • Kernal64English
        12·
        7 months ago

        When I hear someone from that city say their city’s name, it sounds like it should be spelled “Trono.”

        • CDenno@lemmy.worldEnglish
          11·
          7 months ago

          Shibboleths are amazing! Calgary is almost universally pronounced “Cal-Gary” by non-locals, locals say “Calgree”

          • Kernal64English
            2·
            7 months ago

            I’m gonna have to disagree with you. Have you ever seen a Shoggoth? They’re horrific and just because they’re protoplasmic beings doesn’t mean their mispronunciation of English should be celebrated.

      • Zagorath@aussie.zoneEnglish
        7·
        7 months ago

        Like the other reply said, it’s all over the place in Australia. You can easily tell a tourist—especially an American tourist—because they’ll say “can-bair-a” instead of “can-bruh”.

        It’s not unusual in the UK, too. Worcester is Wost-er, Magdalen(e) is mawd-lin, and Leicester is lester.

        • Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          5·
          7 months ago

          OMG, that makes it so much worse. If someone tells you about a specific place, and you want to look it up later, you have absolutely zero chance of ever spelling it correctly. Good luck typing lester or woster in Wikipedia or Maps.

          • Zagorath@aussie.zoneEnglish
            6·
            7 months ago

            As it happens, that worked just fine:

            Worcester is famous even outside the UK because of Worcestershire sauce (pronounced “woster-shuh” sauce), the condiment named after the region. And because the name is on the bottle, it’s easy for people to remember.

      • ChexMax@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        7 months ago

        We have a Bradenton nearby which gets shortened to branton (pronounced like brain-nton). Gotta have the long A or else you’ll accidently send someone half an hour away to Brandon.

        • Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          1·
          7 months ago

          Oh that’s just great. Two similar place names like that, and they also happen to be relatively close to each other. I can see how that could cause some confusion.

          Similarly, Kuhmo and Kuhmoinen (both in Finland) are about 446 km apart, but you can easily avoid the confusion as long as you know roughly which part of the country you’re talking about.

          There’s also Helsingborg (town in Sweden) and Helsinfors (swedish name for the capital of Finland). What could go wrong.

    • mindbleachEnglish
      3·
      7 months ago

      This is the real reason for English city names being Like That. It’s just the locals getting tired of using five syllables, and then four, and then three, over the course of literally a thousand years.

      We might find out the original name of London was Welsh before the Romans arrived to write it down.