never say anything to a penguin that the penguin has not already said to you
this reads like a shitpost but i’m actually 100% serious.
i was walking along the side of the harbour this evening, just after all the penguins had come in from the ocean to nest. there was one penguin right by the footpath, and when it saw me it kept saying ‘höö’. so i said ‘höö’ right back. it seemed to like that, and we had a lovely conversation where we just kept saying ‘höö’ to each other. i crouched down about two metres away from it, and we kept talking, and it actually moved towards me a little bit, seeming to prefer my company to the heartless embrace of the sea.
but then i made the mistake of trying to change things up. i said ‘hweh’, which was something that a previous penguin said to me, and this penguin hated it, and fucked right off. never said another word to me. i felt so rude.
I keep imagining this from the penguin’s point of view:
“Gustav, my friend, why so glum?”
The penguin in question looked up from his half-eaten sprat, shaking his head in disgust.
“Not glum, Sebastian. Affronted, outraged – I had the most perturbing encounter with one of the Beakless Ones.”
Sebastian nodded solemnly. “Yes, they are often perturbing. What happened, my friend?”
Gustav sighed heavily, looking up to the sky and holding his flippers wide, as if to ask the gods “why?”, before mournfully retelling his experience, “I was on the beach where the Beakless sometimes wander, contemplating names for this year’s chicks, when one of them approached. It seemed harmless enough to greet – they’re cute, in a strange, bald and flat-faced way, are they not?”
“Oh Gustav, you kind-hearted fool.”
“Such a fool, I am!” Gustav’s moans had gathered a small crowd already – the only thing penguins love more than a bellyful of fish, is a story. A good storyteller was always guaranteed a warm spot to huddle in the winter, surrounded by bored friends longing for entertainment.
“What did it do, Gustav? Did it kick you?”
“No! When it got close, I called out to it, ‘hello, friend!’. It stopped and returned the greeting – awkwardly, but it was rather sweet, like a chick learning it’s first chirps. ‘Hollow fren,’ it said back to me. I was charmed, but not wanting it to learn poor pronunciation, I repeated the greeting, and so did it! Getting clearer each time, till it could almost pass for a true penguin itself.”
“Gustav is a wonderful teacher,” Adelina, his mate, stated with a proud nod of her lovely blue head. “You remember how well our chicks could enunciate, before they even caught their first fish.”
“But what of it, Gustav? What happened to sour this experience so?”
“We went back and forth, till I was satisfied. It lowered itself near the ground, and I moved closer, carefully, not wanting to alarm it. I was just about to tell it how pleased I was, that it learning so quickly, when all of a sudden, it looked me right in the eye and said ‘Fuck off, freak.’”
There were avian gasps all around.
“Oh no!”
“How rude!”
“I was so appalled, I could not bring myself to even chide it.” Gustav bowed his head in shame. “I turned and left without another word.”
“It said that to you? Oh dear.” Sebastian tilted his head in a piercing glare towards one of their fellows, focusing on the only one who was slapping his sides and chortling. “Björn, you scoundrel! What have I told you about yelling obscenities at the Beakless?”
Björn cackled and bobbed his head in defiance. “How was its enunciation, Gustav? You soft-hearted buffoon!”
I say them differently and my roommate used to love asking me to do so at parties to hear everyone else go ‘woah, weird’ and then start repeating the two words over and over. (Not sure if this is a helpful comparison, but I pronounce ‘caught’ like ‘court’ and ‘cot’ to rhyme with ‘got’.) (Language and pronunciation is so fascinating!)
oh my GOD I’ve been trying that and now I sound like I’m doing an absurd over-acted NYC accent lmao
I don’t have the merger! The vowel sounds are different. “Cot” is between “ah” and “eh”; “caught” is “aw.” … And my New York accent shines on “aw” sounds.
haha I figured that was why you disagreed with the other post, you new yorker you. I do love that new york/new jersey vowel inflection
I have a friend whose second language is English and until I was able to tell them in person they couldn’t understand how the name “Alec” and the word “phallic” could rhyme
oh my god I hope this person was not themselves named Alec.
I’ve spent the past hour trying to wrap my head around how people without the caught-cot merger pronounce those words and I can’t hear the difference even with recordings and with @pirisquills demonstrating for me
i know i’ve previously expressed indignation over collective academia’s choice to translate “Gallia Bracata” as “trousered Gaul” instead of “pants france”, and today i am similarly incensed by how absolutely none of the scholars of Greek tragedy have called the dragon-drawn chariot that carries Medea off at the end of Euripides’ play the Dragon Wagon
A certain Welsh archivist and coffeeboy of our acquaintance would approve.
AHAHAHA so true story
Near the end of my program in classics in undergrad (it was a series of semester-long classes aimed at launching a major or completing a minor) I had a course in Greek and Roman Theatre while at the same time taking Latin IV. The six of us who had survived to Latin IV (Latin I started out with 36 students) were basically self-guided at that point, and decided we would translate Seneca’s Medea in Latin class ahead of studying it as a dramatic text in our Theatre course.
So we do in fact get to the ending of Medea, and all of us are just…very tired Latin nerds, it’s the end of the semester, for some of us it’s the end of the program, and Medea is also a really sad story. I mean, yes it’s a tragedy, so of course, but the climax is a mother murdering her children out of desperation, and that’s pretty rough to grapple with as a twenty-year-old.
And we hit the dragons, and we were discussing the best way to translate some of the weird grammar in the passage, and remember Medea has just killed her children. And my friend Beth blurts out,
“She fled the feds in a dragon wagon!”
And that was it. We couldn’t even keep class going. We just all fell apart laughing and decided we’d go get doughnuts instead of finishing class.
In my linguistics class we were talking about “insertion” which is basically when you say a word and pronounce an extra letter or sound even though it’s not written in the word itself, to which my professor used the example of “hamster” because when you say it you pronounce a “p” even though it’s not written and this group of guys were going through an existential crisis because they couldn’t believe they said hamster with a “p” and one kid began to question everything in his life and it was beautiful
My favourite example along these lines is the hidden nasal sounds in English that you don’t even realize you’re producing. Everyone knows about /m/ and /n/ because they have distinct letters, but there’s also a sound that’s often written “ng” and yet not actually pronounced as n+g. For example, “ng” in “finger” is pronounced like “n+g” but “ng” in “singer” is a totally distinct sound (known as “engma” and written /ŋ/ in the IPA).
Even more obscurely, /m/ is normally produced with a closure of the two lips, but when it’s found before /f/ or /v/, it gets pronounced with the teeth on the lips instead, just like /f/ and /v/ are, as in “comfort” or “symphony”. The IPA symbol for this is /ɱ/, and I don’t think it technically has a fun name, but I call it “emfma” by analogy with “engma” and every linguist I’ve said it to has understood me.
Modern historians tend to characterize the time where English borrowed a lot of words from Norman French as a period of richness and innovation, but sure enough, writers at the time were grumbling about how kids these days were speaking absolutely terrible Anglo Saxon.
Full quote, from Bokenham in 1440 (notice how he’s ironically using lots of Latinate words in his complaint, like “corruption” and “familiar” and “augmentation”):
And þis corrupcioun of Englysshe men yn þer modre-tounge, begunne as I
seyde with famylyar commixtion of Danys firste and of Normannys aftir,
toke grete augmentacioun and encrees aftir þe commying of William
conquerour by two thyngis. The firste was: by decre and ordynaunce of þe
seide William conqueror children in gramer-scolis ageyns þe consuetude
and þe custom of all oþer nacyons, here owne modre-tonge lafte and
forsakyn, lernyd here Donet on Frenssh and to construyn yn Frenssh and to
maken here Latyns on þe same wyse. The secounde cause was þat by the
same decre lordis sonys and all nobyll and worthy mennys children were
fyrste set to lyrnyn and speken Frensshe, or þan þey cowde spekyn
Ynglyssh and þat all wrytyngis and endentyngis and all maner plees and
contravercyes in courtis of þe lawe, and all maner reknygnis and countis yn
howsoolde schulle be doon yn the same. And þis seeyinge, þe rurales, þat
þey myghte semyn þe more worschipfull and honorable and þe redliere
comyn to þe famyliarite of þe worthy and þe grete, leftyn hure modre tounge
and labouryd to kunne spekyn Frenssh: and thus by processe of tyme
barbariʒid thei in bothyn and spokyn neythyr good Frenssh nor good
Englyssh.
Here’s a translated version if you don’t feel like puzzling through the Middle English:
And this corruption of Englishmen in their mother tongue, begun, as I
have said, in the every-day admixture of first Danish and then Norman,
was greatly augmented and increased after the arrival of William the
Conqueror by two things. The first was by the decree and ordinance of
the aforesaid William the Conqueror that children in the grammar
schools should leave off and forsake their own mother tongue and learn
their Donatus in French and construe it in French and do their Latin in
the same way, which is something which goes against the habit and
custom of all other nations. The second cause was that in the same
decree the sons of the lords and the children of all the nobles and
worthy men were first set to learn and speak French, before they could
speak English and that all writings and indentureships and all manner of
pleas and controversies in courts of law and all manner of calculations
and accounts in households should be done in the same (language).
And seeing this, the rural people [saw] that they might seem to be the
more esteemed and honorable and the more easily open to the
acquaintance of the worthy and the great, abandoned their mother
tongue and labored to be able to speak French: and thus in the course
of time mutilated them both and spoke neither good French nor good
English.
A Pretty Taste for Paradox 