General Language Thread

Isn't that more people assuming that white people all speak English?

Apparently, they dont make the same mistake with, say, French or Spanish.

Huh. Odd.

But they do mistake Portuguese for Spanish all the time.

I'll cop to that. I can sometimes distinguish the two in writing, but almost never in speech.

It's apparently because German and English use similar consonant-vowel combinations.

German does not sound anything like English either.

I think you are confused with German and Dutch, which are regularly confused by other language speakers.

Well, yes, they are both Germanic languages, but that doesn't mean they sound the same. You wouldn't confuse Spanish for French, would you?

Edited by Redmess on Sep 23rd 2020 at 2:39:02 PM

I mean, for a time the Dutch and the Deutsch were part of the same country, it would make sense people confuse them.

As for Spanish and Portuguese, I guess one of the easiest ways to tell them apart is that the latter uses longer sounded diphthongs is comparison to Spanish. There's also the /eu/ dipthong that is more abundant in Portuguese than in Spanish.

Portuguese speakers also don't talk like they going on fast-foward.

"You wouldn't confuse Spanish for French, would you?" I can only tell you what other people have told me. It probably depends on one's familiarity with European languages. Someone who had seldom heard either language before might very well confuse them.

German, Dutch, and English share lots of basic vocabulary that is cognate—i.e., obviously related, give or take some predictable sound changes. Also, all three languages are "stress-timed." Unlike "syllable-timed" languages such as most of the Romance tongues (in which all a word's syllables are voiced for roughly an equal length), unstressed syllables are crowded in between stressed syllables in a way that can give German, Dutch, & English all a Morse-code like cadence to non-speakers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isochrony

So even though we sound quite distinct and easily identifiable to each other, I can see how non-Germanic speakers might find it easy to confuse us.

Edited by Jhimmibhob on Sep 24th 2020 at 2:31:55 PM

Why English Spelling is so messed up:

TLDR: English is three languages wearing a trench coat.

Yeah, and the trenchcoat is a patched together pastiche made up of bits stolen from other languages wardrobes.

Re: confusion between Spanish and Portuguese: Few days late, I know, but I've heard it said before by a Latin-American Spanish speaker that Portuguese sounds like a Russian person trying to speak Spanish.

Wait, but they were talking about Portuguese-Portuguese or Brazilian-Portuguese?

'Cause those two sound really different.

For that matter, what version of Spanish you're comparing it against would make a significant difference, too.

EDIT: I see now that PresidentStalkeyes mentioned the friend was a speaker of Latin American Spanish. But still, Argentinian Spanish, Mexican Spanish, Venezuelan Spanish, etc are still going to sound rather different, too.

Edited by PointMaid on Sep 26th 2020 at 9:53:28 AM

Granted, I can see how Portuguese-Portuguese sounds sorta like Russian, or at least the accent does.

"but I've heard it said before by a Latin-American Spanish speaker that Portuguese sounds like a Russian person trying to speak Spanish."

Pretty sure that's what Portuguese speakers say about Spanish.

I can confirm from personal observation that Spanish can be confused for French by people with no real exposure to either (in this case, South Koreans).

Dutch and Flemish have a similar interesting relationship. Flemish sounds comical to the Dutch, while Dutch sounds very serious to Belgians. Flemish is regularly used in dubs for comedic characters. Timon and Pumbaa are basically twice as funny for their Flemish accents.

Sometimes dubbing choices are a bit odd though. Applejack from MLP got a Flemish accent, even though we have perfectly good rural dialects of our own.

You can even get that between different dialects of English, I find. Like, in America the Cockney accent, until relatively recently, was considered pretty 'whimsical' and inherently amusing, while the RP accent was the go-to dialect of the Evil Brit. Here in Britain, meanwhile, characters with Cockney accents tend to be nothing special, since, you know, that's relatively normal in London, where most nationally-consumed media comes from; unless, as has been pointed out by at least one comedian, you speak Cockney in a friendly tone, which instantly makes you sound like a psychopathic London Gangster. As for RP, I think characters with the RP accent were typically regarded as the default good guys but are nowadays more likely to be out-of-touch toffs that are impossible to take seriously.

Yeah, that doesn't really help with RP being the standard accent taught at foreign university English courses.

Anyone here with expertise in Russian? I'm trying to come up with a neologism inspired by the etymology behind the name of Belka. Белка is conventionally translated as "Squirrel" but literally means "Whitey" (and is probably appropriate given the dog in question's rather predominantly pale color) when you follow how it was constructed from белый ("white") and -ка (here used as a diminutive suffix). What I want is to replace белый with красный ("red"), but I have no idea how the compound should look like; краснка sounds weird even for Russian, but omitting н like it seems suggested for similarly-ending adjectives under the suffix's Wiktionary article gives краска, which only has "paint, dye, ink; colors; blush, flush" as listed meanings and is apparently derived from красить ("to color; to adorn, beautify") rather than красный.

Edited by MarqFJA on Dec 13th 2020 at 7:22:06 PM

We have a few Russians around, but I don't know if they frequent this thread.