But that's how c is pronounced in castillian, no? What's pretentious about it?
this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2025
637 points (100.0% liked)
Comic Strips
15352 readers
2026 users here now
Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.
The rules are simple:
- The post can be a single image, an image gallery, or a link to a specific comic hosted on another site (the author's website, for instance).
- The comic must be a complete story.
- If it is an external link, it must be to a specific story, not to the root of the site.
- You may post comics from others or your own.
- If you are posting a comic of your own, a maximum of one per week is allowed (I know, your comics are great, but this rule helps avoid spam).
- The comic can be in any language, but if it's not in English, OP must include an English translation in the post's 'body' field (note: you don't need to select a specific language when posting a comic).
- Politeness.
- Adult content is not allowed. This community aims to be fun for people of all ages.
Web of links
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world: "I use Arch btw"
- !memes@lemmy.world: memes (you don't say!)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Pronouncing things as they would be in the language they're actually in is sometimes a faux pas in American culture, I've learned
Let's be fair: doing things the correct way, or just being slightly educated, is often a faux pas in this wasteland pretending to be a civilization.
The cultural backlash comes not from 'pronouncing things correctly makes you sound educated' but because people that do this are adopting an accent for one singular word, and that is often perceived as them attempting to imply some connection to that group/culture that they do not have.
Americans, white Americans especially, have essentially no cultural heritage to draw on. It's why we latch onto things like a grandparent being from Ireland and thence go around calling ourselves Irish-American, or the confederate stans. People with a rich cultural history are generally viewed as extremely interesting, too, so when another american adopts characteristics from a culture they have no real connection with, it's perceived as a deeply tacky attempt to gain social clout. Its akin to being presented with a lesser form of weaboo.
(to be fair, this does happen with the perception of educated people too. "Use real words" and all that, so you're not really wrong just a bit wide of the mark on the particulars)
What do you mean, "white Americans have no cultural heritage"? Your culture runs the planet and has been a going concern for several centuries across hundreds of millions of people. We are in twenty twenty five, good sir. AD. Place got colonized in the sixteenth century. Half of Europe was in a completely different country back then, even discounting all the American history that goes before that.
And yeah, it's weird that you latch on to foreign ancestry as a substitute. I'd joke about it, but I'm here getting all pissy about the US equivalent, so it'd be hypocritical, I suppose.
Not OP, but maybe it's better phrased as "white Americans have a limited shared cultural heritage."
Waves of immigration make it hard to tell what of that 5 centuries is actually shared. It's also viewed as tacky to try and lay claim to the bit before your ancestors arrived.
If your ancestors were Irish and Italian immigrants from around 1850, going off about the Mayflower can be viewed as similar putting on airs
It's our national Mythology, we're a land of migrants and refugees. People have been coming to this land for 500 years, yeah that's a long time compared to our perspective, but there are traditions and cultures in Europe that predate even knowing about the existence of other land in another hemisphere by an additional 1000 years.
And the culture you describe as dominant over the world while yes is predominantly white, is just unchecked capitalism and neoliberalism and a product of whoever controls the largest military and acts as the economic measuring stick to the rest of the world and that if any other nation were to unseat the US as the dominant economic and militant force, then their oligarch's culture would dominate the planet.
load more comments
(5 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
Let's not put them on the pedal stool
I mean, I get it to an extent. I'm much more in favor of linguistic descriptivism rather than prescriptivism, so I acknowledge that terms and pronunciations can develop over time and are not wrong.
If someone pronounces "Beijing" in English with a softened J/G sound (like "beige") and someone else corrects them with "Oh do you mean bei-JING", truthfully neither are wrong. The correct pronunciation is whatever people understand and accept.
On the other hand, suggesting that there is a single correct/more authentic pronunciation (particularly in cases where it may not even conform to standard English phonemes) veers into prescriptivism and has problematic connotations.
Hm, but reacting negatively to someone pronouncing it, for lack of a better term, the original way IS presciptivism. This isn't about someone who pronounces a Spanish word the Spanish way criticizing someone who pronounces it the English way, but the other way around.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Fowks pass!
load more comments
(7 replies)
probably that he's not from there. absent other information, his lisp would then indicate that he is imitating the accent in order to sound more cultured. like someone from the us midwest saying "have you been to mehico?"
Barcelona kinda has an extra layer of this too, because Catalan does pronounce "Barcelona" with an S sound rather than an unvoiced TH
load more comments
(5 replies)
That's fine, I intend to aggressively say "Los An-heles" and "Ari-tho-nah" from now on, see how the anglophones deal with using a normal accent to say their names.
I mean, I get it, it sounds weird when people say "Los Anyeles" or "London" when speaking Spanish, too. But... you know, if the spelling is the same I don't see the problem using the way it's actually meant to be said.
I've gotten enough weird looks for ordering a "BuRRi-toh" in anglo speaking countries to be annoyed by this. And don't get me started with how Americans have chosen to pronounce "Los Gatos". If you're going to steal our word you at least could give us the deference of not mocking us for saying it correctly.
Now, if the anglophone in question is out there calling it "Barna" you know they're a poser.
i feel like the wider point got missed there.
saying "barcelona" with a faked spanish accent is the same as saying "berlin" with a faked german one. it's weird, and it makes you took pretentious. bar th elona and ibi th a are just common versions because a lot of people know about them.
now, some people can't help it. they might be german, for example. that's different, and the comic is saying we shouldn't judge for that, and we shouldn't assume someone is trying to sound clever just because they pronounce a word differently.
load more comments
(5 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
What's pretentious about it is that you're talking in English, so you should use the English place name. The purpose of communication is to be understood by the other person. If you use a non-standard pronunciation, even if it's the name as the locals there pronounce it.
So, to communicate effectively to another English speaker in English you shouldn't be saying "Munchen" you should be saying Munich. You should be saying Prague, not Praha. Vienna, not Wien.
Choosing to say the name of a place "like the natives do" might be seen as pretentious because instead of trying to communicate effectively, you're attempting to seem smart or cultured.
load more comments
(3 replies)
~~It's the opposite (as far as I could find). Pronouncing "c" similar to "th" is only done in Spanish in Spain. In Catalan (as well as Latin/South American Spanish) all pronounce it like "s".~~
Nevermind, I just can't read. You wrote Castilian, not Catalan.
Castilian Spanish is the dominant dialect of Spanish in Spain.
Edit: A helpful map:
load more comments
(3 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
I know its sounds like im an asshole but i lived 4 months there and picked itnup lol. So now i alsways say it like that even tho my spanish is pretty bad. But i like to pick up the correct, native pronounciacion of place names anyways to show a bit of respect to the people living there and i dont judge you if you dont do it.
I'm bilingual and that's dumb.
People living in a place don't care how you say the name of the place where they live when you're talking to someone else in your own language. They don't feel a sudden burst of respect from someone elsewhere in the world.
More importantly, the native names of most places use phonemes that simply don't exist in English. Turkey wants you to say "Türkiye" but not only does English not have the "ü" character, that phoneme simply doesn't exist in English. If you're trying to communicate with someone in English, you shouldn't use phonemes that don't exist in English.
Fundamentally, the purpose of saying a place's name is to communicate with someone, it's not to show respect to the people who live in the place being named. If someone is going to find it even slightly difficult to understand you because you're choosing to pronounce the name of a place in a way that's unnatural to English speakers, then you're doing a bad job of communicating.
Im bilingual and speak 4 languages and i like it when people pronounce names correctly. Especially in hungarian which a lot of people pronounce incorrectly, it feels nice. Then again i could be alone but other peoples comment suggest otherwise. I just dont know why you reacted so offensively to my comment. Btw a language not having the correct sounds doesnt mean you dont hear/know them. Im really bad with the scratchy sounds in french, danish, arabic, etc but i still hear them so i recognise what is being said.
load more comments
(7 replies)
Look ma, a cunt
Here in Switzerland we have four languages and we simply say words like they sound in the language they are from, even if most of us only speak one of the languages natively and one as a second language from school. There is no reason to make up separate pronunciations. Buillon is buillon and tiramisu is tiramisu even if I'm speaking Swiss German.
load more comments
(1 replies)
My experience has been the exact opposite. When I mispronounce words I've been giggled at and/or corrected. When I pronounce it right, people either don't notice or act pleasantly surprised, I've even gotten some head nods that I assumed was acknowledgement of my trying
load more comments
(2 replies)
Language is indeed for communication, which is why both ways of saying it work...
load more comments
(7 replies)
load more comments
(7 replies)
serious question. is it pretentious to use the "real" name of a place instead of it's english name? i'm not talking about pronunciation, but when english people decide to come up with a completely different, name for foreign places
like, "i visited milano, torino, and firenze this summer" instead of "milan, turin, and florence"
Well, I don't think most primarily-English-speaking people would appreciate you mentioning that you visited Baile Átha Cliathe this past summer instead of just saying Dublin.
Does this mean I have to start calling Los Angeles "The City of Angels"?
Yeah kinda because English speakers know it as Milan, Turin and Florence
Well, most of the Spanish speaking world calls Barcelona the same way we call it. With slightly different inflection, but only the castellanos have the “Spanish lisp.” Which derived from some king who had a lisp, if I’m remembering that correctly? So other Spanish speaking people—most of them, in fact, don’t call it “barth-elona.”
I learned Spanish in Spain, so I started speaking in that lispy Spanish. But as I continued to get way more fluent, living in the other parts of the Spanish speaking world, my accent changed.
load more comments
(3 replies)
Do you get to the cloud district very often? Oh what am I saying, of course you don’t.
The majority of my time playing skyrim I thought he was referring to somewhere in a different city like Solitude or something. Didnt realize he was talking about a place thats 10 paces away lol
load more comments
(2 replies)
The ancient Spanish basically all had a lisp. Nobody thought about it at the time and it eventually became the status quo and then correct pronunciation. I base this on absolutely nothing and will die on this hill.
There is an urban legend that everyone in Spain started speaking this way because of the super-inbred Habsburg kings had a terrible lisp and everyone wanted to make him sound normal. There's no evidence of it, but considering this guy was king of Spain...
Consider that the artist probably, at the direction of the subject, made some alterations (aka photoshopped) to the painting in order for the portrait to come out how they wanted to appear. It's possible that the subject looked even worse.
load more comments
(1 replies)
When Spain invaded Latinamerica, they recorded the language of the natives phonetically but there were a lot of sounds that didn't have an Spanish equivalent so they just wrote X for all of them and now they're trying to retroactively fix the spelling of several words so you're kinda right. For example, Spain insists México is spelled Méjico.
Edit: Apparently, as of recently, Spain no longer insists México is spelled Méjico but still keeps it around as a correct spelling (it's not, it's literally only them).
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
I am all in to pronounce names & places correctly, aka according to the original language. So, so dumb when a name is "transliterated" to another alphabet and now it doesn't mean anything to anyone, and nobody can read it correctly.
However, for well established names, might not worth the trouble.
I agree to a point, but try Bangkok.
Edit: For the uninitiated, that is: Krungthepmahanakhon Amonrattanakosin Mahintharayutthaya Mahadilokphop Noppharatratchathaniburirom Udomratchaniwetmahasathan Amonphimanawatansathit Sakkathattiyawitsanukamprasit
lol do they say that colloquially? I don't think so?
No. They use Krung Thep, which is short for Krung Thep Maha Nakhon.
Bangkok is also the first one that came to mind, bit as other have said the full name is not used locally, either.
Pekwachnamaykoskwaskwaypinwanik Lake in Manitoba, though.
That would be the (standard) Spanish, right? Catalan, the local language, has it with /s/
But it's very language-dependent. English has established names for many places, so you should probably use those. But some languages just don't, and if you borrow everything, you might as well borrow properly.
load more comments
(1 replies)
No, I've never been to Barthalona or Barcelona. Nor am I ever going to either. I'm far to poor to travel beyond local necessities. I have no idea why I'm here at this party. Why you are here?
load more comments
(2 replies)