Pheasant Throwers

What does English sound like to foreign ears?

We’ve all heard examples of fake Chinese or German from speakers who lack familiarity with either language. While typically cringe-worthy, these examples do raise interesting questions regarding our own language. What does English sound like to non-English speakers? After more than 40 years, Adriano Celentano’s “Prisencolinensinainciusol” remains one of the most illuminating examples. 

The entire song is nonsense verse, neither English nor Italian, but the sounds are meant to resemble English. Linguist Mark Liberman wrote an interesting post about this sort of thing over at Language Log discussing yaourter, the French word for an attempt to speak or sing in a foreign language that one doesn’t know all that well. This often involves trying to sing a foreign song with nonsense or random words filling in the blanks. Liberman shares this wonderful quote from a random Internet user:

Just for the story, in France, when we don’t speak English and we want to imitate the sound, we call it “yaourter”(to yoghourt), the imitation sounds like a very nasal language, kind of like a baby crying. It mostly imitates the “cowboy” accent.

Before women were granted the right to vote in 1918 and 1920 in the UK and US, respectively, there was a very, very long discussion about whether giving women the vote was a good idea in the first place. In fact, people were so adamantly against giving women the vote that the more artistically inclined of the anti-suffragette set were fond of creating tacky anti-ladyvoting postcards, that presumably they could swap with other anti-suffragettes and then laugh and laugh. Here’s Collectors’ Weekly’s Lisa Hix explaining the history of the postcards as an old timey meme.

Think of them like the turn of the 20th century equivalent of the poorly photoshopped Obama with a bone through his nose email forward. 

Anyway, enjoy this rundown on how suffragettes are ugly, loveless hags who want only to steal pants (and dicks, probably!) from the men and forcing the dudes to do dehumanizing lady things like hold children and get bossed around. Giving women rights is just like taking rights away from men! 

Disney Buys Lucasfilm for 4 Billion Dollars

This is crazy. Disney just purchased Lucasfilm and now owns Star Wars and Indiana Jones. Disney isn’t wasting any time. Announcing a new Star Wars movie Episode 7, coming in 2015. That’s kind of insane to me.

George Lucas said in the press release:

“It’s now time for me to pass Star Wars on to a new generation of filmmakers.

Be as snarky as you want. Say, “he should have passed it on before he made the prequels”  but deep down inside you know that you (and I) will have a really hard time trusting anyone, anyone else with Star Wars.