languages and stuff

In “pre-colonial times,” wrote the late feminist scholar Niara Sudarkasa, women in West Africa were “conspicuous in high places.” They led armies, often played important consultative roles in politics, and in the case of the Lovedu people (present-day South Africa), they were even supreme Rain Queens. What it meant to be a woman in many African pre-colonial societies was not rigid. “Among the Langi of northern Uganda,” writes Sylvia Tamale, dean of the faculty of Law at Makerere University Uganda, “the mudoko dako, or effeminate males, were treated as women and could marry men.”

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Just going around saying "Shark!" to each other.

"Shark, what can I get you?

The first one is El 47 (The 47). It mixed spanish and catalan.

It’s based on a real story (in 1978 Manolo Vital, a bus driver, hijacked a bus in Barcelona as a form of civil disobedience, so that it could reach his poor neighborhood) and the mc speaks both languages basically fluidly. Some characters spoke spanish, others catalan, our mc switched through them depending on the situation. The plot sounds a little boring but it’s a great movie, surprisingly emotional, about migration inside one’s country, about fascism and the Franco dictatorship of Spain (even though at that point it had already ended), about how poorer neighborhoods made of migrants were always ignored to the point people died because of it, about catalan, etc.

The other one is Slúžka (The Chambermaid). It mixed czech, hungarian, german, and slovak. Now, since I don’t speak any of these languages and I watched it with subtitles, I can’t exactly say which one was more predominant, if they were given the same amount of scenes, etc, but I do remember that there was no noticeable shift to the point I didn’t even notice the language changed. It was treated with the most normality.

It’s also based on a real story, and it tells the story of Anne, fifteen years old, poor, from a small Slovak town, going to Prague to become a maid just before wwi. There she meets the daughter of the noble family (Resi), and they end up falling in love. Talks a lot about misogyny, maids and the life of those who worked as domestic servants, wwi, etc.

it's a quick read of less than 1,000 words, nevertheless the presentation and framing of this language are so appealing to me, and I realise that actually, I've been trying to do the same thing in my own conlanging all this time : a fictional language, spoken by a fictional people with their own culture and mythology, but set in the real world and respecting the history of the real world.

like, not everyone is Tolkien (I certainly am not) and so,, all the romance of a fantasy realm can sometimes just end up being a distraction. on the other hand, not doing any culture-building at all is sterile and boring. but just evoking Silbia the mother of the stars is enough to spark the imagination and I love it

Most languages use relatively similar sound inventories overall, but make distinctions others don't. And the way the our language centers work is they group these sounds together, allowing us to recognize that things within a given range constitute a recognizable phoneme. If your languages groups together sounds another language makes a distinction between, your brain cannot tell.

So everyone on those posts congratulating themselves for looking up pronunciation and saying "It's Not That Hard?" Surprise, you might have still got it wrong and can't even tell. You can look up the IPA chart and still flub it completely because what sounds right to your brain and what a native speaker will understand are totally different things!

"I might have butchered that, please let me know" is sometimes an excuse for lack of research, but it is, unfortunately, also a much more accurate self-assessment than confidently fucking it up after mouthing along to a wav file a few times.

For example, in English, you don't use the sound ɐ̃ (as in pão). I have yet to meet a native English speaker who can make that sound, usually they just default to a plain a. Even though, in Portuguese, pau (pau) and pão (pɐ̃ũ) are completely different words.

The name of the country Kiribati (kɪrɪbæs) is derived from the surname Gilberts. As in, it is literally the Gilbertese pronunciation of Gilberts. Because their language lacks phonemes for G/L, the name uses the best approximation possible.

And that's if you can actually, accurately find consistent answers when you do look it up. My own home county and its towns are mispronounced frequently on the local news and weather. They're getting that shit wrong one single county away.

If you're listening to someone mispronounce your native language, you might not even be able to accurately diagnose what the other person did wrong. Sometimes people will claim some phoneme was mispronounced when the problem was the stress was so wildly incorrect that that part of the word sounded wrong, so you assumed it was the phoneme itself. If a native speaker can't correct it, how is are people supposed to figure out the correct pronunciation themselves?

When people act like this is an English speaker only problem, they're telling on themselves. You're either not noticing when this happens in other languages, or you're not listening to other languages at all. Which isn't something to be ashamed of, until you're shaming people for being monolingual. I promise people are pulling the same "I hope I'm saying that right" in other languages. Are adding sounds they don't even hear themselves adding. Are saying something almost correct and then correcting themselves to something wildly wrong.