Revenge on English
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A skit by Singaporean voice actress Caitanya Tan.
Much fun!
Selected readings
- "Queue" (7/24/25)
- "Massive attack of mispronunciation" (12/30/16)
- "Pronunciation guides fail spectacularly" (6/27/24)
- "Retching schedule" (3/4/09)
[h.t. Alex Baumans]
wgj said,
September 17, 2025 @ 12:02 pm
I highly recommend the History of English podcast. One thing it tells you over and over again is that most strange looking English words are spelled that way because they were once pronounce that way. Knife, knight, know, knuckle – the K was pronounced in all of them not that long ago, some still during the time of Shakespeare. So if you pronounce English words as if they were German, you're not really joking, but merely going back in time.
Matthew J. McIrvin said,
September 17, 2025 @ 4:50 pm
RobWords made a video about silent letters in which he pointed out that many were pronounced, but others were introduced relatively recently by writers who wanted to make the words acquired from Old French look more like their Latin antecedents. That's where the b in "debt" and "doubt" came from– never pronounced in English or even spelled in French, but the Latin words had them.
ajay said,
September 18, 2025 @ 4:15 am
If Caitanya Tan is (as her name suggests) of Chinese descent and living in Singapore, her ancestors were probably not in fact south-east Asians who were colonised by English-speakers. Her ancestors were Chinese settler-colonialists who occupied territory taken by force from its rightful south-east Asian owners.
Peter Cyrus said,
September 18, 2025 @ 6:49 am
@ajay: Worse: the Kra-Dai (e.g. Thai, Lao), Austroasiatic (e.g. Vietnamese, Khmer), Hong-Mien, and Austronesian (e.g. Malay, Filipino) are not native to Southeast Asia, either.
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
September 18, 2025 @ 11:30 am
I've always wondered how far back that sort of argument goes. I mean, strictly speaking, aren't the Bushman/San/Saan the only people in the world who ended up where they started out?
ajay said,
September 19, 2025 @ 5:12 am
strictly speaking, aren't the Bushman/San/Saan the only people in the world who ended up where they started out?
no, the San live in SW Africa.
ajay said,
September 19, 2025 @ 5:13 am
Worse: the Kra-Dai (e.g. Thai, Lao), Austroasiatic (e.g. Vietnamese, Khmer), Hong-Mien, and Austronesian (e.g. Malay, Filipino) are not native to Southeast Asia, either.
I'll make a note of that; no doubt it will become relevant to the conversation later.
Jonathan Smith said,
September 19, 2025 @ 5:48 pm
(Obvious) point taken, but to the contrary the Austroasiatic homeland is often posited to be the Red River or Mekong basin — I think this is the recent trend actually (personally I'm partial to south China.) Re: the other families, while southerly shift in historical times is a thing, specifics depend on stuff like what "Southeast Asia" means… e.g., not many of us live closer to the proposed homeland of our proto-language "ancestors" than Austronesian speakers in Luzon.
Re: "blood and soil" generally, of course such claims are always bullshit, but some are more bullshit than others and good-faith comparisons of various flavors of what let's call "demographic change" are useful and important: to name just a couple factors, population and time scales matter, and esp. governments and policy-making matter.
Pamela said,
October 1, 2025 @ 5:25 pm
I think they are getting revenge not on the English language but on English spelling. GB Shaw beat them to it. But I think we all sympathize.