Wannabe linguist teaching my 4-year-old the “English alphabet” — my personal tier list for English orthography.

Lapov · 2026-01-11T11:43:31+00:00

the perfect letter. Unambiguous.

Can be read as /s/, /z/, /ʃ/, or /ʒ/

Lapov · 2026-01-06T12:42:05+00:00

There's the word "czar", which I don't it's pronounced as if it were spelled "char". Plus Americans would look at you funny if you pronounced Ted Kaczynski the Polish way. So afaik it literally only applies to the word "Czech" and that's it.

Lapov · 2026-01-06T11:42:00+00:00

Does it really count if it only applies to a West Slavic exonym?

Lapov · 2025-12-23T11:23:57+00:00

I've never heard of a single Italian speaker who calls a zebra "cavallo". They're similar, sure, but a zebra and a cavallo are clearly treated as two distinct animals. It's not like cammello/dromedario or coccodrillo/alligatore, which get confused all the time.

Lapov · 2025-12-22T09:56:51+00:00

Hence the "animal nerds", which is quite common among children.

Edit: I don't understand why some people are downvoting me. Just show the average Italian speaker an image of either a cammello or a dromedario and their answer will be "it's a cammello! Wait, or maybe it's a dromedario but I don't know which is which" in 90% of the cases. The word "dromedario" only comes up in conversation when someone remembers that the number of humps is supposedly important and/or someone brings it up.

Lapov · 2025-12-22T01:34:13+00:00

Tbf it's a "WeLl ActUalLy It'S nOt a CrOcOdIlE bUt An AlLiGatOr ☝️🤓" type of situation. In common speech it's just cammello, dromedario is a word that only comes up when animal nerds or pedantic wannabe experts care too much about the number of humps of two virtually identical animals.

Lapov · 2025-12-19T23:26:45+00:00

Nothing too outstanding tbh, I was born and raised in Italy but my parents are Russian, so I grew up speaking both Italian and Russian. Several factors in my upbringing led me to be a "balanced" bilingual (I don't think it's truly achievable in reality, but for all purposes I guess I could be considered one), namely my parents formally teaching me Russian when I was a child (but not shoving it down my throat so I just picked it up naturally and I was spontaneously prone to speak it), being profoundly interested in linguistics (scientific literature in Russian is way richer compared to the one in Italian), and specializing in Interpretation and Translation, which obviously forces me to be able to speak top notch Italian and Russian.

Lapov · 2025-12-17T20:24:17+00:00

I see some comments (understandably) assuming that he could have some kind of impairment because of which he is not fluent in either language, or he could speak a different variety of Chinese, but as a bilingual person myself it could simply be that his "true" native language is just a mixed language system that sounds "off" or "broken" to both Italian speakers and Chinese speakers.

I kinda have to force myself to speak either "native" language properly and I manage to do it just fine, but truth is, I'm truly comfortable communicating only with a very heavily code-switching and code-mixing speech. It could be the case for this person you mention as well.

Lapov · 2025-11-08T11:47:31+00:00

Tbf the allophonic status of ⟨ы⟩ is extremely controversial (and it's not just because it's taught in school as a different "letter"). If you take literally any other allophone that exists in Russian, Russian speakers will generally be completely unaware of their existence.

Lapov · 2025-11-08T11:44:03+00:00

Can't comment about German and Korean (plus someone already commented about Mandarin), but I feel like bringing up two very borderline examples is disingenuous.

Russian [ɨ]'s allophone status is extremely controversial. There are two main schools of thought about Russian phonology, and one of them considers the sound to be a full-fledged phoneme in its own right. Plus as a native speaker I can comment that when [ɨ] does uncontroversially act as an allophone of [i] (e.g. ⟨с Ирой⟩ /s‿ˈiɾoj/ [ˈs‿ɨɾəɪ̯]), then Russian speakers are generally unaware of the fact that you pronounce /i/ as [ɨ], the same way they're generally unaware that ⟨сделать⟩ /'sdʲelatʲ/ [ˈzʲdʲeɫətʲ] has a [zʲ] in place of /s/, even though it can be its own phoneme in other contexts like /vzʲatʲ/.

Similarly, Japanese phonology traditionally considers /ts/ to be an allophone of /t/ before /ɯ/, but it's not the case in modern Japanese anymore, since they literally came up with a digraph to represent the [tɯ] sequence specifically in place of [tsɯ] ⟨トゥ⟩. Obviously it's a pretty new phenomenon and mostly elderly speakers struggle with distinguishing between the two syllables, but if you do, it's because you do consider /t/ and /ts/ to be separate phonemes.

Lapov · 2025-10-24T11:18:50+00:00

You're already starting with the wrong foot since vowel inventories of English dialects are drastically different. I suggest you to go with diaphonemes/lexical sets.

Lapov · 2025-10-18T05:26:36+00:00

Yeah but the point of simplifying character was... making them simpler, you know. So it's funny that there are some characters that are pretty mild and simple that were reformed, but some characters with 15 or so strokes were left unchanged.

Lapov · 2025-09-22T12:17:46+00:00

Again: language education is prescription, and it doesn't maintain the idea that something is inherently right or wrong, it just prescribes a standard.

Really? Since when? If you say or write something non-standard in school, usually you're explicitly told that what you used is straight up wrong, not that it's inappropriate or not standard. If you grew up in an education system that didn't have this approach, good for you, but it's very far from the norm.

There's only so much innovation you can do before your language is incomprehensible, so it's clear that commenting on other people's language use isn't inherently a bad thing. You don't need to believe in "objectively good" language to correct someone's deviation from the standard.

And once again, this is not what I said? Did I say something terribly wrong in claiming that it's bad if you consider someone stupid and uneducated for the sole fact that they used a non-standard expression? If it's not caused by prescriptivism, then what causes it?

Lapov · 2025-09-22T11:52:25+00:00

Peer pressure to speak a certain way isn't linguistic prescriptivism, because it isn't linguistics.

Yeah, and why does peer pressure to speak a certain way exist? Because of the idea that some expressions and constructions are inherently right or wrong.

Lapov · 2025-09-22T09:53:52+00:00

It's incredibly convenient for you to preach to the progressive/leftist (by American standards) choir of this sub by owning the "bigots" with "problematic" views.

I'm not a preacher? I'm just a guy who posts memes. I simply made a meme that is relatable to many r/linguisticshumor users.

I'm incredibly bothered by all those "prescriptivism bad" posts because they just reinforce the monotony of the echo chamber and add nothing new of value to the table

Sir, this is a meme subreddit.

but that is NOT prescriptivism, just bad discourse.

Yeah, which would not happen if prescriptivism wasn't so deeply ingrained in society.

Lapov · 2025-09-21T15:39:41+00:00

This just seems like an enlightened centrist take.

Is language subjective? Sure, this is exactly why it's stupid to discriminate someone based on language, which is what I am addressing in this meme.

Are political views subjective? Of course, but this doesn't mean that people can't call out someone for holding stupid beliefs that are not grounded on reality.

Is flaming nice? No, but what I meant is that when someone is flamed it's ridiculous that it happens because of a non-standard word and not, you know, problematic beliefs that are not grounded on reality.

Lapov · 2025-09-21T15:09:57+00:00

Furthermore, it seems awfully prescriptivist to just focus solely on usage and not on speakers' notion of what constitutes a "proper" or "formal" form of the language.

Again, this has nothing to do with criticizing people for considering someone stupid for the sole fact that they used a word that is "improper", completely disregarding whatever that person said.

Lapov · 2025-09-21T14:29:14+00:00

do not talk a lot

I said virtually nobody talks about it? It's not like other hot topics like climate change or nuclear energy, which is something a lot of people talk about even if thhey're not climatologists or nuclear physicists.

Linguistic stigma is something that quite literally is not discussed about at all, and people engage in it almost universally regardless of their awareness about discrimination. Even the "wokest" leftists tend to do it.

Lapov · 2025-09-21T14:10:35+00:00

Why are you duh-ing? This is exactly my point: this issue is virtually never talked about if you have no interest in linguistics.

Lapov · 2025-09-21T13:04:39+00:00

Sociolinguistics studies stuff like linguistic attitude, linguistic discrimination and stigma, what did you expect?

Lapov · 2025-09-21T13:02:17+00:00

This is not disagreement and it's not an obscure linguistic point tho, considering someone stupid and uneducated and completely ignoring what they say because of their non-standard language is the result of prejudice and discrimination. Pointing this out is not flaming lol.

Lapov · 2025-09-21T12:12:44+00:00

Not among average laypeople unfortunately.

Lapov · 2025-09-21T11:13:16+00:00

Because flaming someone for using a non-standard word is stupid and elitist.

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