So changing your "gender" is fine, but changing your accent is *weird*...

That's me at our Comhrá in the library @UtopiaPlanitia . To the despair of the other Irish language lovers. But I can't help it .....these fascinating - to me - links pop into my head when we are doing a crosfhocal or reading a novel. Stop dissecting it , just read it they plead.

So we diverged from P Celtic ? Often wondered which way round it was. Now which Gaeilge dialect would be best for a non binary person? I'm going with Uladh because of the rising inflections at the end of sentence hi!

( Running way in Munster Irish....)

Not really, people do have accents. Nobody 'has' a gender.

Thats fabulous, I love it.

When I started to learn German at night school many years ago, the tutor was from Schleswig-Holstein in Northern Germany. For the first session, she spoke in phrases which originated from her region, which we northern English students understood quite well. It was only when she started to bring in words from the southern dialects, that it became more difficult.

The supermodel Doutzen Kroes is a native Frisian speaker who campaigns for the language. I've heard her speak it in interviews.

I still have a suspicion that the people of Friesland are having a big joke on the rest of us, but I can't tell what it is.

Was that the same programme where Izzard rocked up in Friesland and was asking a Friesian farmer to name various animals "Broon coo" etc?

Izzard pointed to the farmer's dog and asked what it was. The farmer replied with a completely straight face "Border Collie".

TAKE IT AWAY ROBERTA!!!

🌸🌺

If we swapped "accent" for "gender", many of those posts would be pointing out how ridiculous it is to try to change your "gender". Why can't they see it? 🤯

It's easy if you try ....

I found that my school Latin came in handy when I was in Romania. I can't speak Romanian, but I found that if I thought of it as Italian with some Russian mixed in (which is sort of what it is) then I could puzzle it out.

I've picked up a little bit of Manx, but since it's very similar to Ulster Irish (just with an English style spelling) I could probably bluff my way with a Manx speaker. And I found the place names are easy if you say them out loud - it's not difficult to figure out what Slieau Dhoo is.

Yes, that is a fascinating aspect of some languages.

And yes, pronouns were not something English speakers had to worry about much beyond the basics until Trans mucked that up 🙄

What is more interesting are the islands of languages that have no apparent descent from proto-Indo-European[1],

Basque and Hungarian spring to mind. (And Finnish ?)

It's also beyond irritating that English worked so hard to eliminate (grammatical) gender only to have the trans clown car rock up and try to undo it.

[1]Probably best spelled out in full.

I love reading about language evolution.

I speak very basic Gaeilge (Irish) and I know a few basic words & phrases in Gaelic, Welsh and Hindi too. And I was very pleased to find out, when I was picking it up, that Hindi has quite a few basic words in common with the three Celtic languages.

Although, Hindi seems to have more in common with Welsh because Welsh is a P Celtic language and kept more of the original Proto-Celtic language sounds. Whereas Gaeilge and Gaelic are Q Celtic because those languages modified those particular sounds. And then away back in the mists of time, Proto-Celtic would have developed from Proto-Indo-European as would Hindi.

I bore poor DH to death with this stuff 😬

https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199772810/obo-9780199772810-0115.xml

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4328733.stm

So that's why my mum pronounces it Haitch, and is probably also why my paternal grandmother kept telling me that I, having copied my mum, was saying it wrongly.

I have spent my whole life puzzled by this.

I've just remembered when everyone went batshit when they discovered Hilaria Baldwin wasn't Spanish. I wonder what reddit thought about that.

This is something I've noticed in videos of trans rights protests - an unexpectedly large number of the trans identifying men they interview have an effeminate American sounding voice. I assumed it was because they'd learnt to copy a female voice from watching American YouTube videos.

Protect-the-dollz...he is truly a voice of reason amongst them. I would love to talk to him in person.

I often think about these mens voices, no matter what they do they will never ever have a the tiniest chance of hitting a top C. a la Queen of the Night. Lots of women may not be able to but we all have the possibility, and one can always try squeaking it.
They will never have our voices no matter what they try.

If you keep your ears, eyes and (most importantly) mind open, with a dash of school French and Latin, plus allowing words to stick from reading history and/or foreign language websites, it's surprising how far a supposedly monoglot person can get.

For Christmas, will we invite Reddit over here?

There are some clanging mistakes on this, but it's a lovely illustration.

https://www.openculture.com/2015/06/the-tree-of-languages-illustrated-in-a-big-beautiful-infographic.html

The Rest Is History Lads have a theory about Kaiser Wilhelms inappropriate footwear starting WW1.

It may not have been the accent, but all German spies in WW2 were quietly identified and either captured, or just fed a load of carefully crafted nonsense (department XX - I leave it to the amateur codebreakers to guess why).

I’m in ROI but my neighbour and my friend both have very similar accents even though they live 200 miles apart and always have. The only thing they have in common is they’re both COI.