#linguistry

[munchymunchkin]

[humshummerypoot]

the Spanish pronunciation of lmnop is like if the English lmnop drank margaritas

[psilocervidae]

Hey can the linguistics/etymology side of Tumblr explain to me why we say His and Hers instead of "Him's" and "Her's"? While where at it, could anyone explain how we ended up having both "He/She" and "Him/Her", which are ostensibly the same words but cannot be used interchangeably? This has been gnawing at my brain all day

[unsociable-and-taciturn]

remember when in killing eve konstantin misspells eve’s last name and says “polassi” then villanelle proceeds to correct him. now, there is this polari (which is also only one letter apart from polastri) language that was widely used for queer coding some time ago and just imagine what kind of a multilayered reference it could’ve been…

[hugo-the-inkwell]

idea

a way to put ikea product names through english sound changes kinda like that german map of england or that english map of germany

spjutrocka? oh so you mean sputerocker

[alcibiades-hacks-it]

So something I'd never really questioned is that English has a lot of synonyms. Like most adjectives and nouns and such will have at least one synonym, many will have like a dozen, and that's not even including regional slang and dialects. And I always assumed that was the case for most languages.

But today I suddenly realized that might just be because English is a frankenlanguage made up of serveral other languages and that results in overlap a lot. So I'm curious:

People of Tumblr who speak a language other than english, how common are synonyms in your language?

Most words have many synonyms

Most words have one or two synonyms

Most words do not have synonyms

Synonyms are virtually or fully nonexistant

I only speak English but want to see the results :)

Voting ended onJun 3, 2023

Please share for a bigger sample size and tag with your language! I'm curious!

[humshummerypoot]

me: notices despise doesn’t have a corresponding noun

my brain: “despiction”

my brain at least 14 times a day: “i despise this with a great despiction”

me: chuckles at our inside joke

other people: look at me like I crumbled flaming hot Cheetos over strawberry ice cream

[la-lilis]

haven't had a spoken conversation with anyone in English in a while, cause I just kinda stopped talking to my friends. been a couple months now and my accent sounds horrible and I just learned that I can't fucking do a dental fricative anymore without lisping. it's such a basic sound, why is it so hard???