I am literally fucking BEGGING people to stop saying "ax oh lot uhl." That is absolutely the WRONG way to pronounce that word.
I know the song about the axolotl on the stairs is very cute, but it is teaching kids how to pronounce a Nahuatl word VERY VERY WRONG. Can we all please spend like 30 seconds watching this very nice person show y'all how to say it right? Please?
(Yeah, I used to say it wrong too, and then a friend was kind enough to correct me on the way the word is pronounced in their ancestral language and so now every time I hear it wrong it's like nails on a chalkboard & makes me embarrassed.)
For those who can't listen right now or are hard of hearing:
ah-SHOH-lote.
If you're familiar with the word "shallot," it's very similar to that, but if the "a" was an "o."
Something I genuinely wonder about in situations like this is why, when words are put into different alphabets, they're not written how they're pronounced. Like, presumably, it was the Spanish who transliterated this word into the Roman alphabet, so why not spell it how it would be pronounced in Spanish?
... they did.
The letter X has some interesting sounds in Spanish. Here's how it works.
In medieval Spanish, the letter ‘X’ was a very common one and it was originally pronounced as the English sound “sh” /ʃ/, like in the word “shame”. Later in the mid-17th century, its pronunciation morphed into the Spanish sound “j” /x/, which sounds like a hard “h” in English. This phonetic change, among others, provoked a readjustment in the Spanish consonant system causing various orthographic reforms. That is why you might see very common names such as Don Quijote often spelled as Don Quixote in Old Spanish.
I don't mean to be rude, but I've had this question for a long time: why isn't it the case that ak-so-lot-el is just the English word for the creature called the ah-shoh-lot in Nahuatl? Is it because the difference in pronunciation came about because of misreading the spelling?
As a layperson with an interest in linguistics I'd argue that you're right, the English word for the animal is pronounced 'ack-soh-lott-tull', simply because that's what basically the entirety of the English-speaking population calls it. Like I'm sorry but if I pronounce it the 'proper' way in English conversation I will almost definitely then have to explain that I mean what they refer to as 'ack-soh-lott-tull' and I was pronouncing it in the original language, and I knew this would happen, which is just not very effective communication. Words, spelling, pronunciation, definitions, etc. are all derived from the way people actually use them, not vice versa. It's good to know the etymology of a word but it's just that, etymology.
No.
Because people will actually get used to it if we start decolonizing language and not insisting that gee golly gosh, we would, but it's just too ding dang hard!
How do I know this?
Aotearoa.
Ten years ago I didn't know that New Zealand had a prior name.
Six years ago, I didn't know what it was.
Five years ago, I had to explain lots in conversations why I had - at the behest of friends from Aotearoa - started using that instead of New Zealand.
Three years ago, I wrote this sidebar for the Atua Worlds & Wonders section in Scion: Demigod Companion.
When this book came out, multiple people asked me why I'd bothered putting that in, "because everybody knows what Aotearoa is."
It annoyed me at first because I kept forgetting how to spell it. (We're TEARing out the old name and doing a haka about it, shouting AO - OA). I had to practice pronouncing it so I didn't sound like a dope or trip over my tongue, the same way I did when I found out my friend's name (Hiromi) is pronounced with a sound like a cross between an r and a d, not an American r.
And then it just became another word that I use.
Yep, you might have to explain to people that they've been pronouncing it wrong. I'm willing to bet that the kind of people curious enough to be talking about axolotl in America are largely going to be curious enough in general to be excited to learn a new thing. Not everybody, but most.
Either way, "it's just inconvenient to do it right" is
I'm gonna assume I wasn't clear enough, but I'm not saying "it's inconvenient to do it right", I'm saying that the words and definitions and pronunciations are determined by how people use them, so it follows that while the Nahuatl word āxōlōtl is pronounced that way, the English word axolotl is pronounced the way English speakers say it, and that happens all the time and is just the way language works. This is even reflected on the English Merriam Webster, and the English Wikipedia page gives the English pronunciation and the Nahuatl as the source of the English word. I think it's fine and valuable to share the history of the word, but it's not incorrect for an English speaker to use an English word that is derived from a different word.
Yes, I'm aware that's how the linguistic harvester/thresher that is the English language works, and I'm aware that's what English language resources say.
You get that this is like asking the fox whether it's appropriate to raid henhouses for eggs and that you're not actually making a vaguely convincing counterargument, right? Like, yes, I'm sure that the language of the British Empire, the one that consumes indigenous languages and spits out their bones, does say that's the right way to do it.
That you persist in saying, "This makes it objectively correct," well. That's certainly a choice you're making.
I am choosing to be done with talking to you about this.
#axolotl#language stuff#colonialism#linguistic imperialism#my old nemesis#some people really go 'this IS the hill I want to die on'#refusing to say a single indigenous word#that's the hill?#that's the hill you want to die on?#'but what if thing says I'm right?' who cares?#why is some thing and its' approval more important to you#than the language and culture of an entire group of people?
@vaspider I want to apologize in advance for the very long TL;DR I'm about to write but this sort of thing hits a raw nerve for me, so I'm going to go off, less because I think I'll reach anyone and more because this rant has been building within me for decades.
I get irritated by this for a lot of reasons, but I think the biggest one is that my paternal grandfather is Mugat Ghorbati. And he has spent all 99 years of his life, in three countries, asking people to stop calling him Lyuli. Lyuli is a slur. It's an abbreviation of a phrase that means "the ones without reason/thought/intelligence, order, or strength". It is calling not just someone but their entire culture a group of unthinking, illogical, weak parasites on society. (Fun fact: the Mugat have historically taken in children and adults abandoned by various societies for having disabilities. They have a sign language developed as a result of this that outsiders often make fun of or think are 'witchcraft gestures'. I am not kidding.)
And constantly, in Uzbekistan, in Russia, and in the United States, people trot out the dictionary or Wikipedia in order to say that they not only are going to keep calling him and his people the slur, but that they're right for doing so.
My mother cut right through this once by telling a woman, "You're a bit old to be needing external validation through a book, Caroline. At least get it from a person like most people with extrinsic self-esteem."
And that was when it clicked for me.
Broadly, human beings operate on a spectrum from intrinsic to extrinsic self-esteem. My mom is a psychologist, so I'll explain this the way she explained it to me: intrinsic self-esteem is when your sense of rightness, confidence and worth comes from within yourself. Your actions align with your values and you're secure in them because of that. Extrinsic self-esteem is when your sense of rightness, confidence and worth comes from other people. Your actions align with that of someone else - someone you admire, someone in authority, a specific group (your family is a common on, esp. when you're younger), or society in general. Again: this is a spectrum. Most of us are not 100% either of these things. People's self-esteem is a mix. The problem isn't ever valuing other's opinions. The problem is this:
To the Carolines of the world, the idea that the dictionary writers/Wikipedia article creators would approve of their actions is more powerful to them than the idea of the person in front of them approving is. They value the idea of other people, people in authority or the majority of people, agreeing with them so much that it is instinctive, for them, to default to assuming if everyone says it, it can't be incorrect or wrong. Their metric for right or wrong is not internal values or objective fact. It's popular consensus.
Extrinsic self-esteem in this way allows you to ignore the person in front of you you are actively hurting because if everyone else is doing it, enough that a book says it, then it must not be wrong at all.
It also allows you to ignore the power dynamics at play. The dictionary and Wikipedia are majority edited and created by white people outside the cultures of - and often outside of the countries or continents of - the words they're defining. No Nahuatl person was consulted in making that entry listing the pronunciation of axolotl. No Mugat Ghorbati person was consulted in having the Wikipedia article on them be under a title meaning 'the mindless stupid chaotic weaklings'. But if you're getting your answer to what is right not from real reflection but from external sources, you're not thinking about that. The world becomes as simple as "the book/internet/white people can't be wrong!" while ignoring the implications of the unspoken "the indigenous people 100% can be wrong, though".
If you are at all a logical person, you should know better. Books, the internet, and other people from outside the group in question have gotten things wrong for centuries (well, decades in the case of the internet).
If you are a person motivated by values you hold, or you want to be that kind of person, you should know better. Books, the internet, and other people from outside the group in question have failed to meet any substantial values regarding minority groups and languages for as long as they've existed.
The language, culture, and feelings of indigenous people should matter to you. They should be more important to you than popular consensus is. Not just out of respect for them, but because extrinsic self-esteem won't benefit you, either.
Do you really want what other people think to control your thoughts and actions? Do you trust general consensus to not make mistakes?
Do you want to be someone so easily manipulated by the world around you that you can't alter a single word of your vocabulary?
Absolutely no need to apologize. This was a coherent and passionate defense of your family, and I learned things I didn't know.
Thank you.
Thank you for reading my very long post. Like many people with ADHD, I have a tendency to fail at being succinct. I worried that, with my neurodivergence, I might completely fuck up the tone and accidentally sound accusatory or hateful. I don't hate people who do this. I really don't. We are all extrinsically motivated sometimes. That's not a moral failing in and of itself.
The failure is when a person is old enough to know better and do better and they decide to fight people asking them to do better.
I don't know any Nahuatl people but I don't ever want to talk over them the way people on three continents have talked over my grandfather. And I guess I struggle to understand why someone would want to be that kind of person.
I have ADHD too. I get it.
Thank you again. :)
