Odd? No, it's normal politician behaviour. Julia Klöckner herself got hacked because she is not aware of phishing. To distract from her incompetence, she urges to switch to Wire to implicitly blame Signal. It's obvious what's going on, but people have so little knowledge about digital communication and security that she will get away with it. Poor woman got hacked by insecure Signal, people will remember.
That one is ancient history. My 6yo is currently fighting
her friends and their parents alike to make them realize and learn that there is an "L" at the end - it's "axolotl", not "axolot".
It's technically not just “an L” if we're trying to avoid Anglicizing the pronunciation, right? The “tl” cluster is its own affricate with a lateral fricative as its tail, or am I misremembering?
What is scientific about this pronunciation? Axolotl is not the scientfic name (its Ambystoma mexicanum), and usually the goal with pronouncing scientific names is for the listener to be able to spell the name after hearing it (at least for botany, which is what I am familiar with).
In the Spanish of the 1490s and early 1500s, there was a "SH" sound, spelled with X, the same way there is today in other Iberian languages like Portuguese, Galician, Catalan, or Basque. They got to Mexico and wrote many indigenous words with "SH" sounds (like "Mexico" and "axolotl") with X. Shortly after this, the pronunciation shifted to the modern Spanish J sound (which in much of the Spanish speaking world is like the CH in loch, but in some countries is like an H sound).
I am Spanish myself and didn't know about this fact until recently. It explains many "old-fashioned" spellings like México, Pedro Ximenez, or Don Quixote (nowadays usually written as Quijote, but you will find the old spelling in other languages).
For those who are curious enough, this article explains the evolution of the Spanish sibilants and why our languages uses J and Z in a very different way from pretty much any other language:
My favorite example: It also explains why "sherry" wine comes from "Jerez" ... Because it used to be Xerez at the time that most European languages learned the name.
Well, actually I suppose the hardest part is to pronounce the other consonant hispanicized as -tl at the end (a soft lisp)
[ɬ]
voiceless
alveolar
lateral
fricative
[0]
in a sufficient fluent manner (except you happen to speak e.g. Welsh, there the sound is written as ll so by happenstance the "axolotl" found in Wales can be pronounced fluently by the Welsh) otherwise you are saying it half correct which is arguably worse.
So let the nahuatl speaking people have a laugh at your expense for pronouncing it the germanic way or if you want to go unnoticed do it the evolved spanish romanic way, a good middle ground I guess.
Anyway I think it is generally a lot fun to hear words pronounced "wrong" by foreigners or having trouble hearing/pronouncing it "right" respectively heavy accents are hilarious icebreakers (:
The Welsh or Icelandic "ll" is not quite the same. That's a "voiceless lateral fricative", lacking the alveolar break that earned it the "t" in "tl" for the Latinized spelling. It's much closer than most languages get, but it is a different sound.
The Nahuatl consonant is a "voiceless alveolar lateral affricate". It is a single constant represented with [tɬ] or, more correctly, with a tie bar between those two glyphs: [t͡ɬ].
I stand corrected you are right there is no isolated use of [ɬ] in nahuatl as a phoneme it is used only in the context of an affricative /t͡ɬ/
I got ahead of myself in trying to isolate the sound [ɬ] for untrained ears.
To get back to the original point though if I'm not mistaken again in standard mexican spanish /ʃ/ as a phoneme is lost entirely and only appears in the affricative /t͡ʃ/? So in all likelihood the original /ʃ/ in axolotl would be pronounced by way of habit as [t͡ʃ] (unless again you have say a argentinian dialect where e.g. "ll" (/ʝ/) in llamar is pronounced as [ʃ]) if you try to "correct" mexican spanish speakers.
Is there a word for foreign loan words that have their pronounciation changed?
I feel like axolotl fits in that category as it’s a commonly known animal in the English speaking world, that has a common pronounciation remarkedly different from the language it came from.
Loan words going from English -> Asian languages like Thai and Japanese such as “beer” becoming “beeru” fit the same vein.
It does.. and I've never heard anyone say it that way (and I appreciate that you chose the only dictionary that gave anything close to your argument).. but that's still nothing like "ballot".
That is how Mexico used to be pronounced in Old Spanish. Kind of like how X is sometimes pronounced "sh" in Portuguese. The name was based on an indigenous name which had the "sh" sound there.
They can spell/pronounce things differently than we do and it's all cool either way. It's very common for animals to have different spellings, pronunciations, or even completely different names between languages. If you add time and regional axes, the same variances can be true even when keeping with the same language!
I'm just explaining why it's written 'x' and pronounced [ʃ]. If it pleases people to knowingly mispronounce Nahuatl loan words, they can do so, but it seems rather silly given that [ʃ] is also in the phonemic inventory of English. What next? Are you going say 'fowks pass' for faux pas?
Where I disagree is the premise it's supposed to be mispronunciation to say/spell a word differently than where it came from, doubly so when we change the spellings/pronunciations of our own words!
I think the disconnect here is that I actually wasn't aware that 'axolotl' existed as an established word in English. If you're looking at it just as a Nahuatl word written using Nahuatl orthographic conventions, then it's weird for someone to suggest that it should be written with a 'sh' because that's how it's pronounced.
What I meant is that it would be weird for an English speaker to have views on how Nahuatl words should be written using Nahuatl orthography, since different languages obviously have different orthographic conventions and associate different symbols with different sounds.
Oh, got ya - I thought they were talking about how English writes/pronounces its version of the word rather than how Nahuatl should do so! I agree fully in that case, it wouldn't make any sense at all for how foreign languages do something to dictate how another does - or to even expect them to be the same.
That’s like telling the Japanese that “cutlet” is not pronounced “katsu.” It ain’t gonna change. Or even having southerners pronounce squirrel with two sellable [autocorrect : syllables] Good luck with that!
At twelve cents for a half tail or twenty five cents for a full tail, I think I'll stick to just watching them climb trees and bury nuts. Especially since I'm expected to salt, straighten, and dry the tails first.
Yeah, they do sat they only want tails from squirrels harvested primarily for food; they don't expect or want people to hunt squirrels just the sell the tails.
We're speaking English, so why even entertain the idea of pronouncing "axolotl" differently, in that case? The Japanese say "en", but that doesn't seem to inspire anyone else not to say "yen".
That's because in English we get it via Spanish, which doesn't have ʃ (although interestingly, it was just in the process of losing that sound in the early 17th century). If we're going from Nahuatl direct to English, and the Nahuatl sound also exists in English, then you may as well just use the correct sound. Otherwise, what are you going to do with Xochimilco?
The misconception is that words enter "a language" and not individual people's minds. Most English speakers have never heard the word "axolotl" spoken in its original pronunciation, nor are they familiar with the orthography that spells a "sh" with X.
>Spanish, which doesn't have ʃ (although interestingly, it was just in the process of losing that sound in the early 17th century).
I don't know about 17th century, but some dialects of Spanish certainly do have that sound now.
>Otherwise, what are you going to do with Xochimilco?
In English, X at the start of a word is typically pronounced like a Z, as in "Xanadu", "Xanax", and "xylophone". I don't think anyone would bat an eye if you read it as "Zochimilco".
It’s not a misconception that the English word ‘chocolate’ exists and that there’s a particular history of how that came to be the case. I think, reading the thread again, I didn’t make it clear that the sentence you quoted was talking about the history of ‘chocolate’ and not ‘axolotl’.
If pronouncing Xochimilco according to English orthographic conventions is important to you as a matter of principle, then of course you can do it. But it’s a Mexican place name that has a canonical pronunciation that is not difficult for English speakers to approximate, so I can’t really see the point.
(And yes, ʃ does exist in some modern dialects of Spanish, but those aren’t the dialects that would influence the pronunciation of Spanish to English loan words in most cases. The interesting thing is that this was much less obviously the case in the early 1600s. Apparently the exact origin of ‘chocolate’ in Spanish is a bit of a complex historical linguistic puzzle.)
>If pronouncing Xochimilco according to English orthographic conventions is important to you as a matter of principle
No, not to me. I speak Spanish natively, but even I don't know how to say that. My first guess would be "Jochimilco", but I'd have to look it up (I'm not going to). I'm just saying that having Xs in weird places would not stop an English speaker from inventing a "wrong" pronunciation on the spot.
>But it’s a Mexican place name that has a canonical pronunciation that is not difficult for English speakers to approximate, so I can’t really see the point.
"Mexico" itself is also not difficult for English speakers to approximate, yet they don't. Clearly approximating the local pronunciation is not how foreign speakers decide how to pay toponyms, and that's fine. That's how languages are shaped.
My point is just that it makes no sense to get hung up on speakers not pronouncing loanwords "correctly". If we're going down this path, we should also complain that Spanish speakers write "fútbol" instead of "football", and that tea is called "tea" instead of "cha" and spelled "荼". We should demand that words be crystallized in their pronunciation and orthography when they cross language barriers.
There aren’t any hard and fast rules about how to pronounce loan words. I agree on that point. In your original post, though, you seemed to be entirely dismissing the option of pronouncing the word according to an English approximation of its native pronunciation, which is an approach that’s equally valid (and is what English speakers often do for quite a few words).
>In your original post, though, you seemed to be entirely dismissing the option of pronouncing the word according to an English approximation of its native pronunciation,
When a pronunciation is already widespread, yes. "Axolotl" is not some new word; lots of people know the animal and call it "aksolotl". If we were talking about, say, some obscure Chinese village that suddenly became very relevant in the English-speaking world, I would not insist to pronounce the pinyin spelling of its name as if it was an English word.
The 'sh' pronunciation is pretty well-known, in the UK at least, due to exposure to it in Catalan (particularly with CaixaBank) and Portuguese. I suspect that most people here would guess that Spanish still pronounces it that way too, thanks to México and Xérès / Sherry.
And there's Xitter, of course, which is a fairly common way of referring to the social network formerly known as Twitter.
>I suspect that most people here would guess that Spanish still pronounces it that way too, thanks to México and Xérès / Sherry.
Sorry, what? First, is the word "Xérès" well-known among English-speakers? Second, "México" isn't pronounced "méshico", so how is it a supporting argument at all?
Are you sure that x is an ecks and not a chi that straightened up a bit?
The thing about script and type is they only really work by prior agreement.
There is a set of marks on the page that we all agree on "is" an axolotl. How we choose to say that out loud is up to the individual. On the other hand, if we were to converse with you directly ... vocally ... then you could tell us how you say the name and if we were convinced that you were at least Mexican, we might follow your lead.
Script, type and sounds rarely match up precisely, ever.
I live in a town called Yeovil (Somerset, UK). I have a mug with at least 65 different spellings of the name over the last ~1900 odd years. It started off as Gifle "bend in the river" in a Saxon language. We have had a "great vowel shift" in "english" and three different varieties of "english" noted since then, just in these parts, let alone elsewhere.
The place name was spelt as Evil or Euil for a while! No-one batted an eyelid because the concept of the grammar nazi was a long way in the future and spelling was pretty random in general. Ivel, Ivol, Givelle and many more have been documented.
Please record how you say the name and make it available. Fiddling with text will never cut it.
The constitution made it impossible to make a less sexist law, because it says that women cannot be forced to military service. It is an old document, and it is based on old role models. Modernizing the constitution would require 2/3 majority, and the government was already struggling with making a law at all.
> The constitution made it impossible to make a less sexist law
with the right level of public exposure citizens would surely have been able to put enough pressure on the government to make this happen. But instead zelensky kept repeating the talking points that we should not be concerned about the war because the risk had not changed since 2014. Near-zero effort was made to evacuate ukrainians living near the russian border or those who would be in the way of russian troops. The intelligence had been there for at least six months before the war began
> and the government was already struggling with making a law at all
And while we pump CO2 into the atmosphere, we also shrink the engines that could get it out again, like the rainforest in Brazil. Perfect optimisation!
(I don't want to shame Brazil, it's a global chain of problems. And other forests are decimated, too, like in Sweden and Estonia, for the demand of produce worldwide.)
Same here. And I have a friend who keeps his small IPhone because they stopped building smaller phones, too. There is a demand, maybe not that big.
For me, I want to be able to operate the phone with one hand, and the large screen makes it difficult to reach all the spots on the screen even with large hands. I do operate my Fairphone 5 with one hand, but it is super awkward and at some point, the phone will fall into a gully because I cannot hold it tight while navigating.
And I wouldn't mind 2mm more thickness if this means the cameras are flush with the back and the battery is larger.
Whenever I see this when talking about small phones, I'm reminded of the stats, where the iPhone minis were a small proportion of iPhone sales but still by themselves outsold most manufacturers.
There seems to be a nuance (which is missing from the title).
The initial paragraph refers to activities which are prohibited.
Peers agreed by a majority of one to ban videos and images depicting
relationships that would not be allowed in real life.
There's perhaps a little more nuance (sexual activity with a step- partner has as an age of consent of 18, rather than the more-typical age of consent of 16)
They also agreed to bring intimate pictures and videos of adults
pretending to be children in line with similar images of real children.
internal reachability (from Germany to .de domains), too... :-)))
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