I hope that the control group consisted of speakers of different languages, because if not, the whole methodology, and therefore the result, are flawed. English is a deliberately simple, even primitive language, it is difficult to take seriously in such tests the opinions of people for whom it is the native language.
As a Chinese, my perspective is that tonal language speakers tend to regard the tone of other tonal languages as “funny” or thinking “Is he seriously said like that make me laugh?”. As a case in point is the Thai language to Chinese people. Also, my mother tone is a dialect of Chinese so there is also a quite big difference tune system to mandarin which used in capital. When we listened to those who coiling their tones from northern places, were possibly hard to help laugh.
4:53 you listed them, I said "sleuth" then you also said "sleuth." That's the word. Sleuth, sleuthing, make it an adjective with a y: sleuthy. And I don't want to hear "that isn't a word." Then howcome you understood it?
I'm of Irish descent, confirmed and documented. Great x4 grandfather came over. I got it in my mind to learn Gaeilge. Yeah. Lol I've learned a couple of other languages, but Gaeilge escapes me! After 3 years, i can sort of say hello, good bye, please, and thank you. It's a beautiful language. I'm content with just listening. For now. Lol
But why was the spelling never upgraded?? 😩 I mean it has to be hard for English natives to learn to write their own language! In German spelling is constantly updated, it‘s not a big deal 😂
In the US South, we have "a$$wards" and "back-a$$wards"... pretty close to your arselong... I believe they come from a playful spoonerism of "a$$-backwards"
In the Scottish descendant communities in Nova Scotia, Canada, & the United States, New England, (Northeast Region), where 3 ships of exiled Clan Campbell participants in the 1678 assassination attempt on King James crashed on Prince Edward Island, in 1679, then assimilated with Native American tribes throughout New England, New York, and Pennsylvania over the next century, there are at least 70,000 Scottish-Americans who stubbornly kept using Scottish Gaelic, their Native American Tribes language, & What has become the primary language of the United States of America, American English. This is why the United States and Britain are considered 2 Countries separated by a common language!
I live in the States, but I have ancestors who spoke all those languages as well as English. It's so moving to hear and learn about the other languages of my people! ❤
I never understood why Morning Doves also cooed in the evening when I was young. , Eventually I saw (and read) the words Mourning Doves. And subsequently learned they are named for the mourning sounds they make, that I figured it out.
The most appealing languages to listen to, of course depending on the speaker, are; English. French. Italian. Worst; Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese). German.
I just happened onto your channel and enjoy it immensely. I realize that this was posted ten months ago, but I hope you have a chance to read it. My husband learned English as his second language. He quite naturally had to make sense of phrases he hadn't been taught. Two in particular quite amaze me because they make a kind of sense. To him, the sentence, "The feeling is mutual," sounded like, "The feeling is neutral." He also thought that "pall bearers" carrying a coffin were "polar bears," because they could carry the weight.
Where I come from it's common when presented with an untidy mess to say "it looks like a bomb's hit it!". When I was little I always thought my mum and nan were calling my room a "bomb city" (not even a "bombed city", which would be tragic but make more sense). It still evoked the image of a place thrown into chaos by a destructive force (me).
JOSE can you see, by rhe dawns early light, what so proudly we hail at the twilights last gleaming. Whose broad wipes and bright scars through rhe parelous fight , or the ramparts we watched.... " I always wondered who Jose was?
This might be a bit biased, as I am Canadian and therefore was forced to study French in school, despite living in a part of Canada where less than 5% of the population is fluent in French (as a first OR second language), so it’s quite possible that helped fuel my resentment, Honestly, I’ve always thought French was a particularly ugly language. Especially when I learned about the concept of language families, and that French was most closely related to Languages like Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. I realized that French is basically the same as Italian (to a larger extent) and Spanish (to a lesser extent), (except for a few more Gaulish and Germanic loan words), but was a lazier, almost more drunken-sounding version of those languages. But yet, everyone around me seemed to find this lazy, drunk sounding derivative of Latin, with all its silent letters and nasally, phlegmy sounds, “beautiful” and “romantic”. And from that, I determined that what they find beautiful about it is that their culture has conditioned them to think of the French as the pinnacle example of class and high culture, and that anything they or their culture produces is automatically “elite” just because it is French, including their language, despite the fact that (to me at the time) it sounded like it was created by a bunch of spoiled brat retards who were constantly drunk on wine and brandy 24/7 and just didn’t give a sht because they knew everyone in the world automatically thought highly of the culture that they come from, so they didn’t have to care. It was almost like, to me the sound of the French language carried a vibe of “I’m French! I can pronounce my Latin as badly as I want because I’m drunk all the time because I can be, because I’m French! And everyone knows that the French are the pinnacle of culture and therefore better than anyone else”. To this day though, I’ve never gotten over that. Among Romance languages in particular, the sound of French carries heavy vibes of “screw correct pronunciation. I’m French. People love me anyway just because I’m French. I don’t need to pronounce words correctly, or even how they are spelled in our own language”. So for that reason, even though I too personally find Italian and Spanish some of the most beautiful languages out there, French is one of the ugliest.
Not sure if anyone else recalls an episode of TAL where there was a story of an american who had an italian friend and this friend was a constant source of these eggcorns. I recall they were all very charming.
I've always known that any language can be made to sound nice or awful, and really love what Tolkien said about this: "Orcs and trolls spoke as they would, without any love of words or things; and their language was actually more degraded and filthy than I have shown it. I do not suppose that any will wish for a closer rendering, though models are easy to find. Much of the same sort of talk can still be heard among the orc-minded: dreary and repetitive with hatred and contempt, too long removed from good to retain even verbal vigour, save in the ears of those to whom only the squalid sounds strong." The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Appendix F: "On Translation"
Don't know if necessarily counts as an egg corn, but in Mandarin 好不容易 hao bu rong yi means "Very not easy" or "Very difficult". At some point it was collectively decided that the "not" part was optional, so now 好容易 hao rong yi, which literally means "Very easy," now means "Very not easy" or "Very difficult."
I thought the saying “the coast is clear” was “the ghost is clear” until I was a young adult 😂😂😂😂😂 It always made sense, because I figured things must be safe if “the ghost was clear.”
