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Bonus 19: Hyperforeignisms
🕑 Added 2018-09-08 07:30:50 +0000 UTCEnglish loves to borrow words from other languages. When a word is borrowed, English speakers have a few options: pronounce the new word like an English word, or keep the features from the language it came from. Sometimes though, we get carried away, and start applying a pattern that we learned from some borrowed words to others where it doesn't apply.
In this bonus episode, Gretchen and Lauren take you on an international tour of hyperforeignisms. These words give us an interesting insight into how our minds deal with the interesting edge cases of words that are kinda-English and kinda-other-languages.
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We're also very excited to let you know that Space Baby art and merch is now available! We've also got a couple other new merch items: baby clothes that say NOT JUDGING YOUR GRAMMAR, JUST ACQUIRING IT, shirts that say "I want to be the English schwa. It's never stressed", and IPA scarves in new colours! See the full merch post (LINK) for order links!
We've made the new merch live on the RedBubble store, but haven't told anyone else yet, so you can get in early. Remember, as patrons, you're entitled to custom merch, so if you want us to try and put babies on other RedBubble lines, or want a custom colour IPA scarf while ordering a Space Baby scarf, let us know! Also, we'd love to see photos of any of the merch as part of your lives!
Thank you all for voting on this topic, and thanks to Solitary Gamer for suggesting this topic!
Links:
- We asked people on Twitter for their favourite (or least favourite!) examples of Hyperforeignisms. We included some in the show, but there are other great answers on the thread!
- Hypercorrection - Lingthusiasm bonus #5
- People who make dictionaries: Review of Kory Stamper's book - Lingthusiasm #8
- Systematic Hyperforeignisms as Maximally External Evidence for Linguistic Rules (Janda, Joseph & Jacobs) (ht to Ben Zimmer)
- Phở/pho
- For hyperarchaisms see The Poetry of Memes - Lingthusiasm bonus #14
You can listen to this episode on this page, via the Patreon RSS or download the mp3. A transcript is available for this episode as a Google Doc. Lingthusiasm is also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com or chat to us on the Patreon page.
Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All ThingsLinguistic. Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our audio producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producers are Emily Gref and A.E. Prevost, our production assistant is Celine Yoon and Fabianne Anderberg, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
Comments
I'm very late to this conversation (I only recently joined Patreon) but I had to mention that the Target/Tar-jay example immediately made me think of the 90s British sitcom Keeping Up Appearances. The main character was named Hyacinth Bucket and one of the running gags was that she insisted on pronouncing her last name 'bouquet' and visibly winced whenever anyone pronounced it like the English word 'bucket'.
Lingthusiasm
It's tricky! It would be great if we all got more exposure to other languages through our education, to help with these things!
One thing i have been guilty of in the past is mispronouncing jalapeño, because my foreign pronunciation brain wants all the e’s in foreign languages to be “ay”. I still doubt myself every time I say the word
