Barcelona

lime!

probably that he's not from there. absent other information, his lisp would then indicate that he is imitating the accent in order to sound more cultured. like someone from the us midwest saying "have you been to mehico?"

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Fair but unkind. People talk weird most of the time.

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Pronouncing things as they would be in the language they're actually in is sometimes a faux pas in American culture, I've learned

lime!

yes, that is indeed the joke of the comic.

MudMan

That's fine, I intend to aggressively say "Los An-heles" and "Ari-tho-nah" from now on, see how the anglophones deal with using a normal accent to say their names.

I mean, I get it, it sounds weird when people say "Los Anyeles" or "London" when speaking Spanish, too. But... you know, if the spelling is the same I don't see the problem using the way it's actually meant to be said.

I've gotten enough weird looks for ordering a "BuRRi-toh" in anglo speaking countries to be annoyed by this. And don't get me started with how Americans have chosen to pronounce "Los Gatos". If you're going to steal our word you at least could give us the deference of not mocking us for saying it correctly.

Now, if the anglophone in question is out there calling it "Barna" you know they're a poser.

Skua

Barcelona kinda has an extra layer of this too, because Catalan does pronounce "Barcelona" with an S sound rather than an unvoiced TH

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It's the opposite (as far as I could find). Pronouncing "c" similar to "th" is only done in Spanish in Spain. In Catalan (as well as Latin/South American Spanish) all pronounce it like "s".

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Let's be fair: doing things the correct way, or just being slightly educated, is often a faux pas in this wasteland pretending to be a civilization.

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Castilian Spanish is the dominant dialect of Spanish in Spain

MudMan

Different vowels, though. Like I said below, I wonder what the "pretentious" read would be with an accurate Catalan pronuntiation. Gonna guess it'd pass better, because all anglophones tend to know about that whole situation is "Castillian Spanish lisp hur hur".

Maybe that's why this strip and the whole "he said it with a lisp to sound cultured" joke rub me the wrong way. It always seems like latching on to the pretentiousness to get away with an ignorant or xenophobic joke.

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But if you pronounce faux pas wrong, it's also faux pas

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To be honest, when I'm speaking German, I pronounce it as French as I can (foh-pah), but when I'm speaking English, I pronounce it like the English speakers do (foe-pah).

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I mean, I get it to an extent. I'm much more in favor of linguistic descriptivism rather than prescriptivism, so I acknowledge that terms and pronunciations can develop over time and are not wrong.

If someone pronounces "Beijing" in English with a softened J/G sound (like "beige") and someone else corrects them with "Oh do you mean bei-JING", truthfully neither are wrong. The correct pronunciation is whatever people understand and accept.

On the other hand, suggesting that there is a single correct/more authentic pronunciation (particularly in cases where it may not even conform to standard English phonemes) veers into prescriptivism and has problematic connotations.

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https://i.imgur.com/ErOd97q.jpeg

lime!

i feel like the wider point got missed there.

saying "barcelona" with a faked spanish accent is the same as saying "berlin" with a faked german one. it's weird, and it makes you took pretentious. bar_the_lona and ibi_th_a are just common versions because a lot of people know about them.

now, some people can't help it. they might be german, for example. that's different, and the comic is saying we shouldn't judge for that, and we shouldn't assume someone is trying to sound clever just because they pronounce a word differently.

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I'm curious, what is it?

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Do you get to the cloud district very often? Oh what am I saying, of course you don’t.

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Fox-Pass

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[ faux pas ]

Pronounce both x and s. That's how I believed it to be pronounced until 30s lmao

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I blame the French for that, if you want a word to be pronounced a certain way don't spell it totally different.