Barcelona

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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.

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The cultural backlash comes not from 'pronouncing things correctly makes you sound educated' but because people that do this are adopting an accent for one singular word, and that is often perceived as them attempting to imply some connection to that group/culture that they do not have.

Americans, white Americans especially, have essentially no cultural heritage to draw on. It's why we latch onto things like a grandparent being from ireland and thence go around calling ourselves Irish-American, or the confederate states. People with a rich cultural history are generally viewed as extremely interesting, too, so when another american adopts characteristics from a culture they have no real connection with, it's perceived as a deeply tacky attempt to gain social clout.

(Its akin to being presented with a lesser form of weaboo.)

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France has many linguistic crimes to answer for....

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And that's the point, I believe. Catalan is not a dialect of Spanish.

MudMan

Yeah, no, I get the joke.

I'm just annoyed by the joke.

Slightly, anyway. It's less annoying than hearing Colbert do it (he really likes this one, and generally slightly xenophobic country stereotype jokes, for some reason), but it always rubs me the wrong way a little bit, for the reasons I mentioned elsewhere.

I mean, I'm not mad or anything, I still get to have a sense of humor. For as much as "guy speaks funny" is one of those, anyway.

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The majority of my time playing skyrim I thought he was referring to somewhere in a different citt like Solitude or something. Didnt realize he was talking about a place thats 10 paces away lol

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I remember talking to these girls on discord, and they kept talking about their new fox ears, and then when they showed me, they were bunny ears on a headband. That’s when I realized they were saying faux ears.

MudMan

I urgently need to know if you're at the very least German, because if you're anglophone that statement is straight up against the law.