xkcd #2942: Fluid Speech

https://xkcd.com/2942

explainxkcd.com for #2942

Alt text:

Thank you to linguist Gretchen McCulloch for teaching me about phonetic assimilation, and for teaching me that if you stand around in public reading texts from a linguist and murmuring example phrases to yourself, people will eventually ask if you’re okay.

  • @[email protected]English
    17•5 months ago

    I think Verlan is pretty neat. We had a full lesson on it in middle school because of one of our country’s most popular musicians, Stromae, which is Verlan for Maestro.

    • @GlitterbombEnglish
      8•5 months ago

      Fantastic! Stromae is actually the reason I learned verlan existed! I got to see him live in the US, and it was one of the coolest live shows I’ve ever seen. The majority of the video for quand c’est is an actual part of the live show, and I wasn’t expecting it at all

    • @TeodomoEnglish
      7•5 months ago

      Wait, Verlan is l’envers, stromae is maestro… Is this Verlan thing just like Rioplatense Spanish’s Vesre? (Vesre basically means revés i.e. inverse)

      EDIT: Just looked it up on Wikipedia and it turns out this phenomenon happens in a number of languages: Riocontra in Italian (riocontra -> contrario), Podaná in Greek, Šatrovački in Serbia, Totoiana in Romanian.