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.

  • @bitwabaEnglish
    3•5 months ago

    I’d say part of this is the intended / official descriptipn isn’t actually that. The spoken word existed first, then someone tried to capture that spoken word using a finite list of characters and character combinations that map back to phenomes. The written word isn’t phonetically accurate to the letters it is composed of, and the written word is just close approximation of the spoken word itself.

    • 🇨🇦🇩🇪🇨🇳张殿李🇨🇳🇩🇪🇨🇦English
      1•5 months ago

      That is absolutely correct. Writing isn’t language, in fact. Language is instinctual and barring severe brain damage, everybody on planet Earth learns to communicate in at least once. (Sign languages are language. Indeed they’re an extension of body language.)

      Writing is an attempted encoding of language (and not a very good one, given how much is lost in written form vs. in-person communication!) and is a skill that takes a lot of time and effort to learn. Writing is not instinctual in the slightest.