this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2025
366 points (98.2% liked)

Linguistics Humor

1466 readers
97 users here now

Do you like languages and linguistics ? Here is for having fun about it


For serious linguistics content: !linguistics@mander.xyz


Rules:

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
top 25 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] 000@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 points 4 days ago (1 children)

The script is called Devnaagari, Hindi is a language

[–] lunarul@lemmy.world 11 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Most of those scripts have names that are not the labguage names. There katakana, hiragana, and kanji for Japanese, there's hangul for Korean etc.

[–] ryedaft@sh.itjust.works 11 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Always thought Korean looked like a Swiss designer made an alphabet for extra terrestrials

[–] MyEdgyAlt@sh.itjust.works 11 points 4 days ago

It’s really cool - it was deliberately designed with the goal of improving literacy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul

[–] four@lemmy.zip 14 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Doesn't Japanese have two writing systems? And one of them looks more like Chinese?

[–] SpaceScotsman@startrek.website 41 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Japan has 3 writing systems and this comic seems to be conflating Katakana and Kanji together as "stabby", leaving Hiragana as "adorable". All of them are (long ago) derived from chinese, but only the Kanji still look similar.

I would have introduced Chinese first, and then in the Japanese panel present the stabby and adorable ones both being attacked by flying contraptions. (And a few floating around the korean one, too)

[–] AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space 8 points 5 days ago

Kanji is essentially the Chinese ideographic system, so probably wasn’t counted.

[–] makyo@lemmy.world 3 points 5 days ago (2 children)

I've wondered about this too - they must have to use Latin characters a ton too to be on the internet right? Or how does that work? I've never seen web addresses in Japanese.

[–] frank@sopuli.xyz 5 points 5 days ago (1 children)

So like if you search

鈴鹿サーキット(Suzuka Circuit)

You get a link to suzukacircuit.jp as a top result, but to navigate directly there I think you have to type suzukacircuit.jp in Latin characters

You can often change your kanji + kana into romanji (latin characters) as an autocorrect suggestion

[–] makyo@lemmy.world 1 points 5 days ago

Ah gotcha I should have figured they probably weren't typing URLs directly that much. I guess I'm probably an outlier even among western users for doing that.

[–] codexarcanum@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 4 days ago

URLs use a system called punycode to convert to a subset of ASCII that's used for DNS resolution. Not sure if typing in non-ascii script in the address bar would auto-convert in most browsers or not though.

[–] TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.com 12 points 5 days ago (2 children)
[–] shalafi@lemmy.world 21 points 5 days ago (2 children)

First time I saw my Filipino wife crying laughing:

How to tell Asians apart.

Was scared shitless to show her that.

[–] zedgeist@lemmy.world 16 points 5 days ago

I don't know if I'm legally allowed to find that funny

[–] TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.com 6 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Come, honey! Let me show the finger ricemaker trick of my people!

[–] shalafi@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago

She was crying over that too! And then very serious, "This is how you must do it."

[–] bricklove@midwest.social 1 points 4 days ago

His Thai impression sounds just like the Thai announcer for ONE fighting championship

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Correspondence with European scripts:

  • the OG Latin and block letter Cyrillic are like like katakana (sharp, stabby letters)
  • Greek is like hiragana (loopy, adorable letters)
  • the "weird" Latin we use today is like Burmese, except sideways (butts everywhere)
  • cursive Cyrillic is like Mongolian, except the rain is over (the knives are poking into the ground)

Devanagari has no European equivalent because Devanagari is perfect, since it's used to write Sanskrit and Sanskrit is the mother of all languages. Except of ULTRAFRENCH of course.

[–] death_to_carrots@feddit.org 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Now I need to know what ULTRAFRENCH is. I know normal french, if it can be considerd "normal".

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Quebecois French is 50% English. English itself is 99% French. This means Quebecois French is 50%+99%=149% French, making it more French than French itself. So it's ULTRAFRENCH. It's one of the main candidates for the mother of all languages, alongside Hebrew and Sanskrit.

[–] death_to_carrots@feddit.org 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That's not how percentages work.

Also, the mother oft all languages is the silent starring into the fire.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 points 1 day ago

The fucked up percentages are part of the joke - claims about some attested language being the mother of all others are full of equally flawed reasoning, except the authors genuinely believe on them. Same deal with claims of English being "mostly French"; they're as silly as saying "a tuxedo cat is 99% spotted cow, 1% orange cat".

[–] Tarquinn2049@lemmy.world 5 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Burmese is more like human millipede.

[–] bricklove@midwest.social 2 points 4 days ago

It's like Georgian characters sewn together

this seems... wack and also why would you not have Urdu on it, or Tibetan, Tibetan script looks hella cool