this got me a comment saying it is not possible for someone's italian to be this bad this must be rage bait'nyes u got me my Italian is actually perfect and i am only mispronuncing it to make you, you personally, suffer

[xibanya@mastodon.xyz]

this got me a comment saying it is not possible for someone's italian to be this bad this must be rage bait

yes u got me my Italian is actually perfect and i am only mispronuncing it to make you, you personally, suffer

[xibanya@mastodon.xyz]

once while going from city to city by bus wandering around the north of Spain, I noticed the young woman working the front desk at the youth hostel i was staying at was on the phone in Romanian. I checked into the hostel speaking flawed American-accented Romanian and she was so delighted to hear Romanian in the mouth of a non-native speaker she upgraded my reservation to include meals

do not phonate the wrong z in front of an Italian they will die, thousands of lives lost every year, tragic

[xibanya@mastodon.xyz]

i should start singing Italian opera in Romanian, that'd probably put the people leaving these asinine comments into a coma

[jannem@fosstodon.org]

@Xibanya
You should just sing the lyrics to "Volare" over any score.

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@Xibanya when I was quite young I participated in a cultural exchange program where I met a couple of folks from Romania. On the last night of the thing, we were pulling an all-nighter and I was very tired and kind of hovering in that state between wake and sleep, and these two folks were chatting in Romanian in just the right voice volume, low enough not to disturb, but I could still hear them. And I couldn't understand a word they were saying but I would have sworn they were speaking Sicilian.

[xibanya@mastodon.xyz]

@oblomov I've gotten a similar effect from hearing people speaking Dutch from a distance where from the rhythm and stress i was sure they were speaking English until I got close enough to actually make out the words. and then once the illusion was broken I couldn't make my brain "hear" it as English again even from the same distance as before. brains are weird

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@Xibanya ah, bullshit, most Italians don't even know which «s» and «z» are voiceless* and which ones are voiced*.

(*not entirely sure about the translation here, but if you know Italian phonetics, I meant “sordo” and “sonoro”)

[xibanya@mastodon.xyz]

@oblomov conveniently they're the exact same words :D

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@Xibanya *phew*

[xibanya@mastodon.xyz]

@oblomov also you are clearly being misled by survivorship bias: the italians who know which «s» and «z» are voiced or unvoiced have sadly already perished from the burden of this knowledge

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@Xibanya their head exploded after hearing the wrong one being used by their fellow countrypeople.

[illuminatus@mstdn.social]

@Xibanya @oblomov This happened to a friend and I last July, with Finnish/Suomi in Helsinki. We are both Spanish and whenever we heard some people in the street talking, it took us some seconds to identify, because cadence and vowels are sufficiently similar to those in Spanish to make for some confusion.

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@Illuminatus @Xibanya wow that's even more astounding because those language as related like apples and triangles*.
Interesting to learn that they still manage to sound superficially similar by some weird phenomenon of linguistic convergent evolution. Thanks for sharing.

*yes I'm aware that's not the idiom; it's on purpose.

[illuminatus@mstdn.social]

@oblomov @Xibanya It was extra curious because in Helsinki there were also plenty of Swedish speakers, so it was a real disonance.

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@Illuminatus @Xibanya I can imagine: «hey that sounds like something I understand! Nnnnope, complete gibberish».