Why not have numbers? I never understood the need for names in places like this. Fuck you need my name for? What if there’s more than one John in here? Give me a number and call it out when ready… jeez.
I had an English teacher in middle school who named her son Sean, pronounced like “seen,” and she always complain about how people always pronounced it like “Shawn.”
Personally, I think it’s a tad rude to name your child with an uncommon spelling as is just setting then up for a lifetime of minor annoyances. But to use a fairly common variant and insist on a non-standard pronunciation is far worse.
Why can’t they just assign order ID number like every other normal food service business?
Yes, just assign me a UUID please.
I have a non-English name and I honestly don’t know what to say when they ask for my name so I just pause for like 3 second then think of a random English name to use lol, cuz I doubt they can read a Pinyin name lol and don’t wanna make it awkward.
I placed an order at a restaurant where you have a name for the order, but you also have names for particular food items. The main name was Mario Mario. The food items were various SMB characters. I went to pick up the food in a Boo shirt and Mario baseball cap. I heard them talking about Mario’s last name being Mario and Luigi’s last name being the same. Anyway, I went over to pick up the order, they noticed my clothes, and started laughing. Good times. Anyway, I like using character names.
Because people who have no real friends think it’s more “personal” to force a stranger to poorly read their name.
Sean is such a weird pronunciation of Shawn.
Obligatory
Sadly, this doesn’t work, as the “se” is what makes the “sh” sound. Otherwise “Sean” would be pronounced “Sawn.”
When men play these games do we call them sementics?
Huh-huh, “semen.”
The joke does work if Sean yans, though.
And there’s a beautiful fean walking across the lean.
In retrospect, peaning my guitar in order to afford a new amplifier wasn’t the best idea I ever had…
. H E A V Y . R A I N . I N T E N S I F I E S .
Envy: in my native languages every letter means one concrete sound no matter of the word or any other circumstances. I can pronounce correctly any word I see written, and can correctly write down whatever word I hear even if I hear it for the first time and don’t know its meaning.
I’m envious of that, to be honest. Non-phonetic spelling is one of the greatest barriers to learning a language like English.
Part of the problem though is what this comic highlights, where English does not often try to adapt names and loanwords to its own phonetics. They are transliterated to the Latin alphabet in ways that make sense for the logic of the source language, and then just carried into English.
And then it just happens that the history of the English language is characterized by the number of times Britain was invaded by speakers of other languages that just merged into the lexicon, so English is riddled with loanwords that are each informed by the logic of their languages of origin.
Does your language still have different regional accents or does that end up getting smoothed/averaged out by the writing system?
It has. Some regions use local words that aren’t included in official vocabulary plus they love to misplace emphasis (we don’t mark it in written form). Not sure if it can be called “accent” though, more like “dialect”.
What language?
Ukrainian.
My guess: Serbian, Turkish or Italian
Same (with few exceptions that are well documented and always applicable to every situation)
But names are still fucked, because they’re not translated. Example:
- Tomass
- Tomas
- Thomas
- Tuomas
Or the Shawn/Sean example in the comic
The Ethiopian alphabet (abougida) has this feature, but it goes one step further. Every vowel consonant pair (aka every syllable) has it’s own symbol. That sounds like a lot of symbols, and it is, but the beauty of it is that the vowel sounds are just modifiers of the consonant. So you only have to memorize the consonant symbols and the modifiers and you can reduce drastically reduce the number of letters needed plus have a completely phonetic writing system.
Sean Bean has entered the room.
Seen Bawn.
Bean, seen.
Bought the taw-shawt
Maybe she meant Shaun?
Sean, See awning.
Shawn, Shorning.
One of my coworkers is named Sean and I always refer to him as Seen. It is very funny to nobody except for me.
I have a very common name. My Starbucks name is Bart.
Fake barista. They would say “Venti”
Never had coffee outside of Starbucks?
I think that’s the joke.
Is Starbucks the only coffee shop that requires people to speak Italian? (Honest question from someone who’s never had a desire to go to any coffee shop.)
Unless you count “espresso”, “cappuccino” and “macchiato” as speaking Italian, then yes
I guess we can consider those adopted into English vocabulary since we haven’t replaced them with any English words.
Kinda like résumé and hors d’oeuvre and a million other French words we have in our normal vocabulary.
It’s pronounced “expresso”.
