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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25594 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026

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Yes, I am going to "No True Hispanic" this.

I'm not calling these people "weird". I am calling them "not hispanic"[1] because they are not using Spanish. And I am making a prediction on their backgrounds based on this observation. For example, "True Hispanics" write "furros" instead of "furries" because furros conforms with Spanish orthography. My understanding is that the word "furry" first entered the Spanish lexicon through American heritage Spanish speakers and then native hispanics started using the word furro (although I admit to not being an expert on the linguistics of Spanish sex fetish vocabulary), and I expect a similar phenomenon to be happening here.

[1] In all my posts I'm using the word hispanic to mean Spanish speaking as that is literally what the word means in Spanish. I'm not trying to use the word to imply racial/ethnic ties or to mean latam-culture-adjacent the way it is sometimes used in the US.

TIL I'm not Finnish because I regularly use words that have the letter c, q, w or z (none of which exist in native words).

Frankly, your so-called argument is just complete bullshit.

Frankly, your so-called argument is just complete bullshit.

I prefer mierda. But you're probably right.

Battles over loanwords are pretty common: The Académie Francaise (nominally the authority on French as a language, but opinions differ) would love to excommunicate Francophones who use "email" rather than «courriel». IIRC Spanish as a language isn't quite as centralized given among other things how many countries use it: a decent chunk of its speakers even call it "Castilian".

In Czech, for loanword verbs at least, they usually just slap -ovat on the end and call it a day. My favorite is "surfovat". Sometimes they'll change the spelling and sometimes not, and it's not even consistently done for some words. I've seen both skateboard and skejtbord used interchangeably.

IMO English is at least in part "as she is spoke" because we tend in modern times to borrow loanwords from Latin alphabet languages as-written, but inconsistently keep the pronunciation as-borrowed, so the phonetics are literally all over the place and you need a decent understanding of etymology to know why the "ll" in quesadilla is (usually) pronounced so differently from allay.

Isn't that how English has behaved for the last N hundred years?

Yeah, most of the phonetic ones that come to mind predate standardized spellings, so a few hundred years.

French is pretty much an extreme example in the language purity debate. In Finnish there is little to no controversy in using such loanwords but they are inevitably changed into a finnish style pronunciation, usually without changing the spelling. So c becomes k or s, q becomes k, w becomes v and z becomes ts. It goes even further than that in some common names so that the name is pronounced as a best effort pronunciation without the spelling being changed. Thus curry sauce gets written "curry-kastike" and pronounced as "karri-kastike" (but if you were to actually write it like that, it would sound like sauce made from a person named Karri).

Which is all to say that cultures take up loanwords all the time without necessarily caring one bit about the root or changing the spelling. Doubly so for anything related to internet or recent trends.

When my French Canadian grandpa would visit France, the French there would insist that he speak English rather than his filthy degenerate Quebecois French.

That’s a bit like a frog accusing a toad of being a dirty amphibian.

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