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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   14063 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026

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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".

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.

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