Comment on You are not prepared

• zarkanian@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Sometimes when a word gets borrowed from another language, the pronunciation comes along, too. Sometimes not. Every dictionary here says we aren’t using the Nahuatl pronunciation. It isn’t a thing, no matter what some guy on YouTube is saying.

  source

  • LemmyKnowsBest@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I do prefer pronouncing axolotl phonetically to rhyme with Aristotle.

    But I guess this kinda makes me curious about the Nahuatl language, why would they use the roman alphabet if they’re just gonna change the pronunciation of every letter into some unrelated nonsense 😵‍💫

    source

    • zarkanian@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      They didn’t use the Roman alphabet. They used hieroglyphs. The Spanish were the ones who came up with that spelling.

      Now, why did the Spanish decide that X should make a “sh” sound? I don’t know, but I can guess. I don’t think that the “sh” sound is present in Spanish, so they decided to use a letter that they didn’t use much (or at all) to represent it: X. But in English, X inside of a word makes a “ks” sound, so when the word was read by English speakers, they said “acks-oh-lawtl”.

      I just pulled that out of my ass, though.

      source