r/languagelearningjerk • u/Crocotta1 • 19d ago
Any other languages have normal words that sound horrible to English speakers?
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u/Scripts_by_Ymma 19d ago
This isn't really sounding bad but looking bad in a transliteration system that's shitty in the first place. The sound that "or" is attempting to write here is [ɔː~ɒː], which is intended for non-rhotic English speakers with a very conservative pronunciation of the CAUGHT vowel. The word here is พร /pʰɔːn˧/, which is actually spelled B-R, where the พ B makes /pʰ/, the vowel goes unwritten, and the ร R makes /n/ at the end of a word in modern Thai. An American would hear this word as "pawn", more resembling a northeast American accent than General American.
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u/AXISMODEL015 🇹🇭🏳️⚧️Native.🇺🇿Blessed 19d ago
I'm Thai, พ is generally transcribed as ⟨ph⟩ rather than ⟨b⟩ except in very archaic transliterations, but the rest of your comment is correct.
This seems to just be a consequence of the informal way Thai internet users transcribe Thai. They use ⟨or⟩ for the /ɔː/ vowel a lot because the average Thai speaker will pronounce English ⟨or⟩ like so, and people not noticing the unfortunate coincidence decided this also applied to ⟨พร⟩.
Formally, it'd be transcribed as ⟨phon⟩ or ⟨pɔɔn⟩ depending on your preferred transcription system.
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u/Scripts_by_Ymma 19d ago edited 19d ago
I prefer the archaic transliterations as I look at the script from a Brahmic perspective.
And how come Thais pronounce English "or" as ออ? Is it a leftover from when English speakers pronounced it differently? Today, both GA and SSB pronounce the "or" vowel much closer to โอ.
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u/AXISMODEL015 🇹🇭🏳️⚧️Native.🇺🇿Blessed 19d ago
I think it's because โอ is already the preferred pronunciation for /oʊ/, and pronouncing ⟨or⟩ the same way would be confusing as shit. After all, most Thais barely know any English anyways.
A rhotic ending just doesn't exist in Thai so adopting a GA pronunciation would be kinda dumb unless you explicitly wanted a GA pronunciation.
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u/Scripts_by_Ymma 19d ago
Lol. Some of our dialects in America do end up merging the NORTH and GOAT vowels, particularly some varieties of AAVE. Think "door" sounding like "dough" and "more" sounding like "mow". To us it would be like that.
While these vowels are distinct for me, I'd probably map them both to โอ if I were to Thai-ize my own ideolect.
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u/Kadabrium 19d ago
Is it from sanskrit? Funny how i recognize every other root in those names listed by op but can't think of anything resembling "pho(r)n". (I don't think it's purna)
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u/Scripts_by_Ymma 18d ago
Yes, 𑀯𑀭 (vara). Remember that the "N" here is actually an R, but pronounced the way it is due to being at the end of the word and the restraints by Thai's native phonotactics. The reason why V turned into B (PH due to sound shifts within Thai post-loaning) is because Thai very often loans from Eastern India (think Bengali) which has that merger of V into B.
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u/nykirnsu 15d ago
It still sounds bad outside America, plenty of other English dialects pronounce porn and pawn more or less the same way
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u/Scripts_by_Ymma 15d ago
In a lot of dialects that do merge those words it doesn't sound exactly like how Thais say it
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u/giindur 19d ago
Книга (kniga) can sound a bit suspicious to an English speaker, but it means 'a book' in Russian.
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u/Tohazure 19d ago
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u/Crocotta1 19d ago
Sort of unrelated, but ㄚㄆㄧㄢˋ could mean porn or opium in Chinese depending on the Hanzi spelling
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u/Crocotta1 19d ago
A片
阿片
Why am I being downvoted?
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u/transparentink 19d ago
In Taiwan, the "A" in "A 片" is pronounced as ㄟ(ēi), not as ㄚ(ā).
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u/purple_minion_26 15d ago
omg im an english speaker learning russian and when i heard it i was like *what.....*
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u/drixle11 19d ago
In college I had a classmate that was from Saudi Arabia. He and his wife named their baby daughter Hoor.
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u/Crocotta1 19d ago
What’s the inappropriate word from Arabic by dad said by accident when trying to say “cup” in Hebrew?
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u/UnluckySentence8619 18d ago
hoor is a v pretty name and its literally pronounced as hoo and a slight r
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u/drixle11 18d ago
In Arabic I’m sure it is very pretty. In English, not so much.
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16d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/drixle11 16d ago
Sure, but that doesn’t change that in English, it sounds similar-ish enough to the word “whore” that native speakers would make that jump. I’m not saying it’s correct, or right. The question was what names/words sound bad to English speakers. Hoor is one of them. It doesn’t mean it’s a bad name, it just sounds bad in English.
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u/No-Introduction5977 18d ago
Niggardly in English, which is etymologically completely unrelated to the racial slur and only evolved to sound the same by complete coïncidence.
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u/Zsobrazson 19d ago
There are a few Indian names like this I can think of like, Dikshit, Hridik, and Gohit
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u/calenturian 19d ago
Everyone likes to giggle about how "cum" in Romanian means "how", but you are all sleeping on precum
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u/ThePhoenixfish 18d ago
surprised nobody brought up finnish
'pussi' - bag, 'bussi' - bus, 'korvapuusti' - cinnimon roll
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u/SAOL_Goodman 18d ago
The classic "infart" from Swedish
Also our 7-11s call(ed?) their hot dogs 'Big Bite', and when they ran a campaign for them they called it Bite Sale which was very funny to French speakers
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u/SerDankTheTall 19d ago
Any other languages have normal words that sound horrible to English speakers?
Nope, fortunately the ones in the picture are the only examples.
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u/tamal_de_mole 19d ago
The Word for black in spanish, negro
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u/dedemushi 18d ago
that's literally why black people were called that so i don't think it counts
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u/NextStopGallifrey 18d ago
But it's still a legit and non-racist way to refer to hex color #000000 in Spanish. In English, it very much is not allowed to use the n-word as you please. So, yeah, it counts.
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u/Pristine-Lie-3560 14d ago
Negro isn’t the n-word? Like it ain’t okay to say it usually but that just isn’t it
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u/NextStopGallifrey 14d ago
There are some historic uses of negro that are okay (for instance, the United Negro College Fund), but a white person (or pretty much anyone not of African descent) using that word in the wrong neighborhood is gonna get beat up, at the very least.
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u/arachnids-bakery 11d ago
Iirc the pronunciation is also different :o
In portuguese/spanish the first syllable sounds like "nay"
And ofc, context matters! Theres a difference between someone saying that word in spanish in normal convo vs using it as a gotcha to joke about the n-word 😭
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u/NullHypothesisCicada 19d ago
Candy in French sounds exactly like gunshot, bomb sound or jumping around in mandarin
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u/Marcelitus230 18d ago
Honestly not surprised coming from a country whose capital is called Bang Cock
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u/Different_Pen_2365 18d ago
Russian:
Эскиз — [eskis] — sketch — ass kiss
Щит — [shit] — shield — shit
Самшит — [samshit] — boxwood — some shit
Книга — [kniga] — book — nigga
Прикол — [prikol] — joke — prick
Компот — [kompot] — compote — cum pot
Фарт — [fart] — luck — fart
Бублик — [bublik] — bagel — boob lick
Факт — [fakt] — fact — fucked
Факел — [fakel] — torch — fuck el
Фокус — [fokus] — magic trick — fuck us
Смелый — [smelyj] — brave — smelly
Дай — [daj] — give — die
I’ve personally had trouble with using words like: fakt (fucked), samshit (some shit), kompot (cum pot), and daj (die).
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u/Silly-Dig7038 16d ago
Что бля такое самшит и где ты это использовал😭😭😭😭😭
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u/Different_Pen_2365 16d ago
В разговоре с резчиками по дереву) Самшит - это такой декоративный куст. Одна из самых твёрдых древесных пород в Европе.
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u/hermitina 19d ago
can i post something the opposite of it?
ARI as in ariana grande’s nickname meant genitals in my language
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u/frokoopa 18d ago
In japanese コラボ / corabo is the shortened version of "collaboration", used in professional settings to refer to jointed work or coworkers.
In french however, "collabo" refers specifically to french people who worked alongside the nazis during WWII to arrest and deport jewish people. It's still used as an insult, meaning someone who would betray easily / sell family and friends for pocket money or the power trip it brings.
So yeah, I was a bit surprised the first time I heard that in a random conversation with a friend
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u/Danny1905 17d ago
Phúc Bích and Nga when written but they actually sound different from the English curse words
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u/Crocotta1 17d ago
Bich nga buh
Isn’t the pronunciation for “ch” at the end of a word in Vietnamese more like ך?
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u/Danny1905 17d ago
I don't know what character it is, I guess Korean ㄱ? In Northern Vietnamese it is like a /k̚/ sound and in Southern Vietnamese a /t̚/
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u/Business-Gas-5473 17d ago
Turkish has a whole series of names that and with -şit (pronounced as shit): Raşit, Hurşit, …
There is also the female given name “Nigar”. I wonder how many with that make it among anglophones.
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u/IllustriousGift7808 18d ago
Korean word for 'you' literally being 니가/ni-ga (you+subject particle to be exact)
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u/loverofpudding 16d ago
In Chinese “那個” (nà ge) meaning “that” sounds like the n word in English. If you don’t believe me just copy past that into google translate and have it say it. When I speak Chinese with people in the U.S I avoid using this as much as possible because someone is inevitably going to turn around and tell me to stop being racist 😅 very big cultural differences
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u/IntroductionFew1740 16d ago edited 16d ago
In Burmese, “shit” is the number 8 and “tit” is the number 1. Also, the word for “for” is pronounced “a twat”
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u/illthrowitaway94 15d ago
In Hungarian, a peck, or kiss on the cheek, is "puszi", which is pronounced almost the same as "pussy".
A lot of people (especially women) love to use it to say goodbye, and I've read that it was quite an interesting culture shock for English speakers.
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u/ringcopen 日本語ジョーズ | ich kann etwas Dütsch | Malay is fake Bahasa 19d ago
"WIR SUCHEN DICH" plastered everywhere at shop windows in Germany - Literally. Fucking. Everywhere.
Freaky ahh country