🌈Ranibow Sprimkle🌈

i love this so much

#she/her but in like a way where you look at a majestic ship not like a woman (via @exeunt-pursued-by-a-bear​)

they/them but in a pile of leaves kind of way

today in “cis people are unhinged” a parent overheard a second grade teacher i work with talking about pronouns in zoom class and decided to a) try to get the teacher fired and b) pull her child out school. the reason my coworker was discussing pronouns? she was teaching a grammar lesson.  

In my linguistics class we had a Chinese girl who had adopted a European name. We all didn’t speak Cantonese and understood her wish to not have her name butchered all the time, except for one of us, a guy who thought he knew to differentiate between tones perfectly because he was learning Vietnamese. He saw himself as super woke and he thought it was wrong for her to adopt a European name when we should just try harder to pronounce her Chinese name (which honestly is just really difficult if you don’t speak the language at all, even for linguists). So he would constantly call her by her Chinese name which she initially didn’t even want to share, but he kept asking her for it, and from the look on her face I could tell that he did not get it right, and that she didn’t like it at all. The first time he did it she even told him it wasn’t correct, but he kept going, so sure he knew how to pronounce it. So like I 100% agree that we should put in effort to pronounce names from foreign languages and not give up on the first try if we get it wrong, but we should also respect people’s wishes when they know we can’t do it/they know it takes too much effort for them to teach us how to pronounce it. In that case, we should just use the name we’re being told to use. It’s that simple.

Fellow linguists, don’t be that guy™

When someone tells you what to call them, that is their name. Whether it is what’s on their birth certificate or not has literally nothing to do with you. You call them what they’ve said to call them. The end.

finally, a post about the pronunciation of names that i agree with. it’s far too much effort to teach everyone i meet to say an arabic ع or an arabic glottal stop ء and I don’t want to go through with it constantly. my own students of arabic take about two to three weeks just to practice trying to say it, and even then it’s a constant effort to learn and to pronounce it correctly every time. 

it also comes off as arrogant and silly for white linguistics students to assume that just because they study language in general, or a certain language in a clinical way, that they have the ability to speak that language well enough to presume upon a native speaker. even if you did speak the language well enough, you wouldn’t have that right.

just respect that i gave you an easy out with the name i introduced myself with, and that it’s no skin off my back to be called it if i use it first. i’ll correct you on how to pronounce THAT, because it’s a string of vowels, but i’ll do that because i know you can pronounce it. none of those vowels are absent from the english language, and even the configuration and order is common enough that you’d be able to say it all. 

Yeah, I’ve actually seen some well-meaning posts that are like “make people learn to pronounce your name!” not realising that even the most devoted person might just… not be able to. I know a lot of white Anglos can be outright dismissive of other languages, but at the same time, some sounds for non-native speakers can be difficult to hear let alone pronounce, and it’s not always out of malice or a sense of superiority (not saying it can’t be of course! It sure can! Just… not always). While my Bengali name is actually pretty easy to pronounce, with my Hebrew name, getting the guttural “CH” for people who aren’t familiar with Semitic languages can be a massive struggle, and I don’t particularly want to be called “Ra-Hell,” y’know? Some people, regardless of intent, are just not good at sounds/accents, and I accept that.

The perpetual push-pull, I think, for anyone who has a name with sounds non-native speakers may have trouble with. On the one hand, being a child of immigrants myself in the US with its particular history and attitudes towards non-Anglo folks, “make people learn to pronounce your name” to me is… choosing to take up space, refusing to be erased and whitewashed and dismissed and belittled.

On another hand, yeah, one only has so much energy to teach people to say a name, and some days it’s not worth it. Lucky me, my fam set me up with an English name too (which lol my Canto fam can’t say accurately at all) because folks who don’t speak Chinese can’t usually handle the tones of my Cantonese name, even though all the phonemes exist in English too. Whatever messy argument is happening in the notes right now, sometimes no matter how much you try, the best you can get with a name from an entirely different phonological system from yours might be an approximation, and each of us gets to decide how much of an approximation we’re willing to tolerate from others at any given time, and some days (all days) that might be zero(0).

Like @kipplekipple above said, and @flange5 said in her tags: it’s about consent. It’s one thing if someone is a racist jerk imposing a nickname or English name on you because they ‘can’t be bothered’ or ‘it’s too hard.’ It’s an entirely different thing for someone to tell you - hey this is how I’m called. Use this name.

(TERFs don’t even clown in the notes, I see you, go away)

When I went to Iceland, I discovered that I cannot correctly pronounce the name Snorri.

And I cannot hear the difference between how I pronounce it and how it’s supposed to be pronounced.

If you don’t grow up speaking Welsh it’s nearly impossible to correctly pronounce the ll consonant.

Sometimes, you just can’t because our brains get used to certain language sounds and “lose” others.

[Image description]

Leonard Pollard

My mom was having trouble using they/them prnouns with some friends for a while. One day she said “I think the problem is that I haven’t changed the way I view their gender outside of their pronouncs which adds several extra steps in converting binary pronouns to they/them then conjugating it. So I need to shift how I see them as a gendered person entirely to make using their pronouns easier.” And since then she hardly ever messes up.

[End image description]

A lot of the cis people in my life need this

This is literally why people mess up pronouns and why it’s a problem.

Like the reason you’re not calling me “they” is because you still think of me as gendered the way you initially assumed. It’s not just the pronouns I want you to change, they only serve as an acknowledgement of the gender I want you to adjust your perspective to. If you did that, you wouldn’t struggle with it.

on the first day of classes professors will usually ask us to fill out a little notecard with our name, pronouns, major, and email. one dude in one of my history classes was very clearly one of those Anti-SJW Bullshit People and went “Uhhh pronouns? Ha, what’s that supposed to mean? I’m clearly a dude I don’t understand what you’re asking” and the professor just looked him in the eye and went “If you don’t know what a pronoun is then maybe a college level course isn’t for you” and i think about her every single day of my life

Please also check out this comic about gender identity and this comic about coming out as trans!