https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/that

That refers primarily to people or things; which refers primarily to things, and who refers primarily to people. Some authorities insist who/whom be used when making reference to people, but others, such as the Merriam-Webster dictionary, write that such prescriptions are “without foundation” and use of that in such positions is common and “entirely standard”.[2] Hence, one sees both “he is the man who invented the telephone” and “he is the man that invented the telephone.”

Dormant Don

I prefer eleventyleven

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Feel like I’ve seen this in Tbilisi before. Where was this one?

лишишь

The official name was still Constantinople until 1930 though, so maybe it should be “Istanbul AND Constantinople” rather than “Istanbul not Constantinople”

Never underestimate the internet’s ability to correct mistakes

I know the title is for the sake of the reference, but I’m pretty sure it was still called Constantinople back then

Fun fact: the s was added to island in the 16th century as a mistake because grammarians added an s to isle to make it look more like the Latin insula, even though there was no s sound in either island or isle.

So in Slavonic linguistics, there’s a sound change known as the Slavic liquid metathesis, which is what gives us South Slavic forms like grad (town) as in Belgrad, as opposed to East Slavic forms, like gorod, as in Belgorod.

The reconstructed ancestor of gorod and grad is *gord (in historical linguistics, an asterisk indicates a reconstructed form). Due to changes in syllable boundary rules in the Slavic language of the day (roughly 8th/9th century AD), you could no longer have two consonants at the end of a syllable, so *gord had to change. In East Slavic, this was solved by adding an extra vowel to break up the consonant cluster, giving us gorod. In South and West Slavic, this was done by moving the /r/ sound to the onset (start) of the syllable (and the vowel was also changed), giving us grad. The “liquid” part of the name refers to “liquid” sounds, /r/ and /l/, since this particular process applied to them.

It almost looks like this is what’s going on here, although not quite. It would have to be gulgulg > gluglug to count as liquid metathesis, but the l and u switched around, which is good enough for me. Plus there’s the pun with liquid and water.

Hopefully that at least somewhat explains the joke. I don’t know if it’s very clear.

Slavic liquid metathesis moment

Pig Haggerty!

But the Red Sea is already full of water

AfDler in Germany

The power of the sun earth, in the palm of my hands

Tories

Same with the UK

Okay, I looked it up, and it seems I was getting confused with the Australian weak vowel merger; the pin/pen merger is actually in some American accents

What? How is that the conclusion you’re drawing here? As a side note, I have learnt and can speak German and have lived and studied in Germany. But more importantly, I feel like we’re having two entirely different conversations. My understanding of your argument is that it is invalid to put down potentially confusing pronunciation differences down to accents. Please correct me if I have misunderstood what you’re saying. My argument is that this is just a natural linguistic process and differing pronunciations even to the point of confusion between dialects is inevitable. If someone’s dialect/accent truly does cause communication problems, then a workaround needs to found, whether that’s rewording things so that confusion caused by pronunciation is averted, or by code-switching to a common dialect in more extreme cases. Neither of these invalidates either dialect or accent. People speak differently, and no matter how strange it might sound, it’s just something you have to get over.