Bizarre Bazaar 09.01.23

Hello Kitty crosses over to the dark side:

This is one of those things where Turks use an “English” word to describe something, but in English we don’t use the same word. They call a fitted tank top or leotard a “body” (spelled bady in transliteration), presumably in an attempt to use the English term. Only thing is, I’ve never heard anyone call a tank top a “body” in English.

This happens a lot in Turkish. They also pronounce the word “gigabyte” with an initial J sound (like “jigabyte”), because it’s an English word and they “know” that in English, a G followed by an I softens the consonant to a J sound (giant, gin, gist, giraffe, and so forth). What they didn’t count on is that unlike Turkish, English actually follows no logical patterns at all— so much of our language comes from other languages, and you can’t just apply pronunciation rules in a consistent fashion and expect results (see also: gift, gill, girl, gibbon, and the list goes on).

I often get corrected by Turks if I say gigabyte with a hard G, and told that, “we also pronounce it jigabyte, just like in English.” Er, except it’s not pronounced like that in English. Nice attempt to get English to make sense, though.

I’ve been told similar stories by friends in Japan, who say that the Japanese have certain “common English” words and phrases that they use, but they’re words and phrases that no native English speaker has ever used in all of human history.

I suppose it’s no different from our society teaching us that the Japanese call suicide “committing hairy carry.” I always wondered why the Japanese would call it that, but of course then you get smart and find out that they don’t.

But I digress. I’m going to take a shower now and change into a body.