A thing to consider not doing around me

[azurelunatic]

There is a thing that sometimes people do, to be funny or for emphasis or whatever. It is the thing where they substitute the letter L for R in words, such as "VICTOLY" for "VICTORY".

There are many possible places and reasons to have picked up doing this, including the ever-popular "somebody I know was doing it and it seemed like fun".

The roots of this substitution is making fun of people with no distinction between R/L sounds, which is common when people whose first language is Chinese learn to speak English.

Which is why I cringe every time I encounter it, and would prefer that people not do this around me.

Comments

[krait]

I believe that it originated with some specific instance or instances in a videogame translation. (VICTOLY might even be one of the originals; it's been around forever.)

Which I guess is why it doesn't raise my hackles quite as much (to me it reads as "let's mock a specific product or product genre" rather than "let's mock an entire group of people"), but yep, it sure does originate from the difficulties certain languages' native speakers have with the L/R distinction in English, so I can see why it grates. It's not a thing that I've ever attempted to use humourously (I'll stick to variations on "all your base belong to us", thanks) but I shall be extra-sure to avoid it.

[torrilin]

If I'm doing this kind of thing, it's pronounced WICTORY! Why? My family is a mix of French Canadian, Austrian, and Scandinavian. So the German W sound for V is culturally appropriate for me. Bonus, I'm Catholic and I know Latin. And the primary inflection set I learned is the Germanic one, where W is used for V.

If you type it tho, it's still VICTORY! Because languages are rarely 100% phonetic.

I figure it's fine to make fun of myself and my cultural background, but it's not so cute to make fun of other people.

I didn't know until the last 5 years or so, but the V/W thing could also be seen as making fun of someone with an Indonesian accent. It's very tricky to tell a slight Indonesian accent from a slight German accent, and Indonesian doesn't really use the V sound the way English does.

[silverflight8]

Standard Mandarin does have an r/l contrast, eg minimal pair rè/lè, 热/乐 have the same tone, same vowel, same everything but the words are different and the only contrast is the consonant (I just picked two very common words, "hot" and "happy" - translating the latter not well, it's usually used in a two words set and takes on many diff meanings). Also ru/lu. Peobably a few more sets but typing on a phone is painful. Some speakers of other dialects don't have the same r or say r and l with the same consonant but standard Mandarin certainly does have a phonological, not just phoenetic, difference.

[kaberett]

YES THANK YOU