Oh, yes you're right - I'm not a native speaker and I think we phrase it slightly differently, and I took that literally. Thanks for the explanation!
Dicska
joined 2 years ago
Oh, I was thinking they meant 65-75 people before the pendulum (the second counter on the grandfather clock?) swung back, so 65-75 people per second. I didn't think so deeply about the maths behind it, just accepted it as a possible meaning. But I'll do it now.
UPDATE: Checks out for 2-3 years, but something is telling me there was enough time for even more years to fit between 1939 and 1945.
UPDATE: Unless you consider "swung back" as 2 seconds, because then it's even possible.
While I don't think that's the objectively correct way (I can accept reasons both for and against switching accents), I also try to say some words the "original" way. In fact, at work I often hear native English customers pronounce some foreign loan words in their corresponding language (or at least making an attempt at it). I wouldn't say that's the dominant style, but it does happen.
What does NOT happen as often is the overexaggerated pitch change that is present in the video. Obviously, they were doing it intentionally for comedic effect, but it also makes fun of people who don't do it out of pretentiousness. Once a word is used often enough, I don't see the point sticking with the "original" pronunciation (I guess not many people pronounce 'beef' as 'bœuf' anymore). Even moreso if the "original" word has sounds that the English language doesn't. I won't get angry if you can't roll your R's.
But when they butcher words that just take some careful reading I lose it. They know the German 'sch', and it's fine - even remarkable. What's not remarkable is when they see a combination of those letters, ignore the order, and just pronounce it as if it was 'sch', regardless. Fuchsia. C-H-S. Maybe, just MAYBE it's not the same as S-C-H. English has a good bunch of words containing CH. The plural of tech is techs. You don't pronounce it as 'tesh'. Fuchsia is, originally, a word containing CH, followed by S.
Another pet (ha) peeve of mine is Dachshund. I know it's confusingly many characters, all c, h and s. But English also has the word 'hound'. It comes from the same root as the German 'Hund'. The rest is Dachs. For hints, see the above paragraph. Pronouncing it as "dashoond" is just as offensive and ignorant (to me; not in general) as saying warthog as war+thog.
As a non-native, I was a bit too old to find the lyrics and get them. After that, it was quite weird to me, but apart from the name being a bit off, I never heard of Gorky Park before.
(I am aware, it's the same here - I was just making a joke by splitting up the sentence differently)
When I told my colleagues about my surprise when I found out The Scorpions were German, none, but none of them had any idea what band I was talking about.
In which god forsaken country are voting rights dependent on children's age?
“Had to be me. Someone else might've gotten it wrong”
Shit, it was even hard to simply copy-paste this.
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I had to read the title 3 times, because even for the second read through I read 'NATO is preparing to comfort Russia'.