xkcd #3232: Countdown Standard
Title text:
Anyone who is caught counting ‘three … two … one … zero … GO!’ will be punished with a lifetime of eating only ISO standard food samples.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3232/
In Finnish we typically say "Än, yy, tee, nyt!", because our word for "now", nyt, is composed of letters N, Y and T.
The “y” is pronounced roughly the same way as “ew” in “new”. “ä” in the same as “a” in “cat”, and “e” is the same as “e” in “well”.
How about translating this to English and using the following as the standard?
"Aehn, oh, double you, now!"
🙃
The three syllable ‘w’ kinda ruins it.
Eh everyone says “dubya” anyways
Still, all other letters only clock 1 syllable. I vote we just go ahead and change the standard to “dub”.
But if we do that, we’ll need a new alphabet song!
(also, since letters [sorta] contain their respective sounds, I suggest “wub”)
Holy shit, is that why people call george w bush dubya? As a non native English speaker I wouldn’t have thought of that in a million years
Yep! Also, if you aren’t familiar with the way words are either stressed or elided in spoken english, you’re probably so confused when you hear native speakers talk 😅
We literally don’t pronounce most of the sounds in most of the words we say. If you go around pronouncing every syllable of every word you’ll sound insane