Spammers are probably not targeting you. Like the obvious comma and spelling mistakes in spam emails that are there to weed out the smart people that are much harder to scam, this also serves as a filter to get only the most vulnerable people.
We're speaking English, so why even entertain the idea of pronouncing "axolotl" differently, in that case? The Japanese say "en", but that doesn't seem to inspire anyone else not to say "yen".
That's because in English we get it via Spanish, which doesn't have ʃ (although interestingly, it was just in the process of losing that sound in the early 17th century). If we're going from Nahuatl direct to English, and the Nahuatl sound also exists in English, then you may as well just use the correct sound. Otherwise, what are you going to do with Xochimilco?
The misconception is that words enter "a language" and not individual people's minds. Most English speakers have never heard the word "axolotl" spoken in its original pronunciation, nor are they familiar with the orthography that spells a "sh" with X.
>Spanish, which doesn't have ʃ (although interestingly, it was just in the process of losing that sound in the early 17th century).
I don't know about 17th century, but some dialects of Spanish certainly do have that sound now.
>Otherwise, what are you going to do with Xochimilco?
In English, X at the start of a word is typically pronounced like a Z, as in "Xanadu", "Xanax", and "xylophone". I don't think anyone would bat an eye if you read it as "Zochimilco".
It’s not a misconception that the English word ‘chocolate’ exists and that there’s a particular history of how that came to be the case. I think, reading the thread again, I didn’t make it clear that the sentence you quoted was talking about the history of ‘chocolate’ and not ‘axolotl’.
If pronouncing Xochimilco according to English orthographic conventions is important to you as a matter of principle, then of course you can do it. But it’s a Mexican place name that has a canonical pronunciation that is not difficult for English speakers to approximate, so I can’t really see the point.
(And yes, ʃ does exist in some modern dialects of Spanish, but those aren’t the dialects that would influence the pronunciation of Spanish to English loan words in most cases. The interesting thing is that this was much less obviously the case in the early 1600s. Apparently the exact origin of ‘chocolate’ in Spanish is a bit of a complex historical linguistic puzzle.)
>If pronouncing Xochimilco according to English orthographic conventions is important to you as a matter of principle
No, not to me. I speak Spanish natively, but even I don't know how to say that. My first guess would be "Jochimilco", but I'd have to look it up (I'm not going to). I'm just saying that having Xs in weird places would not stop an English speaker from inventing a "wrong" pronunciation on the spot.
>But it’s a Mexican place name that has a canonical pronunciation that is not difficult for English speakers to approximate, so I can’t really see the point.
"Mexico" itself is also not difficult for English speakers to approximate, yet they don't. Clearly approximating the local pronunciation is not how foreign speakers decide how to pay toponyms, and that's fine. That's how languages are shaped.
My point is just that it makes no sense to get hung up on speakers not pronouncing loanwords "correctly". If we're going down this path, we should also complain that Spanish speakers write "fútbol" instead of "football", and that tea is called "tea" instead of "cha" and spelled "荼". We should demand that words be crystallized in their pronunciation and orthography when they cross language barriers.
There aren’t any hard and fast rules about how to pronounce loan words. I agree on that point. In your original post, though, you seemed to be entirely dismissing the option of pronouncing the word according to an English approximation of its native pronunciation, which is an approach that’s equally valid (and is what English speakers often do for quite a few words).
>In your original post, though, you seemed to be entirely dismissing the option of pronouncing the word according to an English approximation of its native pronunciation,
When a pronunciation is already widespread, yes. "Axolotl" is not some new word; lots of people know the animal and call it "aksolotl". If we were talking about, say, some obscure Chinese village that suddenly became very relevant in the English-speaking world, I would not insist to pronounce the pinyin spelling of its name as if it was an English word.
The 'sh' pronunciation is pretty well-known, in the UK at least, due to exposure to it in Catalan (particularly with CaixaBank) and Portuguese. I suspect that most people here would guess that Spanish still pronounces it that way too, thanks to México and Xérès / Sherry.
And there's Xitter, of course, which is a fairly common way of referring to the social network formerly known as Twitter.
>I suspect that most people here would guess that Spanish still pronounces it that way too, thanks to México and Xérès / Sherry.
Sorry, what? First, is the word "Xérès" well-known among English-speakers? Second, "México" isn't pronounced "méshico", so how is it a supporting argument at all?
My Pixel 4a would also still be fine. If Google had not killed the battery. I think by now Google has asked (=paid) people to swap batteries on at least 3 different Pixel phones.
I know plenty. But not among the 18-20 year olds that do not know it any different, sure. But certainly my grandpa. Just thinking that you do not need a power-bank and just bring an extra battery on a longer trip will get millions of people interested.
It depends on how much generation you expect to 'waste'. Many plans are targetting a lot more generation than demand, with numbers sometimes stated as 300% generation potential for solar plus wind.
Why is that always posted without stating the magnitude of the effect? The numbers that you find online are around 15% relative loss at 60°C vs. 25°C panel temperatur (I remember a HN comment reporting 12% comparing peak April to peak July). That is significant, but not world changing, especially for AC.
There are 30 year old still functioning panels in Australia.
Buried in that longevity, is an observation that a fifth of panels degrade faster than expected
The long tail appears on graphs showing the degradation rate per year of the panels, indicating that up to 20% of all samples perform 1.5 times worse than the average.
It exists and does degrade panels but the time horizon is pretty wide. Real world data shows something like 0.5% to 0.7% degregation per year on average.
At the start the degregation is higher and but it slows down with age.
So a 20 year old panel might be at around 80% in the worst case.
Often they are in much better shape.
This seems like a pretty good deal to me.
I am afraid, there are far bigger confounders than that (which they supposedly correct for): you absolutely cannot be a taxi driver if you experience short term memory loss. So those people may have changed profession at a faster rate than say kindergarden teachers or bakers. Tbf. GPS somewhat changed that but with GPS, the spatial information thing makes less sense.
reply