This image has been floating around the internet for a while, but I don’t think I’ve seen it on a language blog. I don’t know who created it, but a search on TinEye suggests it originated on 9gag in 2014 as a two-part visual joke comparing Swedish and German grammar, before being variously (and anonymously) modified and extended.
[click to enlarge]
Tweeting it led to some discussion of its accuracy (which I’m unqualified to assess) and of Finnish being anomalous, since it’s part of a different language family; I guess the set is geographical rather than strictly linguistic.
Finnish has a reputation for being forbidding, but some of those comics misrepresent it, I think: its complexity may be more a subjective thing for people attuned to Germanic-language sounds and structures.
Then there’s the whole idea of representing grammars and languages as animals and monsters. I thought of English as a magpie first, before opting for The Blob given its voracious nature and inexorable spread. Or maybe Larry Cohen’s The Stuff, which is like the Brave New World to The Blob‘s 1984.
What creature, real or not, do you think best represents English, or any other language?
Filed under: grammar, humour, language, linguistics Tagged: animals, cats, Danish, Finnish, grammar, humour, Icelandic, internet culture, language, linguistics, memes, Norwegian, Scandinavia, Swedish
