as a welsh person i want you all to accept that W is a vowel because honestly it makes pronouncing acronyms so much easier. wlw becomes ‘ooloo’, wjec becomes ‘oojeck’, love yourselves and stop giving us shit when we tell you welsh has 7 vowels. english actually has 15 vowel sounds but because y’all only use 5 letters you have to rely on a spelling system devised by satan
and please, enough with the “keyboard smashing” jokes. not original, not funny.
yeah, we can actually because the spelling is phonetic. meanwhile english folks have placenames like bicester or keighley or beaulieu, which you have to learn the pronunciation for individually because the rules are so inconsistent. i mean people can’t even agree how to pronounce marylebone but sure welsh place names are the weird ones
fun fact: welsh orthography is actually easy to read if you take your head out of your arse for one minute and learn our alphabet - just like french, or spanish, or korean, because surprise! languages use different spelling systems that are not based on english. novel, i know - and in the 18th century, travelling schools were able to teach people to read and write welsh in a matter of months, so that wales enjoyed a literate majority, a rare thing in europe at the time
fun fact: the english have been taking the piss out of welsh for years, just like they’ve been doing for irish, and scots gaelic, and cornish, and british sign language, and a hundred and one other languages, because evidently the fact that the whole world isn’t anglophone and monocultured and Still Part Of The Empire is a problem, and something that needs to be corrected
To this day, I think my favorite film theory that I accept in my mind as canon is the theory that Shrek literally came up with his own name on the spot as he first meets Donkey
Apologies in advance for repeating some things that have been said on another tumblr post that I cannot find.
The catalyst from the theory comes from how uncertain he sounds when first introducing himself. The “uhhh……shrek” definitely sounds like something he kinda came up with on the spot. It’s even supported when he first introduces himself to Fiona, saying it in almost the same way.
But it’s a theory that seems to make sense. None of the signs or decorations in his swamp are marked with his name (unless you count the title card in the mud, but that’s probably not diagetic). There’s no record of his existence outside of simply “ogre”. And that’s all he’d ever really been to the world. The theme of him being seen as a monster is obviously seen throughout the movie quite a bit, but that can also be seen with how he’s addressed throughout the movie.
I took a look over the transcript for the point. Up until halfway through the movie, there are only two characters who say Shrek’s name. Shrek himself, once when introducing himself, and Donkey. The first time anyone else says his name is when he first saves Fiona and asks his name, still believing him to be Prince Charming. Of course, after finding how unorthodox he is and then learning he’s an ogre, she doesn’t refer to him by name at all until the next day after the Robin Hood encounter. At no point in the movie does anyone else say the word “Shrek”. Not even Lord Farquaad. Farquaad always refers to him as “the beast” or “this thing” or “the ogre”. And that’s part of the theme of how he is seen by the rest of the world. As far as he knows, he doesn’t have a name. He’s just…an ogre.
If this theory is true, then he never really thought of having a name. At least, not until he met Donkey. Donkey might have been the first person to ask him his name. And he wasn’t someone who just ran away from him, thinking he was some hideous beast. And that’s what made him decide to give Donkey his “name”. It’s what started to give him a sense of identity as being more than a monster. It’s a theory that massively improves the movie and I will live and die by it.
I am Silver Tongue, I am an artist. I have many characters and you can check out my art in the art tag. I occasionally practice witchcraft though I don't do anything too complicated. I am girl 2 and don't know what else to put here.
