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xkcd #2942: Fluid Speech
(imgs.xkcd.com)
xkcd #2942: Fluid Speech
Alt text:
Thank you to linguist Gretchen McCulloch for teaching me about phonetic assimilation, and for teaching me that if you stand around in public reading texts from a linguist and murmuring example phrases to yourself, people will eventually ask if you're okay.
Wait, Verlan is l'envers, stromae is maestro... Is this Verlan thing just like Rioplatense Spanish's Vesre? (Vesre basically means revés i.e. inverse)
EDIT: Just looked it up on Wikipedia and it turns out this phenomenon happens in a number of languages: Riocontra in Italian (riocontra -> contrario), Podaná in Greek, Šatrovački in Serbia, Totoiana in Romanian.