How do you pronounce "antifa"?
With all the news about President Trump declaring "antifa" a domestic terror organisation, I heard a few local newsreaders saying this word on television. And their pronunciation of this word surprised me.
I've been mentally pronouncing this word as "AN-ti-fa", with the emphasis on the first syllable and a short vowel sound in the second syllable.
They pronounced it as "an-TEE-fa", with the emphasis on the second syllable, with a long vowel sound in that syllable.
My pronunciation is influenced by knowing that "antifa" is short for "anti-fascist". I don't know of any word with the prefix "anti-" where the second syllable is emphasised and the "i" sound is lengthened. Usually, the emphasis in "anti-" words is placed on the first syllable: "AN-ti-bac-TE-ri-al"; "AN-ti-TE-rro-rism"; "AN-ti-gen"; "AN-ti-bo-dy". So, I naturally emphasised the first syllable in "antifa": "AN-ti-fah".
When I heard the newsreaders saying "an-TEE-fa", it makes the word sound like an imported word/name from Spanish or Portuguese or Italian.
Is there a common pronunciation for this word? How do you pronounce it?
A cynic might say this is no accident, and they obfuscate the origins of the term through that pronunciation as an exercise in anti-branding.
One might.
Except that I'm talking about Australian newsreaders from the public broadcasting service - they have no reason at all to obfuscate the origins of the term.
The first time I really started noticing the term Antifa, it was from Fox News. They were hammering the term hard. They pronounced it An-TEE-fa.
Trump was calling Neo Nazi's in Charlottesville "fine young men" and saying in regards to a neo nazi literally driving over top of counter protesters that "there were problems on both sides."
If you coin the term, you define the pronunciation, and I have never seen an anti-fascist protester refer to themselves as Antifa.
As @ThatFanficGuy has been saying all over this thread, Fox News didn't coin this term.
If you popularize the term, you define the pronunciation?
Or are you arguing over more than just semantics?
According to ThatFanficGuy's link, that "antifa" was pronounced "an-TEE-fa" long before Fox News got hold of the word. They didn't define the pronunciation in any way.
I'm not arguing semantics. I'm pointing out your factual error in assuming that Fox News decided how to pronounce this word.
No, you are ignoring my point. You are ignoring NaraVara's point. These protesters never called themselves Antifa. Fox News called them Antifa. To distract from the fact that they were anti fascist. And now we are arguing over pronunciation. How convenient for Rupert Murdoch.
Yes. Just like they called Donald Trump "Donald Trump". It was the existing name, already provided and with a known pronunciation".
It's a German loanword.
If you wanna do right by the german language, stress on the first syllable, AN-tih-fuh. And in the AN, none of that funny business where you're not really sure if you want to use an "a" or an "e". Use the a from garage, not the a from can.
Is that "garage" as in "ger-AHH-j" or as in "GAR-aj"?
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/pronunciation/english/garage
It's the "a" from a posh british "can't".
:|
I don't know, I just live here.
And frankly, either form of A in garage is close enough to what we need here. Just don't do an american "can't". It's not Äntifa. Though I assume non-germans will appreciate the metalness of that.
I pronounce it "guh-rodge" so it's a little funny seeing the "A" in it referred to as strong and clear.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_German_phonology#Stress:
To clarify, my statement was not about german pronunciation in general, but more about german pronunciation of antifa specifically. Stress on the first syllable.
I'm not seeing anything there to contradict @vektor's statement that the stress in "antifa" falls on the first syllable, rather than the second syllable.
There ain't nothin'.
Alright, I'm officially in a rabbit hole of
my ownyour making and I need a linguist to save me. I am sure there are some phonics rules that can help me better understand this but I don't know what they are.This post made me realize that I use different pronunciations for lots of different "anti-" words, and I don't know why some feel intuitively right or wrong. Here's a quick chart based on what "feels" right to my ear (but that I have absolutely no linguistic justification for). I also imagine this whole thing is subject to regional differences.
As you can see, I actually say the "anti-" part of each of those words differently, and while some of them can wear more than one entrance look ("antibacterial" seems to work no matter how I say it) the others don't work if I try to force a different pronunciation on them.
Now I feel like I'm further from the truth than when I started!
The reason that you pronounce these differently have a number of different factors, but I'm going to touch on "antigen" and what happened there. You've been schwaed! From wikipedia: In linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa (/ʃwɑː/, rarely /ʃwɔː/ or /ʃvɑː/;[1] sometimes spelled shwa)[2] is the mid central vowel sound (rounded or unrounded) in the middle of the vowel chart, denoted by the IPA symbol ə, or another vowel sound close to that position. To put it more simply, schwa is the easiest and most neutral vowel sount that you can make. Any vowel can make the sound, and in this case (or at least the way I say it) the i in antigen has taken on that sound. The reason is pretty simple - since it's the easiest vowel sound to make, lots of vowels eventually turn into it because of how english speakers speak, which is to rush and simplify. In some cases - the famous linguistic example is "chocolate" - the schwa is even eventually removed in the word:
chock-oh-late -> chock-uh-lit -> chock-lit
I would guess that this specific example relates to all the other examples as well; they are in the process of having the vowels middled, because it makes them take less time to say. Eventually they'll all be schwaed. If any of them had consonants that were blendable they would probably eventually not be pronounced at all, but none of the consonants on either side here blend well.
Edit: I looked at a few of these in more detail, and it turns out the most of the "right" pronunciations are monophthongs (I could have said single vowel, but then would have missed the opportunity to whip out that beaut right there), and the "wrong" pronunciations have diphthongs - vowel sounds that are compose of two distinct vowel sounds smashed together. They're more examples of the english speaker's tendency to simplify vowel sounds as long as it is still possible to understand what is being said.
Second Edit: was looking into some interesting sources to share, and found that of course Tom Scott had done a video on this, so it might be of interest.
In English, the only linguistic justification you need is statistics of usage. English is not a prescriptivist language – in that it is accepted that no one dictates how certain words should be pronounced or written. It is, instead, a descriptivist one: its dictionaries are all based on regular usage.
Yours is anecdotal evidence, but it is also, considering the kind of subject matter we're dealing with, a point of data. You're not so much making a case at this stage, but you are providing data for someone who would. To make a case, you're going to need to present some level of analysis: maybe parsing of books circa late 2010s, maybe statistical analysis of the text in newspaper for the last ten years.
How did you arrive at "an-TEE-fa" for "antifa"? I'm interested in your logic for that pronunciation.
No idea. I don't know enough about phonics to know why that feels right to me -- only that it does.
Okay.
Just to add some more linguistic color, there was a post about this on Language Log. That blog post happens to be the citation for the two International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions on the Wikipedia page.
In pronunciation 1, the first syllable is stressed (that is what the ˈ before the syllable indicates in IPA). The second pronunciation puts stress on the second syllable.
Being an American English speaker myself, I would use the second pronunciation, but it’s interesting to note that the name is borrowed from German, where the first pronunciation would be preferred.
Thanks.
The audio of Jake Tapper saying "AN-ti-fa" is pretty much how I imagined this word being pronounced.
I think I'll find it difficult to switch to the more common pronunciation: "an-TEE-fa". And this line...
... gives me permission to stay with "AN-ti-fa". :)
Often when proper names are borrowed from one language to another there are multiple variations that are adopted, and often multiple spellings as well, depending on the language pair and the spelling/transliteration standards. Some other German names that have preferred German pronunciations that I hear English speakers use are Bayer and Volkswagen (though anglicized pronunciations are more common to hear where I live). Since neither German nor English normally explicitly encode stress information in their writing systems, and they have highly overlapping alphabets, it’s very difficult to nail down what is the expected pronunciation of a written name like Antifa, especially if you only see it written, and you don’t know the language of origin. It’s a great question which highlights many of the subtleties of linguistic borrowing of names.
Ultimately, you don’t need anyone’s permission to pronounce words the way you see fit. You just need to be prepared to clarify if your pronunciation is unintelligible to those you communicate with. 😉
As someone who went to Berkeley, I feel like I'm basically an expert on antifa pronunciation (jk)
But most people said an-TEE-fa
Interesting. Thanks.
It's more or less German in origin so why not?
Now the tactic/organization method/culture isn't common here any more, it disappeared in 00 but I mean the songs etc still remains so why not?
The words pronunciation is probably lingering from those old songs?
Personally I've always said it as "An-TII-fah" but thats how everyone pronounced it here so don't know why specifically.
"Zona Antifascista" for example:
https://youtu.be/ec3U0noM9o8
EDIT: got stuck in "old song mode" and now I want the US media to talk about "uultimm yyper total gauche" instead :)
https://youtu.be/PbKeZwBaSXI
EDIT2: even older songs - the classic "Alerta Alerta Anfifascista"
https://youtu.be/q15qLdQ9bNM
It is German in origin.
It's also pronounced ANTI-fa in German.
Yeah so thats a bit of an odd one afaik - the "anti-fah" travels and becomes stressed on the second syllable and I've heard Germans pronounce it "anTi-fah" and stick to that pronounciation (probably went full circle around).
I guess its like "Mozzarrella" and similar words clashing with their own origins. My point is that there can't be a "correct" usage. That the words first of isn't English in popular origin (meaning it gets that "foreign charm" intonation), then have gone through a grinder of different languages mimicking the pronunciation and by now - this is just what the word sounds like.
Plus lets be honest "Anti-fah" although correct here too, rolls horribly. Trying to imagine it spoken in my language feels jittery and weird in comparison
That's a subjective opinion. To my ear, "an-TEE-fah" was very jarring.
To me, the word is about being "anti" something. That's "AN-ti-fah" (like "AN-ti-bo-dy"). It feels wrong when it sounds like a Spanish food or Italian wine.
Oh I ment in my language. If pronounced differently it sounds like someone having the hiccups in the middle of the word or can't talk properly.
But I mean, you pronounce it like you like I suppose? If a lot of people where you are from prefer that it will change. It's not like it has any rules connected to it.
But as for reason - I think its the words cultural origin, the way its pronounced as the word moved across different areas and then just repetition.
I'd never heard the word spoken until last night on the news, and it didn't sound like I expected it to. So I'm checking.
But I remember that I used to mentally mispronounce "misled" as "MY-z'ld" until I finally realised it was the past tense of "mislead", not "misle" (which had I back-constructed as the source of this unknown word).
Oh I have a lot of English words like that 😀 seriously “privacy” am I completely deranged or is it / can it be pronounced PRIVV-ah-sea? I don’t want to call it Praiva-sea
It is? "Anti" is a Greek word element, and "fascist" comes from the old Latin word "fasces".
Culturally. The pronunciation is probably based on how its heard being pronounced, not how it should technically be pronounced (like "Ceasar" for example) and the 90s Antifa movements sprung out of the BZ movements and Black Bloc in the early 90's afaik
It's bizarre to me that people pronounce it like "Queen Latifah" when it's anti-something. It's like "Eye-raq" or "Assburger's" again.
I didn't know it had German origins. But still, I'm not German, and it would sound really odd for me to pronounce it like that - enough that it might furrow brows and cause people to misunderstand me. I think there's a decent chance that they might actually ask me if I meant Latifah.
My understanding is that each linguistic community makes their own rules based on their accents, phonetics and culture. There’s no such thing as a globally correct pronunciation of foreign terms. But yeah as a Portuguese speaker I would say "an-TEE-fan" (the last syllable is wide open in my region).
Oh hell, now that you got me thinking about it, I've now realized that I've been pronouncing the prefix anti– up to 3 completely different ways depending on the word. This is gonna bother me to no end.
(To answer the question though: I've always been pronouncing it an-TEE-fah)
My anecdote: The only time I have heard the word in person was about two years ago on a commuter bus which was usually fairly quiet. This particular night a new rider was loudly making conversation with whoever was close by, and I happened to be one of those people. It was super uncomfortable. He spoke about being part of the the an-TEE-fa movement. It jarred me because that is not how I had been saying it in my head, but that is the way I have pronounced it in my head ever since.
I pronounce it with the emphasis on the first syllable, although I tend to read it as an-tee-fa and I've never heard it said out loud.
I generally pronounce it as a two syllable world, "AN-teefa", with the first syllable stretched out a little and the second rushed over. My mom and older brother (who I talk to when I talk politics IRL) were both raised in Germany and pronounce it as "an-TEE-fa", 3 syllables with the stress on the second, so I think mine is a mutant of theirs and the general English pronunciation.
"An-tee-fah"
Stress changes, sort of, with the sentence I'm using it in, but it's usually more like "Anti-fa" or "Ant-ifa"
"Anti-fa", but I did not grow up in Anglophone countries. My first encounter with the term was in French and there was little doubt about it being short for "Antifasciste", so while I understand how somebody could arrive at "an-tee-fa" it stil sounds like putting the emPHAsis on the wrong sylLAble to me.