https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/that

That refers primarily to people or things; which refers primarily to things, and who refers primarily to people. Some authorities insist who/whom be used when making reference to people, but others, such as the Merriam-Webster dictionary, write that such prescriptions are “without foundation” and use of that in such positions is common and “entirely standard”.[2] Hence, one sees both “he is the man who invented the telephone” and “he is the man that invented the telephone.”

I prefer eleventyleven

Just learn both! But ich_iel has a lot more going on, so prioritise German.

I’m also a big fan of the lesser-known “gorbs”

I love orbs

Saarland

Curved. Swords.

Red guy should’ve waited three years to respond to that

Or cutting off the electorate’s to nose to spite its face

I’m not a lady, but I am a fan of a good pump

Feel like I’ve seen this in Tbilisi before. Where was this one?

лишишь

It’s true. In English we string words together instead of putting them into one word, so there’s not really much difference beyond the odd bit of morphology.

This sounds a lot like an issue that can be solved by slightly opening a window

Wait until you see them in cursive…

I loved looking at the illustrations in those and coming up with stories about them in my head

It’s all fun and games until they mention it to each other

Fun fact: the s was added to island in the 16th century as a mistake because grammarians added an s to isle to make it look more like the Latin insula, even though there was no s sound in either island or isle.

So in Slavonic linguistics, there’s a sound change known as the Slavic liquid metathesis, which is what gives us South Slavic forms like grad (town) as in Belgrad, as opposed to East Slavic forms, like gorod, as in Belgorod.

The reconstructed ancestor of gorod and grad is *gord (in historical linguistics, an asterisk indicates a reconstructed form). Due to changes in syllable boundary rules in the Slavic language of the day (roughly 8th/9th century AD), you could no longer have two consonants at the end of a syllable, so *gord had to change. In East Slavic, this was solved by adding an extra vowel to break up the consonant cluster, giving us gorod. In South and West Slavic, this was done by moving the /r/ sound to the onset (start) of the syllable (and the vowel was also changed), giving us grad. The “liquid” part of the name refers to “liquid” sounds, /r/ and /l/, since this particular process applied to them.

It almost looks like this is what’s going on here, although not quite. It would have to be gulgulg > gluglug to count as liquid metathesis, but the l and u switched around, which is good enough for me. Plus there’s the pun with liquid and water.

Hopefully that at least somewhat explains the joke. I don’t know if it’s very clear.

Slavic liquid metathesis moment