Tumajarbisaun

Wifenlooof, eselifterbraun: a phonetic-mondegreen-turned-meme

Posted on 2022 August 23

Around two months ago I saw the following video on alexlion0511's YouTube1 Channel.

Called "Wenomachainsama", one of the most intriguing titles of any video I'd seen, it turned out to just be some meme I didn't get. Except, this meme was linguistic; in particular, it was an English-to-phonetic mondegreen. That is, speakers were "mishearing"2 the lyrics to Calvin Harris' Summer. The meme consists of the four words below:

  • Wenomachainsama: When I met you in the summer
  • Tumajarbisaun: To my heartbeat sound
  • Wifenlooof: We fell in love
  • Eselifterbraun: As the leaves turned brown

This blogpost, as the title implies, is focused on the second line: tumajarbisaun. It struck me as odd that, while the meme spread in English-speaking communities, everyone seemed to accept the j to represent the [h] sound. Why would an English speaker use j for that?

As it turned out, one trip to Know Your Meme later, the meme originated from Spanish-speaking Instagram user dank.__.growlithe. So of course j was [h], and then the meme spread to English-speaking communities.3

Therefore, the meme is actually an English-to-Spanish-phonetic mondegreen; in fact, we can break down the exact phonetic transitions. Let's do it!

  1. To my heartbeat sound (English)
  2. ≈ [tumahaːrtbiːtsound]
  3. → [tumahaːrbiːsoun] (remove word-final stops)
  4. ≈ Tumajarbisaun (Spanish)

There we go; a "real-world" use for linguistics, or something. But I just found this kind of cool that I could almost reconstruct the history of the meme through the phonetics of a nonsense word(!).

  1. Does capitalizing YouTube as YouTube make me seem old? Do people just say Youtube now? Oops. ↩

  2. Deliberately, as opposed to accidentally. ↩

  3. I'm actually surprised most English speakers accepted that j just makes the [h] sound. But maybe people don't care and it's just a meme. ↩