Language researchers stumble on new way to articulate popular grain

By Gary Lim
Photos By Mark Burnham

ZEVEN – German scientists of the Spachinstitut Von Zeven (The Zeven Institute of Language) made headlines earlier this week after announcing their recent discovery of a previously unknown way of pronouncing the word “Quinoa”.

Quinoa, which has been on the collective palates and vocabularies of the western world since Oprah ate some in 2006 or something, has experienced a massive popularity boom in the last few years and has found its way into all manner of food it was never meant to be in, ranging from smoothies to bubblegum.

Originally the staple crop of the various Andean mountain peoples, they can no longer afford to buy the crop that has represented the majority of their diet since the time they settled the region. Now they are reduced to picking the crop to sell to hungry North Americans. But while North American tongues love grain’s slightly bitter and earthy flavours, they still struggle with the pronounciation of it.

Against every logical conclusion, the word Quinoa is pronounced “keen-wa” instead of the much more sensible “kwinoa”. The alternate pronounciation completely by accident in one of the German language labs when head researcher Fritz Vensel asked his research assistant Klara Viffenstein for a “kleenex” with a mouth full of schnitzel and through his greasy, meat-flecked articulation, the assistant misheard bringing him a bowl of the popular chenopod pseudograin instead.

Described as a mixture of the two original pronounciations with a healthy dose of umlauts sprinkled in, the new technical pronouncation of quinoa is / knooèwyä/.

Although the new pronounciation has yet to be rolled out for the public usage, reports are already coming in from Seattle, Vancouver and notably Portland of people derisively turning their noses up on others for mispronouncing the word. Screen printing shop owner and generally intolerable human being Celena Moon-Frye spoke with The Peak about the new enunciation of the popular South American grain.

“Oh Kweenooi, yeah, that food is so good. Nothing like a queenioa and summer squash winter broth. Or a Cuenoiwa and Spinach quiche. That sounds so good right now,” added Moon-Frye without a trace of self-awareness. As of press time, the new pronounciation has been rendered completely irrelevant by the introduction of Czkeltelachetwicquanizkobap, a newer tastier grain from the coast of Argentina, pronounced “corn.”