Of the world’s languages, only 8% have ‘th’ sounds.

September 19, 2023 10:23 AM

Although there are only five written vowels, English has 14-21 different vowel sounds, depending on the dialect. This is a much larger vowel inventory than most languages (the smallest is 3). However the consonant inventory for English is a very typical 22, though it does have "th," a relatively uncommon one. From the World Atlas of Language Structures: Consonant inventories of languages range from a low of 6 consonants to a high of 122 consonants. The more typical consonant inventory size is in the low twenties.

Another slightly unusual sound found in English is /ŋ/, often written as ‘ng’, and found in words like ‘wing’ or ‘singing.’ This sound is called ‘engma.’ About half of languages have this phoneme. Many languages allow this ‘ng’ sound at the beginning of a word, but not in English.

posted by spamandkimchi (68 comments total)

English is a very typical 22, though it does have "th," a relatively uncommon one.

And yet we gave up þ, the coolest letter in Old English.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 10:28 AM on September 19, 2023 [40 favorites]

This isn't about vöwels œnly, but it is the greatest poem about English ever written, imho

The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité

posted by lalochezia at 10:30 AM on September 19, 2023 [19 favorites]

30 years ago I had a 1hr class each week teaching 'th' etc. to college kids in Japan.

My pedagogical game was weak compared to this teacher
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 10:33 AM on September 19, 2023 [5 favorites]

I love weird outlier language sounds, like "th" and "ng". Czech has one of my favorites, the ř, which is like a j and a trilled r together at the same time (or a "raised alveolar non-sonorant trill") and I believe this sound only occurs in that language.
posted by dis_integration at 10:34 AM on September 19, 2023 [7 favorites]

Heywood Mogroot III: "My pedagogical game was weak compared to this teacher "

I took one semester of Chinese in college, which was taught using a textbook published in the PRC (at that point, I'd been taking Japanese for three years and had taken a couple of linguistics classes). I was impressed that this Chinese textbook included diagrams showing the points of articulation in your mouth for the various sounds. I haven't seen that in any other language textbook.
posted by adamrice at 10:44 AM on September 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

Super interesting! In my own limited experience, I’ve always appreciated the clarity and simplicity that comes with the limited inventory of vowel sounds in Spanish. And probably my biggest surprise was when I started to learn (Continental) Portuguese. So many more vowel sounds!
posted by fruitslinger at 10:45 AM on September 19, 2023

Eunoia
posted by brachiopod at 10:45 AM on September 19, 2023 [5 favorites]

I didn't realize that the Czech ř was that weird - I honestly thought it was just an r followed by a j that for some reason was one letter. But I guess that's just how non-Czechs pronounce it, for example in the name Dvořák.
posted by madcaptenor at 10:47 AM on September 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

Ah yes, "th", the aspirated voiceless alveolar plosive. Strangely enough, despite "th" being a very common sound in English, its orthography instead uses that digraph for dental fricative sounds (voiceless and voiced). What a strange language!
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 10:47 AM on September 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

The consonant inventory maps reminded me of Charles Hockett's old article on "F," which led to this 2019 paper in Science: "Human sound systems are shaped by post-Neolithic changes in bite configuration." It's cited by a bunch more, but I haven't checked if they're agreeing or disagreeing or what.
posted by Wobbuffet at 10:52 AM on September 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

I took one semester of Chinese in college. . .

Yeah, well, there's gonna be a whole different problem there. . .
posted by The Bellman at 10:58 AM on September 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

I love comparative phonology and language diversity. Here's a delightful video of a man giving examples of click consonants in various South African languages like Zulu and Xhosa. He's got a great voice and is a fun performer. Skip to 2:24 if you just want the tongue twister (palate popper?)

WALS doesn't seem to have data on clicks in the consonant inventory. They do have para-linguistic use of clicks though which is more widespread than you'd think and includes English.

English's enormous vowel inventory is diabolical, particularly all the difþongs. What's the history on why we have so many? Is it yet another legacy of the French/Germanic mashup?
posted by Nelson at 10:59 AM on September 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

'Lead' rhymes with 'read'.
Also, 'lead' rhymes with 'read'.
posted by Multicellular Exothermic at 11:08 AM on September 19, 2023 [30 favorites]

I remember reading an article gadzoinks ago about a statistical comparison between all the world’s languages, and English was a huge outlier, in the top ten of languages that were the least similar to other languages. But unfortunately I can’t find it.
posted by Kattullus at 11:29 AM on September 19, 2023

When I was an ESL teacher in Korea, I learned there are two different TH sounds. They sound the same to me. I also have trouble with other similar consonants. I think I have some sort of language processing disorder.

I actually drew (really poorly) where the tongue was for the different sounds. I dunno if it helped the kids or not.
posted by kathrynm at 11:44 AM on September 19, 2023

Was disappointed that the map had one blob for the whole main island of GB. Scots (and English spoken in Scotland) has ch and an unvoiced w that you ain't got, but we traded away some A and OO sounds in exchange.
posted by scruss at 11:47 AM on September 19, 2023 [4 favorites]

It's not a disorder kathrynm! That's perfectly normal, there's a whole field of research on what consonants people can hear depending on what languages they know. Part of learning a languages is training yourself to hear the full inventory of phonemes.

Not sure what you mean by TH sounds but I can think of a whole bunch depending on the precise tongue position and whether it's voiced or not. We have the voiced/voiceless opposition in English, compare "this" and "thin".

For an adjacent pair many American English speakers can't hear, compare the aspirated vs unaspirated T sounds in Hindi. (The linked video greatly exaggerates it; I literally can't hear it in normal speech).

The whole aspect of phonology I just can't hear are tonal languages. Tones are quite common, including most (all?) forms of Chinese. I can hear it when it's exaggerated but not at all in normal speech. I can't say it either.
posted by Nelson at 11:48 AM on September 19, 2023 [4 favorites]

though it does have "th," a relatively uncommon one.

We need the "th" for a Brown University Band Button "Ithaca Thuckth ", (in American: Ithaca [the town Cornell University is in] sucks) which is a good vowel joke Bront.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:53 AM on September 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

I had to go to speech class as a kid to learn to not eff up th vs. f sounds (added bonus, my last name has both). That said, I'm happy to hear it's not that common :P
posted by jenfullmoon at 12:11 PM on September 19, 2023

i just came to talk about the interrobang‽ wrong thread?
posted by rude.boy at 12:43 PM on September 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

Oh yeah, baby! Now use rare phonemes!

(relevant but NSFW comic strip)
posted by kyrademon at 12:49 PM on September 19, 2023 [8 favorites]

i just came to talk about the interrobang‽ wrong thread?

That's the Pornhub thread further down.
posted by slogger at 12:53 PM on September 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

There's recordings you can listen to online of people clearly enunciating Nahuatl. The final sound in that word is so fascinating to me. Also at the end of the word "Quetzalcoatl" which was what led me down the path to trying to figure out how that was properly pronounced. I spent a crazy amount of time practicing that sound.

I only speak english but I love languages!
posted by SoberHighland at 12:58 PM on September 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

My brother used to pronounce three and free the same, he'd say free for both. I never noticed until a friend pointed it out, we grew up in the Midlands and the two were normally distinct, unlike further south. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/an-increasing-number-of-british-people-don-t-pronounce-the-word-three-properly-these-maps-explain-why-a7079976.html

If you can ignore the clickbait title, it's got some great maps.of the linguist diversity across the UK.
posted by Braeburn at 1:12 PM on September 19, 2023 [4 favorites]

I started English very young (age 5), but I distinctly remember the murder that was th. I was lucky in that both of my parents were functionally trilingual and could help me practice. I think it took like half a year before I nailed the sound. ESL teaching in Europe (and teaching other languages) doesn't spend nearly enough time on nailing the phonemes, so that you can really tell who learned from official instruction and who had some kind of immersion through either travel or original-language media.

(And don't get me started on English spelling vs pronunciation. You lot dare to make fun of French.)
posted by I claim sanctuary at 1:30 PM on September 19, 2023 [4 favorites]

The discussion here brings back memories of being an English conversation instructor in Japan. Thankfully the TH sound is pretty easy to show how to make and they already know voiced and unvoiced consonants so it was just a matter of putting the two together to make the right sound. Knowing when to use which TH sound took a bit more work.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 1:36 PM on September 19, 2023

(And don't get me started on English spelling vs pronunciation. You lot dare to make fun of French.)

My reasoning here: every time England colonized a place traders came back with new words (and better food). After a while they ran out of letters for new phonemes and had to improvise. I'm still trying to figure out Pinyin, which feels like it was designed for diplomats to talk shit about their hosts without being worried if intercepted.
posted by pwnguin at 1:54 PM on September 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

First of all, this is more phonology than linguistics. Don't shoot me, this just happens to have been a pandemic hobby. Just tryna be helpy!

My brother used to pronounce three and free the same, he'd say free for both.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th-fronting
posted by rhizome at 2:16 PM on September 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

Related to english vowel pronunciation, here's a loving investigation into Australia's "Intrusive R":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7DuvWVazpk
posted by Popular Ethics at 2:16 PM on September 19, 2023 [5 favorites]

Oh, and off-topic but semi-related and (I think) very interesting: the story of the letter w. I still don't get it.
posted by rhizome at 2:19 PM on September 19, 2023

>you can really tell who learned from official instruction and who had some kind of immersion through either travel or original-language media

after 3 years of the above teaching English to Japanese college kids I could tell with very good accuracy how many months/years they had been in an English-speaking country. This was (very) immediately before the internet hit so maybe things are different now.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 2:27 PM on September 19, 2023

These comments raise the issue of shibboleths:

A shibboleth (/ˈʃɪbəlɛθ, -ɪθ/ i;[1][2] Biblical Hebrew: שִׁבֹּלֶת, romanized: šībbōleṯ) is any custom or tradition, usually a choice of phrasing or even a single word, that distinguishes one group of people from another.[3][4][5] Shibboleths have been used throughout history in many societies as passwords, simple ways of self-identification, signaling loyalty and affinity, maintaining traditional segregation, or protecting from real or perceived threats.

Origin
The term originates from the Hebrew word shibbóleth (שִׁבֹּלֶת), which means the part of a plant containing grain, such as the ear of a stalk of wheat or rye;[6][7] or less commonly (but arguably more appropriately)[a] "flood, torrent".[8][9]

The modern use derives from an account in the Hebrew Bible, in which pronunciation of this word was used to distinguish Ephraimites, whose dialect used a different first consonant. The difference concerns the Hebrew letter shin, which is now pronounced as [ʃ] (as in shoe).[10] In the Book of Judges, chapter 12, after the inhabitants of Gilead under the command of Jephthah inflicted a military defeat upon the invading tribe of Ephraim (around 1370–1070 BCE), the surviving Ephraimites tried to cross the River Jordan back into their home territory, but the Gileadites secured the river's fords to stop them. To identify and kill these Ephraimites, the Gileadites told each suspected survivor to say the word shibboleth. The Ephraimite dialect resulted in a pronunciation that, to Gileadites, sounded like sibboleth.[10] In Judges 12:5–6 in the King James Bible, the anecdote appears thus (with the word already in its current English spelling):

In particular, the English consonant 'l' was used as a shibboleth against the Japanese in WW2:

Some American soldiers in the Pacific theater in World War II used the word lollapalooza as a shibboleth to challenge unidentified persons, on the premise that Japanese people would often pronounce both letters L and R as rolled Rs.[22] In Oliver Gramling's Free Men are Fighting: The Story of World War II (1942) the author notes that, in the war, Japanese spies would often approach checkpoints posing as American or Filipino military personnel. A shibboleth such as "lollapalooza" would be used by the sentry, who, if the first two syllables come back as rorra, would "open fire without waiting to hear the remainder".[23]

Does that imply proper pronunciation of the name of the iconic Japanese monster 'Godzilla' is difficult for native speakers of English attempting to speak Japanese, and might function as a shibboleth in some contexts?
posted by jamjam at 2:27 PM on September 19, 2023 [4 favorites]

Don't get me started: Shibboleth (software) - Wikipedia.
posted by zengargoyle at 2:38 PM on September 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

When I was an ESL teacher in Korea, I learned there are two different TH sounds

You can hear that difference in the words “thigh” and “thy”. It’s basically your standard aspirated versus unaspirated but-otherwise-the-same sound.


I still recall a linguistics class pointing out that what makes the “th” sound unusual is that most languages find it odd to stick your tongue out of your mouth to pronounce a part of it.
posted by los pantalones del muerte at 2:56 PM on September 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

If you’ve ever found yourself wondering why Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom have Gerudo ladies who explicitly teach you how to make a V sound with your mouth, it’s because Japanese doesn’t have V or even its unvoiced counterpart F, and I guess the translation team just didn’t have the time or freedom to localize that into something more natural for English speakers (like maybe it could have been turned into an explanation of how to pronounce Arabic-style Q).
posted by DoctorFedora at 3:03 PM on September 19, 2023

First of all, this is more phonology than linguistics.

It's both, no "more than" about it. Phonology is one of the core research areas in linguistics.

(Source: Linguistics PhD with a specialization in phonetic and phonological typology, which is coincidentally what this post is about.)

I still recall a linguistics class pointing out that what makes the “th” sound unusual is that most languages find it odd to stick your tongue out of your mouth to pronounce a part of it.

There is more than one "th" sound in English, an unvoiced and a voiced one. You might be misremembering your class because you don't have to stick your tongue out of your mouth to produce them. They're interdental fricatives; they're produced with the tongue between the teeth (more or less). As for why they're actually rare, explanations tend toward perceptual salience - they simply don't sound that different from other fricatives, such as /f/ and /v/. They tend not to be stable and easily evolve into other sounds over time.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 3:05 PM on September 19, 2023 [13 favorites]

jamjam: "Does that imply proper pronunciation of the name of the iconic Japanese monster 'Godzilla' is difficult for native speakers of English attempting to speak Japanese, and might function as a shibboleth in some contexts?"

The Japanese name for that monster, Gojira (with a sort of tongue-flap R) is not hard for a native English speaker to learn and reproduce. There are other Japanese words that are harder—the hardest for me is enryo (hesitation) with that combination of consonants in the middle. The aspects of Japanese pronunciation that are probably harder are not the individual sounds, but the fact that English is more sing-songy with rising and falling intonations, and Japanese is flatter, also that in American English, we make diphthongs of all our vowels, but vowels are clear in Japanese.
posted by adamrice at 3:13 PM on September 19, 2023 [5 favorites]

I got invited to a random dinner a few months ago and met a guy from Georgia there. He told me his country's claim to fame is that they use every phoneme in their language so it is easy for them to have good pronunciation in foreign languages. Also unrelated to anything, I learned that Georgia has their own script, which for some reason surprised me.
posted by Literaryhero at 3:21 PM on September 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

He told me his country's claim to fame is that they use every phoneme in their language so it is easy for them to have good pronunciation in foreign languages.

This is untrue. Georgian does have an above average number of consonants, but it's far from having the most, and no language has every phoneme.

(It's wise to be skeptical of unsourced claims about language. For some reason, it's a topic that attracts a lot of misinformation. Or maybe it's just that I notice it more because it's my specialty, but a lot of things get passed around as true that are not, and are fairly easy to check.)
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 3:33 PM on September 19, 2023 [9 favorites]

The interesting thing to me about the various English TH sounds (including the silent H in words like Thomas), is that for all that there are "correct" pronounciations of the various sounds, you can 100% understand someone who swaps in other sounds like F (free/three), D ("You da man!"), or T (tree/three). Someone might get snooty and look down on those, but no one would ever wonder what you are saying.
posted by Dip Flash at 3:48 PM on September 19, 2023 [4 favorites]

I mostly teach returnees now, so I don't have many lessons where I need to get into pronunciation, but I used to do cutaway diagrams of the mouth and all that fun stuff. My whole spiel was getting them to think of successful athletes in very different sports, and asking how they would do if they were asked to play each other's sport with no preparation, and again, with six months to a year to train, and why there would (likely) be a massive improvement. I'd take that understanding of training muscles to move in certain ways, and muscle memory, and say, well, your tongue is a giant muscle, and you've been playing one sport (speaking Japanese) your whole life. If you want to get better at a new sport, you've got to teach your tongue (and mouth) a whole new way of moving, and, sorry, folks, that means practicing, training, and being willing to look and sound silly. Hard sell for a bunch of early teens who had no earthly idea why they were being forced to study this dumb language.

For my own self, I started Hebrew school in probably kindergarten (once a week, on Sunday mornings at first, then three days, Sunday, and after school on Tues/Thurs). It wasn't remotely intensive or useful, but we did learn how to pronounce sounds in Hebrew that didn't appear in English, and for a while, I tended to approach unfamiliar words English words through a Hebrew filter, especially the hard "ch" sound so common in Hebrew. I don't really remember much else from my second grade class other than the way my teacher's eyes bugged out when we were studying the presidents, and I tried to say the name Buchanan out loud for the first time.
posted by Ghidorah at 4:10 PM on September 19, 2023 [6 favorites]

> it’s because Japanese doesn’t have V or even its unvoiced counterpart F

What? ゔ and ふ?

> Gojira (with a sort of tongue-flap R) is not hard for a native English speaker to learn and reproduce

A lot of people--at least USians--seem to get it close enough but not quite. The quickest way I can describe is that the Japanese ra ら is less rounded, a bit crisper, almost like a Spanish rolled r.

But yeah, the biggest "tells" overall (linguistically) are the intonation and vowels.
posted by Sockin'inthefreeworld at 4:29 PM on September 19, 2023

ふ is slightly different from f though. You leave a millimeter gap between your front teeth and bottom lip, according to my old professor.

Interesting how many old eikaiwa monkeys we have here.
posted by The Monster at the End of this Thread at 4:40 PM on September 19, 2023

I always liked Victor Borge's theory that Danish lacks a "th" because it's too cold in Denmark to risk sticking your tongue out.
posted by The Ardship of Cambry at 4:53 PM on September 19, 2023 [5 favorites]

> it’s because Japanese doesn’t have V or even its unvoiced counterpart F

What? ゔ and ふ?

I assure you that ふ, though romanized with an "f," is not pronounced like English F — it's pronounced through mostly-closed lips, more like you're trying to whistle and failing, or just casually blowing air between your lips. No teeth involved at all (and in fact, there's a reason why it's technically considered h+u within Japanese orthography). This is related to why Japanese people can write "you're supposed to use the V sound" with ヴ but in almost all cases just pronounce it as B, especially because there are no Japanese words that use that sound. It's kind of akin to how, if memory serves, European Spanish speakers apparently largely do not distinguish between B and V nowadays, come to think of it.
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:12 PM on September 19, 2023

They're interdental fricatives; they're produced with the tongue between the teeth …

Yes, that was indeed the core point of the humorous comment from the professor. We were all aware you don't actually stick it out of your mouth.
posted by los pantalones del muerte at 5:15 PM on September 19, 2023

I agree and am aware (as Japanese was my first language) that ふ is not exactly an F sound but it definitely is closer to F than H. F gets expressed as ファ, フィ etc but standard pronunciation doesn't say "hu" for ふ.
It wasn't Super Hamicoms that we grew up with :P

We can claim "there's no _ sound in this language" but this is what the language came up with to most closely approximate the sounds for loan words that became part of the language. (Side rant: People used to tell me there's no L sound but there seem to be plenty of Jpop songs that annoyingly insist on pronouncing anything ら行 as La Li Lu Le Lo~)

> but in almost all cases just pronounce it as B, especially because there are no Japanese words that use that sound

Hmm I wonder if there's some kind of demographic/subculture thing, because there are Japanese people I hang out with who pronounce their Vs as opposed to Bs, etc. There is sometimes a generational thing with the Z-J distinction because of the changing transliteration conventions.

/FeefifofumDerail
posted by Sockin'inthefreeworld at 6:26 PM on September 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

Someone might get snooty and look down on those, but no one would ever wonder what you are saying.

Hah, the people who sent me to speech class would beg to differ!
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:33 PM on September 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

Hah, the people who sent me to speech class would beg to differ!

I bet they did. But how many native speakers of English would actually struggle to understand "Who dis?" or "My address is two-free-six Maple Street"? Kids garble things up in all kinds of ways and it's great that schools have support for that, but in reality English is really robust specifically around TH sounds.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:33 PM on September 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

Aptly enough, I find I have no idea which "th" sound is being referenced in the original post!

The sound in this?

The sound in thing?

The sound in eighth? (which tends to be my default reading because it's the sound of the consonant from my Indian mother tongues which gets transliterated in english as 'th'!)

The sound in the American pronunciation of Thailand?

The wikipedia article about this phoneme is excellent: it goes into great detail about all the variations in pronouncing the various types of 'th' sounds in english around the world.

There are way too many possibilities here. I'd LOVE to know which of these sounds, exactly, is uncommon amongst the languages of the world!
posted by MiraK at 8:52 PM on September 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

I love weird outlier language sounds, like "th" and "ng"

Welsh "LL" (as in: Llangollen, Llewellyn, etc) is pronounced sort of midway between f, th, and L and is very hard for non-native Welsh speakers to master (this is why Shakespeare has a Welshman called Fluellen in Henry V).
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 8:56 PM on September 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

Though a native English speaker, I had a tough time learning to make the [θ] sound (that's IPA for th as in three), and I can remember the exact moment I figured it out; I was lying in bed talking to myself at the time. As soon as my tongue slipped into the right spot, I could tell I'd finally gotten it. I must have been about 9.

Prior to that epiphany, I was fully aware that th and f were pronounced differently; I just had my own weird way of pronouncing th which other people perceived as [f]. But it wasn't exactly like my [f]! To make the first sound in three (as opposed to free), I curled my lower lip inward, so my teeth touched my lip at a different, further-out point than for [f] (producing some extra friction in the process). Of course other English speakers couldn't "hear" me doing this, since normative English does not make use of this contrast. I've long wondered whether any other language (or maybe even some dialect of English?) does so.
posted by aws17576 at 9:02 PM on September 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

I learned English in an English-speaking environment as a Polish-speaking child, and it is wild to me how difficult it seems to be for some Polish people to replicate the th sound. This has become my personal shibboleth for people who learned English in Poland from someone else who learned English in Poland, because they invariably seem to have this problem (as opposed to people who have lived in an English-speaking country, although it's not always a guarantee).

The part that's wild is that they don't use any of the reasonable approximations that we hear in dialects (d, f, t), but what are (to my ear) sibilants that are not even close (s, z, ts). I guess it's a reverse lisp.
posted by confluency at 12:02 AM on September 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

As a Bob ap Llewellyn, the old story of how the bishop was taught to pronounce LL was trotted out on the reg'lar:
'Your Lordship must please to put your episcopal tongue to the roof of your apostolic mouth, and then hiss like a goose!'.
posted by BobTheScientist at 1:38 AM on September 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

Auf dem Landsitz North Cothelstone Hall von Lord und Lady Hesketh-Fortescue befinden sich außer dem jüngsten Sohn Meredith auch die Cousinen Priscilla und Gwyneth Molesworth...
posted by Wolfdog at 3:45 AM on September 20, 2023

I learned English in an English-speaking environment as a Polish-speaking child, and it is wild to me how difficult it seems to be for some Polish people to replicate the th sound.

I know Dutch people here whose English sounds native and you wouldn't know the difference except suddenly they say for example 'anudder' instead of 'another' and they give themselves away.

Of course, I'm still working on properly pronouncing words like 'Schiphol' and 'Vleermuis' not to mention one of the local beers, 'Eeuwige Jeugd', so I am not one to cast stones.

Or the 'Gogh' as in Vincent Van Gogh. Supposedly the first g is a voiced velar fricative and the final g is a voiceless velar fricative. I can't really do either.
Of course Vincent probably wouldn't care. He preferred to read and write in French.
posted by vacapinta at 4:25 AM on September 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

The Japanese name for that monster, Gojira (with a sort of tongue-flap R) is not hard for a native English speaker to learn and reproduce.

Hah... not necessarily.

I remember my Japanese-language teacher explaining how to make the Japanese 'l/r' sound. It's easy! You just put your tongue on the roof of your mouth midway between where it goes for the 'l' sound and where it goes for the 'r' sound!

Apparently this is helpful advice for many native English speakers, but my (SE England) 'r' sound doesn't involve the tongue at all: it's teeth and lips only. I absolutely cannot get the Japanese sound right.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 7:59 AM on September 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

My favorite thing about the design of tlhIngan Hol (the Klingon language) is that while all of its phonemes are found in Terran languages, there is no single Terran language that contains every phoneme in tlhIngan Hol. It has some uncommon sounds, like [tˡɬ] (voiceless alveolar lateral affricate), but not [θ].
posted by Carcosa at 8:11 AM on September 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

Don’t Th-front me
posted by notoriety public at 8:53 AM on September 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

You’re just a verbalizer, verbalizer
posted by notoriety public at 8:54 AM on September 20, 2023

I pronounce "appellation" and "Appalachian" the same.
posted by kirkaracha at 9:37 AM on September 20, 2023

So you’re saying that there’s a regional appellation for the Appalachian region?
posted by notoriety public at 9:41 AM on September 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

Ah yes, "th", the aspirated voiceless alveolar plosive. Strangely enough, despite "th" being a very common sound in English, its orthography instead uses that digraph for dental fricative sounds (voiceless and voiced). What a strange language!

English used to have a letter for this sound, "þ" (thorn), which still exists in Icelandic. It fell out of use after the invention of the printing press, because typesetting equipment was imported from the European continent, and the languages on the continent didn't use that letter. Before standardizing on "th", the letter "y" was sometimes used in place of "þ", which is where the spelling "Ye" as in "Ye Olde Shoppe" comes from.
posted by jomato at 12:13 PM on September 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

"Who would know aught of art must learn and then take his ease."

(exercise for cycling through the panoply of RP vowels)

An olde-schoole BBC interview about accents, wherein Lord John Reith (born Stonehaven, Scotland, educated at a technical college in Glasgow) talks with Malcolm Muggeridge (born Surrey, educated at Cambridge).

"Do I speak very definitely Scots to you?"

"Oh, very."

[To my ear they both sound like heightened RP]
posted by Pallas Athena at 12:32 PM on September 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

Wonderful interview. At 1:55 ("what I tried to get was") Reith uses the voiceless bilabial fricative that DoctorFedora and Sockin'inthefreeworld were talking about for Japanese, [ɸ], as a realization of scruss's Scots unvoiced w.
posted by hoist with his own pet aardvark at 12:57 PM on September 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

I am disappointed that thorn snuck into this thread immediately but it's brother eth, which I believe also got used in English, didn't. Eth you all!
posted by How much is that froggie in the window at 7:25 AM on September 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

So you’re saying that there’s a regional appellation for the Appalachian region?

District 12?
posted by kirkaracha at 1:54 PM on September 21, 2023

If you’re tired of the TH why not learn nederlands? Dit, dat, ding, de, drie, dank, vader, moeder, plus lots of other fun cognates!
posted by autopilot at 11:42 PM on September 21, 2023 [1 favorite]