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April 22, 2015 8:34 PM   Subscribe

 
Q: What is the strangest sound in the Swedish language?

A: Probably "-ngwa-". Or "Swee-".
posted by Joe in Australia at 9:11 PM on April 22, 2015


That's not so far off the inhaled "yep" of some Yankees and Canadians.
posted by zadcat at 9:26 PM on April 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


Interesting! That’s different from the ingressive affirmatives I heard when in Southern Sweden, which were more like the one in Fig. 1b on Robert Eklund’s Ingressive Phonation & Speech Page. And I had no idea that ‘In Faroese and Icelandic, entire phrases are sometimes produced ingressively’—presumably Fig. 6 on Eklund’s page is an instance of that.
posted by misteraitch at 3:37 AM on April 23, 2015 [1 favorite]


In Icelandic ingressive speech functions as an intensifier or marker of surprise. For example, if you say "what are you saying?" while inhaling air it means that what the other person said is surprising, shocking even. This isn't only the case with certain phrases, but applies to any sentence in the correct context. For example, if you said "the sky is blue", if you did it 'on the inhale' (as the Icelandic phrase has it) then it would mean that it was shocking to you that the sky is blue, whether because it's been cloudy for days or you've had some kind of corrective eye surgery and can now perceive the color blue.
posted by Kattullus at 6:33 AM on April 23, 2015 [2 favorites]


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