Re:Tongue Twisters: In search of the world’s hardest languag...
by qsi on Wednesday April 21, 2021 @05:22AM
(#26887166)
In addition Czech has the sound ř, which is almost impossible to pronounce unless you learn it in childhood. I don't know of any other language with that sound. Tongue-twisters will almost by definition explore the weird sound combinations in any language, but Czech is a fruitful hunting ground for these!
Interestingly, the geographically close but linguistically unrelated Hungarian makes up for all the vowels that Czech eschews. They're almost polar opposites in vowel usage.
Re:Tongue Twisters: In search of the world’s hardest languag...
by yorwba on Wednesday April 21, 2021 @07:09AM
(#26887957)
Phoible lists four phoneme inventories with the Czech <ř> ([r̝] in IPA), three of which are varieties of Czech and the fourth being Lyélé in Burkina Faso: https://phoible.org/parameters/1214D761CC44F5F017FD63EA26B45...
However, Phoible is not exactly complete. E.g. Wikipedia has a different list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_dental,_alveolar_and_po...
Re:Tongue Twisters: In search of the world’s hardest languag...
by unionpivo on Wednesday April 21, 2021 @07:19AM
(#26888055)
It sounds very familiar to me, I am Slovenian and our sound Ž sounds similar to ř
I know that Czech also has Ž, but to my ears we pronounce it harder, so words like žrelo, or žrebiček ... it kind of comes close.
Btw there's a saying that Hungarian originated from a Slovakian guy falling down the stairs and cursing.
Czech has different specialties, like vowelless words (vchrstls) and vowelless tongue twisters (strč prst skrz krk).
Also the weird-looking "nenaolejuje-li mě Julie, naolejuji já ji", which is a surprisingly normal sentence (unless Julia lubricates me, I will lubricate her).