Tongue Twisters: In search of the world’s hardest language (2009)

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.

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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...

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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.

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