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These things are interesting, this sound is so common in Swedish so it feels like it would be common everywhere but I can't think of any English word where I us

These things are interesting, this sound is so common in Swedish so it feels like it would be common everywhere but I can't think of any English word where I use it. Like, chocolate has that sound in Swedish but not in English. It is kinda like when I learned that J and Y are pronounced differently in English, both are pronounced like Y in Swedish and the J sound doesn't exist. I didn't even hear the difference between them when native English speakers talked for over a decade. It was only when I saw people making fun of a guy for not knowing the difference that I looked it up, and now the difference sounds so obvious!

ljm 7y ago
I’m not a linguistic but there seems to be an amazing ambiguity around I, E and Y. The English E covers е, и, (roughly) ы in Russian. The English y covers the same but also partially у and ё. When you get to dialectic English, then all of those vowels have different vocalisations or they otherwise don’t exist. And in all cases Y is a vowel and the same as J. I love languages and linguistics and this kind of thing. What’s more, take this to Spain and South America and in Castellano your ‘ll’ is more like an English ‘y’, but in Latin American it’s more of a ‘dj’ or an English ‘j’.
- jdmichal 7y ago
  What you're seeing is the fact that /j/ (English Y as in <you>) is a semivowel, which is paired with /i/ (English long-E as in <feet>). This means that the sounds are almost exactly the same -- the consonant version tends to be a bit more restricted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semivowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semivowel EDIT: Also, the Spanish <ll> as /ʒ/ (S in English treasure) is not nearly as extent in South America as you might think. It's still mostly limited to Argentina and Uruguay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye%C3%ADsmo#She%C3%ADsmo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye%C3%ADsmo#She%C3%ADsmo EDIT EDIT: I misread the symbols a bit, and in other areas of South and Central America it's /ʝ/ instead of /ʒ/, which is not a very big difference at all. (Palatal vs postalveolar... Basically neighbors.)
  - DonaldPShimoda 7y ago
    > Also, the Spanish <ll> as /ʒ/ (S in English treasure) is not nearly as extent in South America as you might think. It's still mostly limited to Argentina and Uruguay: In Puerto Rican Spanish (at least, my grandmother's family's accent), the <ll> is more of a /dʒj/ sort of thing. "llama" comes out to "djyamma", with the "dj" softened significantly. Not sure how to express that more precisely in IPA, though.
    - jdmichal 7y ago
      Maybe /ʝ/? That's the palatal version of /ʒ/, which explains your desire to add a /j/ in there. The Wikipedia I linked is about the merging of <ll> and <y> to /ʝ/ if you want to read more. Interestingly, I don't hear this a lot in the northern Mexican Spanish I hear, even though all of Central America is marked as merged. I didn't read it correctly the first time, and I was wrong to call it out in the first place. The difference between /ʝ/ and /ʒ/ is not so big for me to have said anything.
    - ljm 7y ago
      That was precisely what I was trying to allude to :) ‘ll’ is a soft ‘dj’ in Columbia also.
- heavenlyblue 7y ago
  I find it fascinating how Greek ф became th in English and then was again reinvented as F. But English still pronounce all of the Greek ф’s as th.
  - DonaldPShimoda 7y ago
    Phi is, I believe, pronounced as a voiceless bilabial fricative, which does not exist in English. Instead, we have the voiceless labiodental fricative /f/. If I remember my phonology correctly, Japanese uses the bilabial sound but in romanized text it's spelled with an f, which causes English speakers to use the labiodental sound. Not sure why phi would be mapped to the voiceless interdental fricative ("th") though. I thought that came from theta. But I have not studied Greek, so I really don't know haha.
    - jdmichal 7y ago
      Modern Greek uses /f/ also. It was only /ɸ/ for a brief transition period. Spanish, however, uses the voiced version /β/ as an alternation for /b/, hence <Cuba> /kuβa/. (This is sometimes described as a mumble, since it's not a very common sound in Indo-European languages and people don't know how to interpret it.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koine_Greek_phonology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koine_Greek_phonology (Click through the "stop consonant" sections.)
      - mcswell 7y ago
        FWIW, some (most? all? the one's I've heard, at any rate) Spanish dialects pronounce the letter 'f' as a voiceless bilabial fricative (I almost wrote 'phricative'). E.g. fotografia (sorry about the missing accent). The letters 'b' and the 'v' are pronounced in Spanish as voiced bilabial fricatives after a vowel, and as stops after a nasal consonant (which in that position will be pronounced as [m]), and generally in utterance-initial position.
  - jdmichal 7y ago
    I'm unsure what you mean by this... English <th> is inherited from Proto-Germanic, not Greek. Also, did you mean Greek θ (theta)? θ started as aspirated /tʰ/, and it's a pretty common sound change for aspiration to become a fricative, in this case /θ/. φ also made a similar journey from /pʰ/ to /ɸ/ to /f/.
hashmush 7y ago
It's the same with <ch> and <sh> for me. It took way too long for me to realize that they are different sounds in English ((Standard) Swedish does not have any affricates), or that <z> is supposed to sound different from <s> (/z/ does not exist in Swedish). If anyone pronounces <ch> as <sh>, <z> as <s> and <j> as <y> they're probably Swedish.
- tilt_error 7y ago
  I moved to Sweden from Norway at a time when writing a check really was a thing :) It baffled me that swedes would pronounce 'check' with an initial 'k'-sound (as in "käk" or "käck"), which is not at all like the pronunciation in Norway (which is similar to the English pronunciation). What a strange country :-)
  - henrikschroder 7y ago
    Similarly, Danish has kept the 'dj'-sound in English loan words like juice, where Swedish dropped the initial fricative. That tripped me up a couple of times while in Denmark...
    - simongray 7y ago
      Danish generally just adopts loanwords wholesale, never bothering to adapt the pronunciation. We have lots of words from English, French, and German that are spelled and pronounced basically like in those languages. Now as for Swedish, what trips me up is that I've met so many Swedes that (otherwise) speak great English, but seem to pronounce J sounds in a distinctly Swedish way when speaking English. I've had fluent English-speaking Swedes in a university setting asking if I want to hear a "yoke" (joke) and or maybe telling me about their "yeans" (jeans). It's so weird. It's a bit like how many French people seem unable to pronounce an H when speaking English, but Swedes are damn good at English, unlike the average French person.
      - henrikschroder 7y ago
        Yeah, the "blindness" to sounds that don't exist in your native language is funny, and usually the best way to figure out where a non-native speaker is from. If you can't even hear the difference between "sheep" and "cheap", or "joke" and "yoke", you have no way of pronouncing it right in the first place! Likewise, I can identify English with a Danish accent pretty quickly, but I can't for the love of me speak it, because I'm not good enough at Danish. But a dead giveaway is that Danish realizes 'R' as [ʁ], and many Danes pronounce it the same way when speaking English. :-P And there's something with the vowels that's just weird that Danish people do... I can't put my finger on it. (I have the opposite problem, I can't make that 'R' sound at all, which is why my Danish sounds pretty funny to native Danes.)
YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
It's like how I grew up speaking French and never realised that it only has two genders. I'm Greek and Greek has three, including a neutral gender that French lacks. It seems I was always making the assumption in my head that, .e.g. "table" or "oiseau" were neutral ("une table" is female in French and "un oiseau" is male. In Greek they're both neutral). I was a bit shocked when I realised, too. I mean, I studied French formally at some point and I had learned that it only has two genders but it never, you know, sunk in.
- lordnacho 7y ago
  There's quite a lot of language stuff you don't realise if you grew up with it. Sometimes you learn a rule without knowing what on earth the rule actually it. I had this come up once in a Danish class. The choice was between "hans" and "sin" which is a somewhat subtle thing. The thing is I never got any of the answers wrong, but I still don't really understand the difference. On the learning side, you also often get told rules that don't entirely make sense. For instance I'm told in a Mandarin class that there's a difference between 不 and 没 which is whether it's subjective or objective that something isn't true. But that's neither clear when saying something, nor clear in terms of examples I've been given. What's really weird is I speak another Chinese dialect that also has this distinction, and I also can't tell you the rule there.
  - yorwba 7y ago
    > I'm told in a Mandarin class that there's a difference between 不 and 没 which is whether it's subjective or objective that something isn't true. I don't think that rule holds. 没 is usually used to negate either 有 "have" or something in the past. E.g. 我没告诉你。 "I didn't tell you." 不 is used for everything else, i.e. 我不告诉你。 "I'm not telling you." (The interesting thing is that "have" also has a past aspect in English, e.g. "I have told you." But Mandarin doesn't use 有 as a general past marker, only the negation 没) > I speak another Chinese dialect that also has this distinction, and I also can't tell you the rule there. Which one? Is the rule the same as in Mandarin, i.e. can you produce correct Mandarin sentences despite not knowing the rule, relying just on intuition? I think Cantonese uses 冇 to negate 有.
marcus_holmes 7y ago
I'm learning German, and only found out last weekend that the reason Germans pronounce W's as V is because they don't hear the difference. I was trying to get my (German) gf to explain why some words start with a "V" sound and some with a "W" sound, and she couldn't tell the difference. It's all the same sound to them. I now know how to pronounce German W's properly (the sound exactly halfway between W and V). Of course, they pronounce V like F, so I still have to get used to that ;)
- lordnacho 7y ago
  The bible story about Shibboleths is quite an interesting example of this, and also where the term comes from.
  - 77pt77 7y ago
    https://biblehub.com/judges/12-6.htm https://biblehub.com/judges/12-6.htm For those that don't know.
    - marcus_holmes 7y ago
      ahh, killing 42,000 people because of a mispronunciation. Gotta love that pro-life attitude that religion has ;)
      - 77pt77 7y ago
        I had completely forgotten about this story. It was nice to read it once again...
- henrikschroder 7y ago
  It's probably English that's the outlier here, though. 'W' is a double-V in other European languages, only in English is it called a double-U, and treated like a vowel.
  - estomagordo 7y ago
balboah 7y ago
I’m Swedish, didn’t quite get the part about J and Y being pronounced the same? Sounds different to me
- einr 7y ago
  I think he's talking about Y when used as a consonant at the start of English words. Y exists in Swedish as a distinct vowel sound but is not used as a consonant like in English. Swedes tend to pronounce English "yes" and "yoke" as well as "juice" and "joke" all with the same Swedish J sound.
Jverse 7y ago
One thing I've noticed a lot of Swedes don't think about is that 'y' is pronounced the same as 'i' in English, as in the word 'gym'. They instead use the Swedish 'y' sound (like the German 'ü').
boomlinde 7y ago
Another Swede-ism I've noticed is the lack of distinction between e.g. "chip" and "ship" or "choose" and "shoes". Probably because so many similar spellings are bunched up under /ɧ/

ljm 7y ago

I’m not a linguistic but there seems to be an amazing ambiguity around I, E and Y. The English E covers е, и, (roughly) ы in Russian. The English y covers the same but also partially у and ё. When you get to dialectic English, then all of those vowels have different vocalisations or they otherwise don’t exist. And in all cases Y is a vowel and the same as J. I love languages and linguistics and this kind of thing. What’s more, take this to Spain and South America and in Castellano your ‘ll’ is more like an English ‘y’, but in Latin American it’s more of a ‘dj’ or an English ‘j’.

jdmichal 7y ago
What you're seeing is the fact that /j/ (English Y as in <you>) is a semivowel, which is paired with /i/ (English long-E as in <feet>). This means that the sounds are almost exactly the same -- the consonant version tends to be a bit more restricted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semivowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semivowel EDIT: Also, the Spanish <ll> as /ʒ/ (S in English treasure) is not nearly as extent in South America as you might think. It's still mostly limited to Argentina and Uruguay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye%C3%ADsmo#She%C3%ADsmo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye%C3%ADsmo#She%C3%ADsmo EDIT EDIT: I misread the symbols a bit, and in other areas of South and Central America it's /ʝ/ instead of /ʒ/, which is not a very big difference at all. (Palatal vs postalveolar... Basically neighbors.)
- DonaldPShimoda 7y ago
  > Also, the Spanish <ll> as /ʒ/ (S in English treasure) is not nearly as extent in South America as you might think. It's still mostly limited to Argentina and Uruguay: In Puerto Rican Spanish (at least, my grandmother's family's accent), the <ll> is more of a /dʒj/ sort of thing. "llama" comes out to "djyamma", with the "dj" softened significantly. Not sure how to express that more precisely in IPA, though.
  - jdmichal 7y ago
    Maybe /ʝ/? That's the palatal version of /ʒ/, which explains your desire to add a /j/ in there. The Wikipedia I linked is about the merging of <ll> and <y> to /ʝ/ if you want to read more. Interestingly, I don't hear this a lot in the northern Mexican Spanish I hear, even though all of Central America is marked as merged. I didn't read it correctly the first time, and I was wrong to call it out in the first place. The difference between /ʝ/ and /ʒ/ is not so big for me to have said anything.
  - ljm 7y ago
    That was precisely what I was trying to allude to :) ‘ll’ is a soft ‘dj’ in Columbia also.
heavenlyblue 7y ago
I find it fascinating how Greek ф became th in English and then was again reinvented as F. But English still pronounce all of the Greek ф’s as th.
- DonaldPShimoda 7y ago
  Phi is, I believe, pronounced as a voiceless bilabial fricative, which does not exist in English. Instead, we have the voiceless labiodental fricative /f/. If I remember my phonology correctly, Japanese uses the bilabial sound but in romanized text it's spelled with an f, which causes English speakers to use the labiodental sound. Not sure why phi would be mapped to the voiceless interdental fricative ("th") though. I thought that came from theta. But I have not studied Greek, so I really don't know haha.
  - jdmichal 7y ago
    Modern Greek uses /f/ also. It was only /ɸ/ for a brief transition period. Spanish, however, uses the voiced version /β/ as an alternation for /b/, hence <Cuba> /kuβa/. (This is sometimes described as a mumble, since it's not a very common sound in Indo-European languages and people don't know how to interpret it.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koine_Greek_phonology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koine_Greek_phonology (Click through the "stop consonant" sections.)
    - mcswell 7y ago
      FWIW, some (most? all? the one's I've heard, at any rate) Spanish dialects pronounce the letter 'f' as a voiceless bilabial fricative (I almost wrote 'phricative'). E.g. fotografia (sorry about the missing accent). The letters 'b' and the 'v' are pronounced in Spanish as voiced bilabial fricatives after a vowel, and as stops after a nasal consonant (which in that position will be pronounced as [m]), and generally in utterance-initial position.
- jdmichal 7y ago
  I'm unsure what you mean by this... English <th> is inherited from Proto-Germanic, not Greek. Also, did you mean Greek θ (theta)? θ started as aspirated /tʰ/, and it's a pretty common sound change for aspiration to become a fricative, in this case /θ/. φ also made a similar journey from /pʰ/ to /ɸ/ to /f/.

hashmush 7y ago

It's the same with <ch> and <sh> for me. It took way too long for me to realize that they are different sounds in English ((Standard) Swedish does not have any affricates), or that <z> is supposed to sound different from <s> (/z/ does not exist in Swedish). If anyone pronounces <ch> as <sh>, <z> as <s> and <j> as <y> they're probably Swedish.

tilt_error 7y ago
I moved to Sweden from Norway at a time when writing a check really was a thing :) It baffled me that swedes would pronounce 'check' with an initial 'k'-sound (as in "käk" or "käck"), which is not at all like the pronunciation in Norway (which is similar to the English pronunciation). What a strange country :-)
- henrikschroder 7y ago
  Similarly, Danish has kept the 'dj'-sound in English loan words like juice, where Swedish dropped the initial fricative. That tripped me up a couple of times while in Denmark...
  - simongray 7y ago
    Danish generally just adopts loanwords wholesale, never bothering to adapt the pronunciation. We have lots of words from English, French, and German that are spelled and pronounced basically like in those languages. Now as for Swedish, what trips me up is that I've met so many Swedes that (otherwise) speak great English, but seem to pronounce J sounds in a distinctly Swedish way when speaking English. I've had fluent English-speaking Swedes in a university setting asking if I want to hear a "yoke" (joke) and or maybe telling me about their "yeans" (jeans). It's so weird. It's a bit like how many French people seem unable to pronounce an H when speaking English, but Swedes are damn good at English, unlike the average French person.
    - henrikschroder 7y ago
      Yeah, the "blindness" to sounds that don't exist in your native language is funny, and usually the best way to figure out where a non-native speaker is from. If you can't even hear the difference between "sheep" and "cheap", or "joke" and "yoke", you have no way of pronouncing it right in the first place! Likewise, I can identify English with a Danish accent pretty quickly, but I can't for the love of me speak it, because I'm not good enough at Danish. But a dead giveaway is that Danish realizes 'R' as [ʁ], and many Danes pronounce it the same way when speaking English. :-P And there's something with the vowels that's just weird that Danish people do... I can't put my finger on it. (I have the opposite problem, I can't make that 'R' sound at all, which is why my Danish sounds pretty funny to native Danes.)

YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago

It's like how I grew up speaking French and never realised that it only has two genders. I'm Greek and Greek has three, including a neutral gender that French lacks. It seems I was always making the assumption in my head that, .e.g. "table" or "oiseau" were neutral ("une table" is female in French and "un oiseau" is male. In Greek they're both neutral). I was a bit shocked when I realised, too. I mean, I studied French formally at some point and I had learned that it only has two genders but it never, you know, sunk in.

lordnacho 7y ago
There's quite a lot of language stuff you don't realise if you grew up with it. Sometimes you learn a rule without knowing what on earth the rule actually it. I had this come up once in a Danish class. The choice was between "hans" and "sin" which is a somewhat subtle thing. The thing is I never got any of the answers wrong, but I still don't really understand the difference. On the learning side, you also often get told rules that don't entirely make sense. For instance I'm told in a Mandarin class that there's a difference between 不 and 没 which is whether it's subjective or objective that something isn't true. But that's neither clear when saying something, nor clear in terms of examples I've been given. What's really weird is I speak another Chinese dialect that also has this distinction, and I also can't tell you the rule there.
- yorwba 7y ago
  > I'm told in a Mandarin class that there's a difference between 不 and 没 which is whether it's subjective or objective that something isn't true. I don't think that rule holds. 没 is usually used to negate either 有 "have" or something in the past. E.g. 我没告诉你。 "I didn't tell you." 不 is used for everything else, i.e. 我不告诉你。 "I'm not telling you." (The interesting thing is that "have" also has a past aspect in English, e.g. "I have told you." But Mandarin doesn't use 有 as a general past marker, only the negation 没) > I speak another Chinese dialect that also has this distinction, and I also can't tell you the rule there. Which one? Is the rule the same as in Mandarin, i.e. can you produce correct Mandarin sentences despite not knowing the rule, relying just on intuition? I think Cantonese uses 冇 to negate 有.

marcus_holmes 7y ago

I'm learning German, and only found out last weekend that the reason Germans pronounce W's as V is because they don't hear the difference. I was trying to get my (German) gf to explain why some words start with a "V" sound and some with a "W" sound, and she couldn't tell the difference. It's all the same sound to them. I now know how to pronounce German W's properly (the sound exactly halfway between W and V). Of course, they pronounce V like F, so I still have to get used to that ;)

lordnacho 7y ago
The bible story about Shibboleths is quite an interesting example of this, and also where the term comes from.
- 77pt77 7y ago
  https://biblehub.com/judges/12-6.htm https://biblehub.com/judges/12-6.htm For those that don't know.
  - marcus_holmes 7y ago
    ahh, killing 42,000 people because of a mispronunciation. Gotta love that pro-life attitude that religion has ;)
    - 77pt77 7y ago
      I had completely forgotten about this story. It was nice to read it once again...
henrikschroder 7y ago
It's probably English that's the outlier here, though. 'W' is a double-V in other European languages, only in English is it called a double-U, and treated like a vowel.
- estomagordo 7y ago

balboah 7y ago

I’m Swedish, didn’t quite get the part about J and Y being pronounced the same? Sounds different to me

einr 7y ago
I think he's talking about Y when used as a consonant at the start of English words. Y exists in Swedish as a distinct vowel sound but is not used as a consonant like in English. Swedes tend to pronounce English "yes" and "yoke" as well as "juice" and "joke" all with the same Swedish J sound.

Jverse 7y ago

One thing I've noticed a lot of Swedes don't think about is that 'y' is pronounced the same as 'i' in English, as in the word 'gym'. They instead use the Swedish 'y' sound (like the German 'ü').

boomlinde 7y ago

Another Swede-ism I've noticed is the lack of distinction between e.g. "chip" and "ship" or "choose" and "shoes". Probably because so many similar spellings are bunched up under /ɧ/