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In English, there’s only one word in the entire language with a ts sound (pizza) that’s not at the end. They probably could have come up with a name utilizing t
by withinboredom 4y ago
In English, there’s only one word in the entire language with a ts sound (pizza) that’s not at the end. They probably could have come up with a name utilizing that fact, making wake words super “easy” to recognize and hard to accidentally say.
- xnorswap 4y agoThat fact seems dubious, does tzatziki not count?
- eCa 4y agoIs tzatziki the only word that both starts and contains, but doesn’t end, with ts sound?
- eesmith 4y agotsetse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsetse_fly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsetse_fly
- denton-scratch 4y agoTzatziki, Tsetse and Tzar are not English words; OP said there was just one English word (which he identified as "pizza", which isn't an English word).
- xnorswap 4y agoIt has foreign roots but it's surely an English word by any workable definition.
- eesmith 4y agoAnd "tsetse" has been used in English for nearly 100 years longer than pizza - the latter only really introduced because of Allied soldiers sent to in Italy. Google Ngram says it wasn't until the 1970s when "pizza" was more commonly used than "tsetse." https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=tsetse%2Cpizza&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=tsetse%2Cpizza... . Or from BoingBoing today, "North Americans feared and misunderstood pizza in the 1950s" - https://boingboing.net/2022/11/21/north-americans-feared-and-misunderstood-pizza-in-the-1950s.html https://boingboing.net/2022/11/21/north-americans-feared-and... .
- YurgenJurgensen 4y agoJust off the top of my head, depending on accent or dialect: "spritzer", "waltzer", "Mitsubishi", "matzos", "mitzvah".
- eesmith 4y agoA fun code challenge! I started with https://github.com/Alexir/CMUdict/blob/master/cmudict-0.7b https://github.com/Alexir/CMUdict/blob/master/cmudict-0.7b as a list of words with pronunciation. It has: PIZZA P IY1 T S AH0 Looks like I can search for " T S " to find the "ts sound that's not at the end" % grep " T S " cmudict-0.7b | wc -l 991 Some of the non-proper nouns include ACCOUNTANCY, ANTSY, and ARTSY. I'll assume this is too close to the end to count, so require two sounds after the " T S ": % grep -E " T S [A-Z0-9]+ [A-Z0-9]+" cmudict-0.7b | wc -l 853 These include: bestseller, blitzkrieg, boatswain, bootstrap, chutzpah, craftsman, draftsmanship, footstep, hotspot, itself, jetstream, outscore, outsell, outside, postscript, shirtsleeve, shortstop, sportsmanship, statesmen, tsar, tsunami, whatsoever, yachtsman, and zeitgeist. (It doesn't have "spritzer" in the list, and uses the spelling "matzoh" instead of "matzo". I didn't look for a more complete list of word pronunciations.) Finally, two words with two occurrences of the "ts" sound, neither at the end: % grep -E " T S .*T S " cmudict-0.7b ITSY-BITSY IH2 T S IY0 B IH1 T S IY0 TSETSE T S IY1 T S IY0
- YurgenJurgensen 4y ago"Zeitgeist" seems like a bug, I've never heard anyone pronounce the leading 'z' as 'ˈts' in English, and doing so as a non-German might even be seen as 'over-pronuciation'.
- eesmith 4y agohttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/zeitgeist#Pronunciation https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/zeitgeist#Pronunciation gives two pronunciations: Pronunciation (Received Pronunciation, General American) IPA(key): /ˈtsaɪtˌɡaɪst/, /ˈzaɪtˌɡaɪst/ https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/zeitgeist https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/zeitgeist also gives two: ˈtsīt-ˌgīst ˈzīt- I tried to get statistics from listening to https://youglish.com/pronounce/zeitgeist/english https://youglish.com/pronounce/zeitgeist/english? but found I have a hard time distinguishing the two forms.
- denton-scratch 4y agoSeems implausible. ~ Fatso ~ Pitstop ~ Katsup ~ Yachtsman ~ Scotsmen ~ Batsman There don't seem to be many, admittedly.
- ConceptJunkie 4y agoThat is trivially not true.