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In the Finnish civil war in 1918 the White Guard asked captives to say "one" in Finnish ("yksi"). The word starts with the wovel [y]. This is very hard to even
by jampekka 3y ago
In the Finnish civil war in 1918 the White Guard asked captives to say "one" in Finnish ("yksi"). The word starts with the wovel [y]. This is very hard to even learn to pronounce.
When the Russian speaking captives tried and failed to utter the [y] they were shot on the spot. Finnish natives got the luxury to starve often to death in concentration camps.
In WW2 the sibboleth was changed to "höyryjyrä".
- kspacewalk2 3y agoIn the early days of the Russian invasion, Ukrainians used "palyanytsia" as a shibboleth to detect spies. How well that worked in detecting actual spies is anyone's guess, but you can hear the difference in pronunciations really well if you enter паляниця into Google translate and use the TTS function with Russian and Ukrainian. It's really very difficult for a Russian to learn to pronounce this, but anyone who grew up in Ukraine (even if their first language is Russian and they struggle to converse in Ukrainian, like many older people in the south where I'm from) have no issues with it whatsoever due to many years of exposure to the relevant phonemes.