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Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

I love the list of vowel-heavy words. You can also construct some similar words in Dutch. Or at least you used to before 1996, when a spelling change introduced hyphens into many of these:

  zeeëend - sea duck, or Velvet scoter (nowadays "zee-eend")
  koeieuier - cow udder (nowadays "koeienuier")
  zaaiuien - seed onions (still legal I think)
  kraaieëieren - crow eggs (nowadays kraaieneieren, I think)

We also have the opposite:

  angstschreeuw - cry of fear
  slechtstschrijvend - worst writing

These are fairly normal words. With a bit of creativity, you can make some that are much worse:

  borsjtsjschrokkende - borscht gorging
  haaiaaioorkonde - shark petting certificate
  weggooiooien - throw-away ewes

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I shuddered when I saw what a 4 letter word got mutilated into

originally (russian) it was Борщ

And coincidentally Borš in estonian.

And in dutch it became borsjtsjsch? How? Why? Why do you need 8 letters to transmit a single phonem?

No wonder dutch can construct these weird word combos.

Edit, nvm, apparently last sch belongs to next word. Still creepy

Because there's no close sound to щ /ɕː/ in many European languages.

Some languages approximate it with /ʂ/ (think "sh" in English). For example, Romanian: borş.

Most languages approximate it with a combination of /ʃ/ ("sh"), /t/, and /tʃ/ ("ch"):

- "sh" and "ch",

- "sh" and "t", or

- all three, "sh", "t" and "ch".

Or an approximation thereof.

In Swedish: Approximation for /ʃ/ is "sj" /ɧ/. Approximation for /tʃ/ is "tj" /ɕ/ which yields "borsjtj". Though they could've gone for just "bortj" :)

Dutch is "Borsjtsj": Approximation for /ʃtʃ/ (sh t ch) with sj /ʃ/ and t

German is "Borschtsch": Approximation for /ʃtʃ/ (sh t ch) with sch /ʃ/ and t

etc. etc.

> Most languages approximate it with a combination of /ʃ/ ("sh"), /t/, and /tʃ/ ("ch"):

> - all three, "sh", "t" and "ch".

This is not because we're confused! Just borrowing from the historical Russian pronunciation of Щ as ШЧ

My Russian teachers always used the old "fre[sh ch]eese" example for us English speakers.

To my ear "shit/sheet" are closer to щ :)

"In English, Shcha [щ] is romanized as ⟨shch⟩ or ⟨šč⟩ (with hačeks) (occasionally ⟨sch⟩, all reflecting the historical Russian pronunciation of the letter (as a combined Ш and Ч)." The story in Dutch is similar, except "sh" and "ch" aren't phonemes in Dutch so they're approximated as "sj" and "tsj".

In German, sch and tsch are normal phonemes as far as I know, but they use even one more letter to spell them.

I checked the origins of all Dutch words starting with sj- some time ago because some of them look and feel native (and because I'm a nerd), but it turned out that indeed all of them are loan words, even e.g. sjorren which comes from Frisian. It looks like all surrounding languages do have these as phonemes, but Dutch doesn't. (Not sure about Plattdeutsch.)

Yeah, it's 'borsjtsj'. No idea why. Presumably it's the closest approximation of that phoneme in Dutch, but it seems unlikely that anyone trying to pronounce the Dutch transliteration would get anywhere close to the Russian original.

Borsjt or possibly even borsj would probably be better.

There is good reason for the Dutch transliteration. Compare English, where /ʃ/ is a very common phoneme, but due to deriving the alphabet from Latin (which had no /ʃ/), there is no letter for it.

People are taught that the sound is spelled "sh", but that's not quite true:

    mission
    contrition
    sure

And as all of those examples illustrate, in addition to being a phoneme in its own right, [ʃ] is also the English allophonic reduction of the sound sequence /sj/. It's not a coincidence that "sj" is the standard Dutch spelling of the same sound. The English standard orthographical equivalent, "borshch", is less accurate than the Dutch is.

It's very interesting to compare people's view of /ʃ/ with /ʒ/, another perfectly normal native English phoneme, but one that most people insist is foreign and hard to pronounce. The only difference I see is that a standard American education covers the idea that /ʃ/ is a real sound and should be spelled "sh", while /ʒ/ is generally not mentioned. But of course the existence of the sound is not actually related to whether your teacher mentioned it in elementary school.

To add even more confusion, in my sort-of Philly accent, street is pronounced [ˈʃtɹit].

My uneducated guess on /ʒ/ is that /dʒ/ is the most common way of encountering it, so people aren't comfortable separating it out, even though it's still common. It probably doesn't help that the usual transcription is zh which basically doesn't exist in native English words.

> It probably doesn't help that the usual transcription is zh which basically doesn't exist in native English words.

Depends what you mean by "the usual transcription". The usual spelling in English is "s" followed by i or u. (As in "usual" / "measure" / "vision" / etc. etc. etc. etc.) "Zh" is the standard transcription for Russian. The same sound in Chinese is today normally transcribed "r", because that is the letter assigned to it by China's official Romanized orthography, Hanyu pinyin[1]. In Wade-Giles, it was transcribed "j".

[1] The pinyin "r" (and the Wade-Giles "j") can represent a sound anywhere along the continuum between what an English speaker would perceive as the two distinct sounds /ʒ/ and /ɹ/. (The "s" and the "r" in "measure".)

I usually spell it borscht, do they do it differently in the UK?

Borscht is also the name that I know (though as an American, I can't speak to the UK). "Borshch" is the orthographical equivalent to Russian Борщ and Dutch borsjtsj.

Borscht with a T is the Yiddish pronunciation, unlike Russian which drops the T. It's a more common spelling in areas that historically had a larger Eastern European Jewish population (like the US, where the "borscht" spelling extended out from New York).

I don't think so. I'm British and know it as "borscht"; I've never (consciously) seen "borshch" until now.

the comment was explaining which spelling would most closely resemble the original russian pronunciation. as some of the sister comments explain, borscht is the yiddish pronunciation

Borscht is the pronunciation in Bulgarian of Борщ.

Is it really? Googling for "borsjtsjsch" gives me just this thread. You've created a combination of letters never seen before by Google!

https://www.google.com/search?q=borsjtsjsch&nfpr=1

borsjtsjschrokkende

- borsjtsj

- schrokkende

borsjtsjch does not exist, borsjtsj does.

Don't forget this classic:

   hottentottententententoonstelling

This translates to 'an exhibition of tents made by hottentotten' (a word used in colonial times to refer to the Khoikhoi, the non-Bantu indigenous nomadic pastoralists of South Africa).

'sproeiauto' is still legal, one of the few Dutch words using all vowels in a row.

One of the interesting differences about Dutch spelling compared to English, is that there's an official institution (Nederlandse Taalunie, literally Dutch Language union), that sets the spelling and spelling rules for most words. The spelling of Dutch thus is the same in the Netherlands, Belgium and Suriname. The uniformity in spelling means that for most Dutch words (not loan words), you can easily tell how they're pronounced by the way they're written, as opposed to English that never really changed their spelling of words, despite some shifts in pronunciation. Readings older Dutch texts is takes slightly more effort, because the spelling of some words can be completely different from what it is now.

> you can easily tell how they're pronounced by the way they're written, as opposed to English

I see variations of this suggested for lots of languages, even my Norwegian teacher tried to convince me that Norwegian was spoken just as written. But this takes no account of regional differences in pronunciation. The words castle, boat, house, mouse, grass, for instance, all have different pronunciations depending on where in the UK one grew up. Which one is the spelling supposed to represent?

It seems to me that Dutch would be just as likely to have regional variations in pronunciation as any other language.

If Shakespeare had written phonetically he would be all but unreadable now.

Of course there are regional variations, but when speaking Standaardnederlands (standard Dutch) they are relatively small and consistent, nothing like Norwegian. With consistent meaning that the same syllable will almost always be pronounced the same way within that region. Not like English, where "bread" and "great" have completely different ways of pronouncing the "(r)ea" sound, despite being written the same way. Poems rhyme usually, wherever you go within the language region.

Local dialects have larger differences, but if they are written (relatively rare), it usually uses some form of phonetic writing, and those aren't standardized anyways.

That's certainly how we'd like to look at it, but it's only true by defining "standaardnederlands" fairly narrowly. Plenty of regional accents change phonemes, like 'ij' -> 'ie', hard 'g' to soft 'g', and some of those changes don't happen the same way across all words. Dutch is certainly not the big mess of inconsistency that English is, but it still has some inconsistencies.

For example, the word "lijk" is pronounced different from the suffix "-lijk". And then there's the difference between "een" and "een".

Unfortunately English can’t have a single spelling authority, specifically because it’s so popular. It would have to be able to issue binding regulations to the governments of India, the US and the UK, which would be politically difficult.

But British English could have. I mean it desperately needs reform, it's a mess.

I guess the problem is the momentum of such a large population of speakers means this risks breaking British English off in such a way that it may eventually become too non-standard and British people become disadvantaged somehow.

The first ten years after a major spelling reform can be a bit of a mess, but as long as the changes aren’t too big or unrecognizable, it should be doable. The Commonwealth should be able to do it, if the political will is there.

That doesn’t seem to be a problem with French or Spanish, arguably also quite popular.

`borsjtschrokkende`, not `borsjtsjschrokkende`. And yes, that is `mierenneukerig` (nit-picking, literally: ant f*cking). Besides: using a word like borsjt is cheating.

That's why I didn't include it in the normal words. It is absolutely cheating.

As for the spelling: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borsjtsj

(Edit: That page also mentions a soup called 'sjtsji'.)

I stand corrected, I didn't know you could spell it that way. What a weird language we have :)

Your weird uncle Swedish spells it perhaps even worse, borsjtj. https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borsjtj

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