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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 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!

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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.

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.

> 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.

Cantonese. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese_grammar#Negations

As you can see, there's more than one way to negate something. Well it's hard for me to know if the rule is the same, given that I don't really know what the rule is in either! As per my previous comment I can tell you what sounds right, but I can't tell you why.

The explanation for Cantonese in that Wikipedia article could be used just as well for Mandarin by simply replacing 唔→不, 冇→没, 唔好→不要, 咪→别,咗→了 ... so the rules are pretty much the same, they're just instantiated with different vocabulary.

> 没 is usually used to negate either 有 "have" or something in the past.

More technically, 没 is the negative marker that applies to the verb 有, and 不 is the negative marker that applies to everything else. It isn't the 没 that marks a negative in the past as being past -- it is the (omitted) 有. That 有 is commonly not omitted in negative past sentences -- and it's also possible to use 有 to mark past time in positive-polarity sentences, though this is much rarer than the same marking in negative sentences.

There's a straightforward information-theoretic reason why 有 can be so commonly omitted -- it is the only thing that can ever follow 没, so actually realizing it doesn't add much. Everyone knows it's there.

Hm, I responded too quickly the first time. Some comments on the rest of your comment:

> E.g. 我没告诉你。 "I didn't tell you."

This is the same sentence as 我没有告诉你, also fully idiomatic. The past sense is coming from the 有.

> But Mandarin doesn't use 有 as a general past marker, only the negation 没

This is plainly incorrect. 有 is used as a general past marker. It just isn't obligatory in positive-polarity sentences. Here are some things Chinese people have said to me:

你在中国有看见过美国没有的水果吗？("Have you seen any fruits in China that America doesn't have?")

我有吗 ("Did I?")

What I meant by "not a general past marker" is that you can't in general use positive 有 where you can use negative 没（有） to talk about the past. For example, you wouldn't say 我有看这本书。 to express you've read that book, but instead 我看了这本书。 Even in constructions like 有……过 the 有 is optional, so I'd say the past aspect is carried by 过.

On the other hand, maybe that is a shortening of an originally obligatory two-part expression similar to Jespersen's cycle, famously observed in the appearance of "pas" and ongoing disappearance of "ne" in French "ne ... pas". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jespersen%27s_Cycle

Swedish has masculine and neuter, but not feminine, interestingly enough.

In which case it's probably better to say it has an animate/inanimate distinction. I was told by someone interested in historical linguistics that Indo-European first developed an animate/inanimate noun class system and then the animate class developed a feminine subset.

In which case it's probably better to say it has an animate/inanimate distinction.

No, this is not accurate, neither historically nor according to modern usage. Animate objects tend towards utrum but plenty of inanimate objects are utrum too and there are no hard rules or mnemonics you can use to divine which is which.

It's "ett tåg" ("a train") but "en bil" ("a car"), "ett äpple" ("an apple") but "en banan" ("a banana"), "ett barn" (a child) but "en vuxen" (an adult). This is entirely arbitrary and non-obvious to non-native speakers and if you're learning Swedish, you just straight up have to learn which is which for every word.

The biggest mindfuck about utrum/neutrum is that it exists in Danish and Norwegian as well, but the categorization is not 100% the same, some nouns are utrum in one language and neutrum in the other. So there's different arbitrary rules, and if you go from one of the Scandinavian languages to the other, you just have to learn the ones that aren't the same.

For example, "a friendship" is "et venskab" in Danish, but "en vänskap" in Swedish.

Masculine and feminine have merged into 'common'/'utrum', used mostly for animate objects as pointed out by a sibling comment, although not all animate objects (e.g. barn, lejon).

Neuter has stayed as is.

There are, however, remnants of the masculine/feminine distinction left: e.g. klockan is ofter referred to as feminine (hon), and the "-e" in "storebror" (as opposed to "-a" which is used for utrum today and feminine in the past).

The -e/-a ending is still in common use not only in constructions like "storebror" but in general in adjectives pointing to a female or male person ("den fule mannen", "den fula kvinnan") although this usage is falling out of favour a bit ("den fula mannen" would not generally sound wrong to most modern speakers)

Another interesting remnant of old Norse that still lingers in modern Swedish is the accusative case ending -s in expressions like "till fjälls", "till skogs", "till sjöss", "till sängs" etc.

In Canadian French there's an easy remedy if you can't recall what the gender of a noun is: just insert some profanity.

Québécois vulgarity tends to be inserted between the article and the verb, in a sort of semi-adjective form. So if you forgot if le porte or la porte was correct, you'd say l'ostie de porte which translates roughly to "the goddamn door" but lets you collapse le or la into l' and avoid the error altogether.

Oh, but that's the funny thing. I don't struggle with the article. I use le/la or un/une etc correctly. It just seems I do it without ever thinking what it means.

So I'd map "la table" to "το τραπέζι" and "un oiseau" το "ένα πουλί" and never notice that the gender has changed from one language to the other.

Unless I think about it.

And the same with pronouns also.

Yes, native speakers don’t thinks about grammatical gender of words, it’s just coming up naturally. The worrying trend however, is the politicization of language, based on a Saphir-Whorf-like hypothesis (and I would say on Newspeak as well) which lead to the horror that is called écriture inclusive. The Académie condamned this new orthography but it’s still wildly in use in administrative documents.

"Condemned". The distinction between condemn and damn seems to go back to Latin, if not further.

I'm not sure it should matter what one particular authority decides, in terms of language use. People, including people writing administrative documents should be free to write in the manner that feels most comfortable to them. If this creates a political problem, the political solution is the ballot box and altering the education or hiring policies.

Customary criticism is fine, but it makes no sense to say "you shouldn't say foo because some organisation that shouldn't have authority says you shouldn't say foo"; instead, you should have some direct reason why foo is problematic.

Your criticism shouldn't be circular either, for instance "you shouldn't use 'singular they' because 'they' is plural" is completely, aside from being historically wrong, ineffective as criticism, since it is merely because of the incorrect description of the word as "plural" by some authority that you believe it to be plural, whereas most people use it regularly to refer to a non-specific person.

>People, including people writing administrative documents should be free to write in the manner that feels most comfortable to them

They should also write in a way that conveyed information effectively. The so-called inclusive writing is extremely disruptive to the flow of reading and makes job offers, administrative documents and so on a pain to navigate (all for the sake of political positions very few people actually hold), defeating the point of language. I'm sure fellow French speakers will know what I'm talking about.

My takeaway from your post is probably completely surprising to some, but:

A trapezium is a table? (Checks etymonline) And apparently indeed, trapezium comes from a Greek word that means "little table" from "trapeza" meaning table. The things you learn.

(For those who can't read Greek, the Greek writing in YeGoblynQueenne's post are "to trapezi" and "ena pouli". I can read Greek since my mother studied Christian theology and had the alphabet in prominent display to help her learn it, but I can't understand a word of it.)

> I can read Greek since my mother studied Christian theology

I can read (a reasonable amount of) Greek after studying a lot of physics/math :D. But I only understand the words that trickled into the other languages I speak or can recognize a root for.

Yes, that's another interesting experience- how other people pronounce Greek letters and words that they've learned from science textbooks. Sometimes I forget myself and say something in a Greek way and people just stare at me :)

E.g. I was working on a paper with my thesis advisor and I used the plural of "lemma", "lemmata" (λήμμα, λήμματα). It's actually in the English dictionary, but he advised me to say "lemmas" instead because people reading the paper may not be native English speakers and it would just make the text harder to read. I always want to sneak in fancy words in my papers, but it's a bit tricky to do it right..

Hah. Yes, it's the same word. Or same word-root anyway. Interestingly, a "table" as in a matrix, is called a "pinakas" (πίνακας). Which translates as "board" to English (as in whiteboard, cheeseboard etc).

Have you ever visited Greece? It would be a strange experience, being able to read all the signs but not knowing what they mean. I know because I was in Bulgaria for a conference this summer and I could read everything... but understand not a word :)

That's because it's all in a Cyrillic alphabet which is very similar to the Greek alphabet (it's partly derived from it). Come to think of it, so is the Latin alphabet, but I'm used to seeing Latin signs everywhere, including in Greece.

As a native english speaker who also speaks some french and spanish, I had the opposite experience:

I had trouble deciphering the alphabet at speed, but once I had I could often understand the word based on it's similarity to spanish (e.g. Σάββατο / Sábado) or english (έξοδος / exit).

And a trapezoid is called that because it is like a table, with a flat part on top.

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.

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 :-)

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...

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.

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.)

The Danish accent is definitely instantly recognisable, but I also can't put my finger on what it is. It's definitely something about the vowels. Danish is a very vowel-heavy language, so I'm sure some of that bleeds over into English.

I'm old enough that I have used a check a couple of times, but probably fewer than 10. I remember not being certain how to pronounce it "xeck" (käck) or "sheck" (sjeck) or even "tcheck", to improvise an English sort-of-phonetic spelling.

I usually use the analogy that a Swede pronouncing "cheap" as "sheep" is equivalent to English speakers pronouncing "skjuta" as "tjuta".

As a native English speaker, it took me a while to hear the difference between Swedish "tj" and "sj" (at least the way it's pronounced in Northern Swedish, like "schhh").

Yeah, the <ch> and <sh> being the same is usually my Swedish detector. It is surprisingly common amongst swedes speaking english, and not something that danes or norwegians do.

> (/z/ does not exist in Swedish)

It does, but only in the onomatopoetic word "bzzz", as in the sound of a flying insect. And if you were to drop that sounding s, if you said that a fly went "bsss" around you, people would be weirded out, thinking the fly pissed on you or something. So pretty much every Swede can make the sound [z], and can hear the difference between [z] and [s], but only for this single word. It's so weird!

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 ;)

The bible story about Shibboleths is quite an interesting example of this, and also where the term comes from.

https://biblehub.com/judges/12-6.htm

For those that don't know.

ahh, killing 42,000 people because of a mispronunciation. Gotta love that pro-life attitude that religion has ;)

I had completely forgotten about this story.

It was nice to read it once again...

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.

Treated like a vowel now?

Other way around then? Is a consonant, but a defacto vowel? Whatever, English is weird.

Why do you say it's a de facto vowel?

It isn't used like a vowel. There's no word 'XwY' for any string of letters X,Y - and you can't prounounce 'xwy' (for any single letters x,y) without adding vowel sound.

I suspect in the sense that 'w' acts like a long vowel or a diphthong in many cases in English when it is used in the middle or at the of a word.

E.g., (spelling vs pronunciation) 'town' vs 'toun', 'own' vs 'oan', 'bow' vs 'bo' or 'bau', etc.

It definitely seems like the most vowel-like consonant after 'y'.

'Semi-vowel' seems to be the word, for 'y' too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semivowel

> There's no word 'XwY' for any string of letters X,Y

Awe, ewe, owe, awl, owl, own, two...

But my point was that in all other European languages, the letter 'W' is clearly a consonant, usually realized as [v] or [ʋ], and seen as a variant of 'V'.

English is the odd one out, English sees it as a variant of 'U', and it's not clearly a consonant, it's a semi-vowel as you pointed out further down.

Right, I meant consonants, not 'any letter'. (You could do examples like that for any consonant in place of 'w'.)

Well, the English "V" is nearly identical to German "W"; the German "V" is nearly identical to English and German "F" and the English "W" doesn't quite exist in German. Someone had to point out to me as well that I was mispronouncing "water" as "vater" instead of "uuater" about ten years after I was somewhat fluent in the language. I never heard the difference before and native English speakers typically don't go around correcting the pronunciation of strangers….

Hindi (which I'm learning) is similar - व (usually transliterated 'va') is somewhere between an English 'w' & 'v' - not as much 'lip vibration' as the latter but more than the former.

It varies across the v <-> w spectrum depending on region, and also some words seem mostly nearer one or the other (but it's the same character, there isn't a second).

You sometimes hear that in native speaker's English, but more 'v's sounding nearer a 'w' than the other way around (as in native German speakers).

Fascinating how growing up with different languages teach us different sounds, and those we didn't use can be so difficult to produce, even if we can hear and understand the difference.

I struggle with two things in Hindi: aspiration (transliterated as 'ta' vs 'tha' for example, but that's not an English 'th', it's 'ta' with air forced out) which I usually either don't pronounce clearly, or it's way over-exaggerated; and retroflex consonants, which I can hear but often struggle to pronounce correctly quickly enough to flow with the rest of the word. And particularly 'd.a' which when correctly pronounced contains (to my ear) some 'r'.

The German "ch" sound is the thing I struggle with. Not a hard "ch" as in "church", but a soft sound like "shhh" (but in the back of the throat). Pretty hard for an English speaker to do, especially straight after/before rolling an "R"

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’.

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

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

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.)

> 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.

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.

That was precisely what I was trying to allude to :) ‘ll’ is a soft ‘dj’ in Columbia also.

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.

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.

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

(Click through the "stop consonant" sections.)

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.

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/.

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').

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/

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

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.

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