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See also: the Parsley Massacre in the Dominican Republic, which preyed on Haitians' inability to pronounce the word "perejil" as a native Spanish speaker would:

> The Haitian languages, French and Haitian Creole, pronounce the r as a uvular approximant or a voiced velar fricative, respectively so their speakers can have difficulty pronouncing the alveolar tap or the alveolar trill of Spanish, the language of the Dominican Republic. Also, only Spanish but not French or Haitian Creole pronounces the j as the voiceless velar fricative. If they could pronounce it the Spanish way the soldiers considered them Dominican and let them live, but if they pronounced it the French or Creole way they considered them Haitian and murdered them.

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

> so an Ephraimites soldier was literally incapable of pronouncing the word "correctly".

And, importantly, they would not even have realized that they were saying it wrong, because they would have been unable to hear the difference.

As a modern example: I have an acquaintance from Tonga. At some point she got very frustrated with the people around her who didn't understand what she meant by the "rittel bin". She finally pointed at the trash can.

"Oh, the litter bin!"

"That's what I said, the rittel bin!"

In Tongan, l and r are the same phoneme, and native speakers cannot distinguish them without practice.

I learned French as an adult, and I cannot at all hear the difference between the words "rue" and "roue." People tell me there's a difference and they try to sound it out to me, but each time they do, I just have to trust that they aren't saying the same thing twice.

There are native-English dialect groups which make no distinction between the vowels in 'pin' and 'pen'.

For all I rib my wife about falling on the other side of that line, it took my American ear a long time to hear UK-dialect(s) distinctions between 'Mary', 'merry', and 'marry', and still a fair bit of concentration to reproduce them!

The mary/marry/merry split is in America too. I say them all differently.

Another famous example of l and r confusion is Japanese.

One I'm struggling with: Norwegian (bokmal at least) has the "y", which is between i and the German ü. I can kinda hear the difference, if I pay close attention and the speaker is deliberate about the pronounciation, but saying it is kinda hard, and I get it wrong most of the time.

It's not that you're unable to hear the difference, you have to pay closer attention to what you're really hearing. I'm a native french speaker and when first learning english, I was made to carefully notice the subtle difference in certain vowels, intonations, silent consonants, etc. Like in sit and seat. The former vowel doesn't exist in french, so most french speakers learning english would pronounce it like the latter, as in "seat down". English vowels are very different from french, but there are some similarities and if you don't care to notice, you'll use approximations. E.g. imagine a french person saying "book", with the "ooh" sound and a noticeable exhalation after the k. Small little things like that can be brought to attention and corrected.

It also doesn't help that we much rely on the written word to learn. Which reinforces the reliance on existing symbol-pronunciation associations, instead of creating new ones.

Somewhat similar to how English (and other) speakers can have trouble distinguishing between the intonations in tonal languages like Chinese — "mā, má, mǎ, mà", and all that.

This one’s really fun in Bengali, where they have three relevant consonants, but they’re quite commonly all pronounced about the same: Shibboleth is শিব্বোলেত্ and Sibboleth সিব্বোলেত্ , but শ and স may be pronounced the same (though some distinguish them), which could be more like sh or like s, depending on the region and person. And, by experimentation grounded in this specific verse, apparently many of them can’t reliably hear a difference between sh and s, which I find difficult to comprehend given the significant spectral difference. But hearing is at least as much a brain thing as an ear thing.

So when a Bengali is reading the verse, what they’ll speak can be basically “they said, ‘Then say “Sibboleth”’, and he said ‘Sibboleth’ because he couldn’t pronounce it properly”.

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".

In 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.

A modern example that might be intuitive to native English speakers is asking people to pronounce "The rural squirrel measures the tomb". You will be able to tell most Germans apart from native speakers by the first word alone

For a fairly similar experience for English speakers, see the sound that is written in Chinese pinyin as "sh" vs "x". They're two distinct sounds but will likely both register as "sh" to English speakers. Likewise "ch" and "q".

Dutch people still jokingly invite newbies in the country to pronounce the name of the town 'Scheveningen'; this is kind of hard for native English speakers and very difficult for native German speakers, so it was used as a filter by the Dutch resistance during WW2.

Scheveningen - huh?

I recently read Robert Harris's book V2 based on this town. Good book.

Also, there is a chess opening variation named after this place. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicilian_Defence,_Scheveningen... )

And it has held great chess tournaments in the past.

Plus the Scheveningen system is a method of organizing a chess match between two teams.

For a fairly obscure location, it certainly got on the map, so to speak.

I recall reading some interesting neurological research on this topic, about how phonemes are learned and accessed. The specific sounds stored in the brain are largely fixed by a pretty young age, making it almost impossible for adults to learn certain pronunciations that differ from anything they were exposed to as a child.

Case in point - Hebrew lost “Ghayin” way back in history so the Hebrew for Gaza is “’Aza” (with ‘Ayin)

Hebrew also lost the voiceless pharyngeal fricative (Heth/ح) which iirc can only be pronounced by Mizrahi Jews (aka of Jewish Arab origin). It was merged into the voiceless uvular fricative כ khaf (خ in Arabic). Though as I understand it, interestingly the letters themselves are still found in Hebrew with distinct glyphs (ח vs כ) but one has just lost its unique pronunciation.

FWIW this varies by background — Yemenite Jews still pronounce Ayin as Ghayin.

But there’s no letter for it in Hebrew?

Ayin (ע) is the letter, and was the original letter used in the spelling of Gaza — עזה is the oldest and original name of Gaza, for as long as it's had that name. The Hebrew alphabet hasn't changed letters in thousands of years, long predating other Semitic languages like Arabic which continue to use the Gh sound; ancient Hebrew is still easily understood in written form by modern Hebrew speakers — much more so than even Shakespeare is to modern English speakers. When people say "Hebrew lost..." what they mean is the pronunciation of letters changed, not that the alphabet changed (unlike e.g. English, which really has lost and gained letters even over very short periods). And in some cases the sounds were only lost in specific communities; Yemenite Jews have done a pretty good job retaining sounds, e.g. their pronunciation of ע, as well as ת. (Similarly, Ashkenazis' much-maligned pronunciation of ת is probably closer to the original than modern non-Yemenite Mizrahi/Sephardic pronunciation — although Yemenite is closer.)

The last time written Hebrew meaningfully changed was when the Paleo-Hebrew script was exchanged for Aramaic block script 2.5 thousand years ago, but even then, the replacement was 1:1 — ע was still Ayin, it was just written with a different character. And Paleo-Hebrew script has been around since the Bronze Age.

I don’t know if it’s true or a common myth, but US soldiers in the Battle of the Buldge would ask possible spies baseball questions. Even if you were an American that didn’t like baseball, it was absolutely massive back then and would know some things about recent seasons.