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!
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.
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'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 ;)
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’.
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/
Google Translate can provide a basic sample of the sj sound. Ask for a Swedish translation of "seventy-seven hospitals near the lake" (sjuttiosju sjukhus nära sjön):
I have to assume IPA is basically gibberish to 99.9% of the world, if not more. Is there a digitally synthesized version? Whenever I'm reading Wikipedia/Wiktionary and see the phonetic version of a word, I wish I could click on it and hear the sounds (without having to have someone upload a sound file). The pronunciation key (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/English) isn't particularly helpful.
Yes, reading IPA is very hard, but it's hard for a good reason. It's the best way we have of describing human-made sounds unambiguously, because our regular alphabet doesn't work cross-language.
I agree it would be cool if there was a good IPA speech synthesizer, that would certainly help! There's some discussion on the issues and problems with it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13514258
Nope, just gibberish to 99.9% of native speakers. BUT...
Because English is spelled non-phonetically, English learners across the world generally learn IPA together with English, to learn pronunciation.
Granted it's not the entire set of IPA sounds, and some students are better than others... but seeing as there many more speakers of English as a second language than native speakers (according to some sources, though this can be disputed), there must be at least hundreds of millions of people with a rudimentary knowledge of IPA, enough to sound out words in English.
The IPA doesn't actually describe a sound. It describes what you do with your mouth to produce that sound. Where you place your tongue, whether your lips touch or not etc.
The actual sound that gets produced can vary by context, what sound you made before that and what will come after etc. (And who is saying it off course).
Living in China, I was curious to discover that many people there were actually pretty familiar with IPA, I assume it's taught as part of advanced language learning, to cope with all the very different sounds in other languages. On several occasions people expressed great puzzlement that I had no idea how most IPA symbols were pronounced.
I do understand this sound on a cognitive-analytic level (some phonetics courses at university help when learning sounds). I can pronounce it, at least passably.
There are big regional variations to pronouncing sj and so on. Fine, I can live with that, just pick one and use it consistently, preferably that of your teacher.
But when it comes to the sound the article is about, I hear something else.
At some point I cut together many instances of words with that sound from Swedish pop songs and told my teacher which sound (IPA) I clearly hear in all those instances. She told me flatly that I'm wrong. Those singers clearly sing another IPA sound.
It must be similar to when Russians try to show me the difference between hard and soft consonants. They tell me they really over-pronunciate now and they sound starkly different, I'm not even sure I hear a difference.
I'm not a linguist but it seems that most phonemes exist as areas (or multiple discontinuous areas as seen in TFA) in phonetic space while IPA attempts to describe only points in phonetic space[0]. Wouldn't it be better to instead just define X = {(F1min,F2min,...),(F1max,F2max,...)} for every dialect instead of making a universal X = (F1,F2,...) and then using it describe any area in phonetic space that happens to contain it?
The link to Caramelldansen inside the article does not actually contain the swedish pronunciation, because it has some English mishmash text there. Here is the Swedish original, with the linked text at 0:58: https://youtu.be/PDJLvF1dUek
Edit: I don't know of any rules for when to use which spelling. When I was a kid, I just learned how the different words were spelled individually, even though the sound is the same. Same thing when I'm teaching my kids: "Sju (seven) is spelled like this, schack (chess) is spelled like this, charmig (charming) is spelled like this", and so on.
This reminds me of /ꜧ/ which is used as a hypothetical phoneme that sounds [h] at the beginning of a syllable and [ŋ] (as in "ing") at the end of one. Since a given context can only ever have either [h] or [ŋ], there are interesting philosophy of science questions over why we shouldn't analyze it as /ꜧ/. (Though I don't think anyone actually thinks /ꜧ/ is right.)
When I was a kid, they taught us to say words like "white" with that sound for the 'wh'. I thought it was rather odd, since nobody outside of English class ever said it that way.
[+] [-] username90|6 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] YeGoblynQueenne|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hashmush|6 years ago|reply
If anyone pronounces <ch> as <sh>, <z> as <s> and <j> as <y> they're probably Swedish.
[+] [-] marcus_holmes|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ljm|6 years ago|reply
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’.
[+] [-] Jverse|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boomlinde|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] balboah|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bklyn11201|6 years ago|reply
https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=en&t...
[+] [-] hashmush|6 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sj-sound
[+] [-] russellbeattie|6 years ago|reply
Honestly, we're all basically just hoping whoever wrote it knows what the symbols mean. An example: Greenwich (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwich).
[+] [-] henrikschroder|6 years ago|reply
I agree it would be cool if there was a good IPA speech synthesizer, that would certainly help! There's some discussion on the issues and problems with it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13514258
[+] [-] VectorLock|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crazygringo|6 years ago|reply
Because English is spelled non-phonetically, English learners across the world generally learn IPA together with English, to learn pronunciation.
Granted it's not the entire set of IPA sounds, and some students are better than others... but seeing as there many more speakers of English as a second language than native speakers (according to some sources, though this can be disputed), there must be at least hundreds of millions of people with a rudimentary knowledge of IPA, enough to sound out words in English.
[+] [-] apersom|6 years ago|reply
The actual sound that gets produced can vary by context, what sound you made before that and what will come after etc. (And who is saying it off course).
See this diagram: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f8/1e/ea/f81eeaa4921133c3b67b...
[+] [-] xxpor|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peristeronic|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] funnybeam|6 years ago|reply
As a local I hear (and use) all of them interchangeably and am only vaguely aware of the difference if I consciously think about it
[+] [-] girzel|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brummm|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tomte|6 years ago|reply
I do understand this sound on a cognitive-analytic level (some phonetics courses at university help when learning sounds). I can pronounce it, at least passably.
There are big regional variations to pronouncing sj and so on. Fine, I can live with that, just pick one and use it consistently, preferably that of your teacher.
But when it comes to the sound the article is about, I hear something else.
At some point I cut together many instances of words with that sound from Swedish pop songs and told my teacher which sound (IPA) I clearly hear in all those instances. She told me flatly that I'm wrong. Those singers clearly sing another IPA sound.
It must be similar to when Russians try to show me the difference between hard and soft consonants. They tell me they really over-pronunciate now and they sound starkly different, I'm not even sure I hear a difference.
[+] [-] knolax|6 years ago|reply
[0] https://sail.usc.edu/~lgoldste/General_Phonetics/Source_Filt...
[+] [-] tom_mellior|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gpvos|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lukego|6 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZmqJQ-nc_s
[+] [-] scandinavegan|6 years ago|reply
Here's a (probably non-exhaustive) list of 65 different variants. The article in Swedish, but it should be possible to understand the list:
https://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid=411&art...
Edit: I don't know of any rules for when to use which spelling. When I was a kid, I just learned how the different words were spelled individually, even though the sound is the same. Same thing when I'm teaching my kids: "Sju (seven) is spelled like this, schack (chess) is spelled like this, charmig (charming) is spelled like this", and so on.
[+] [-] neilwilson|6 years ago|reply
There are still some slots free in the sounds matrix that no language as yet uses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uZam0ubq-Y
[+] [-] ars|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yxhuvud|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xxpor|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jefftk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] headcanon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gerikson|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blissofbeing|6 years ago|reply
> "A better question, however, might be why aren’t other similar cases around the world treated in the same fashion…? "
It would seem you can't really divorce science from politics, ever.
[+] [-] ksaj|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dariosalvi78|6 years ago|reply
The guy has some really good videos BTW!
[+] [-] galaxyLogic|6 years ago|reply