Are there any words that you deliberately mispronounce?

bonus note: Soros in Hungarian is pronounced Shorrosh. The ‘r’ is an alveolar sound, e.g. the t in little in many 'Murican accents.

Hungarian is a barbarian language - they couldn't even bother to speak an Indo-European language like the rest of us.

I have a friend who studied abroad in Budapest. The first Hungarian phrasebook he got said that there are technically 22 noun cases, but only 18 are used today.

This guy is Slovenian-American, trilingual in Slovene, German, and English. Also decidedly a genius, with almost-perfect standardized test scores implying an IQ in the 150+ range. He was in Budapest for some sort of math-whizzes-get-to-study-in-the-land-of-Paul-Erdos thing. Any Germanic, Romance, or Slavic language would have been a piece of cake. But he got nowhere in Hungarian.

Uncivilized non-Indo-European speakers living in Europe deserve to have their names mispronounced. That goes for Finns, Estonians, and Basques too. Especially Basques.
 
This guy is Slovenian-American, trilingual in Slovene, German, and English. Also decidedly a genius, with almost-perfect standardized test scores implying an IQ in the 150+ range. He was in Budapest for some sort of math-whizzes-get-to-study-in-the-land-of-Paul-Erdos thing. Any Germanic, Romance, or Slavic language would have been a piece of cake. But he got nowhere in Hungarian.

I really hate comments like these.

If we *really* wanted to talk "European languages that do bizarre things you will never understand or be able to do fluently unless you grew up a native speaker" then we should be talking Danish.

Grammar is universally logical and can be taught and comprehended. And even on a grand scale of grammars that have been produced in the history of human language, Finno-Ugric and Indo-European aren't *that* far off from one another. We aren't talking about, say, an Ergative-Absolute system like Euskara, or a direct-inverse system like Ojibwe, or...whatever the frick the Austronesian languages do. We're talking about two Nominative-Accusative, synthetic language families which predominantly employ SVO word order. And with Magyar you also get the benefit of tons of Slavic and Germanic loanwords.

Sound quirks are a matter where at some point, if you didn't grow up with it, you will effectively lose the capacity of ever distinguishing and reproducing the sound at a native-level.
 
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If we *really* wanted to talk "European languages that do bizarre things you will never understand or be able to do fluently unless you grew up a native speaker" then we should be talking Danish.

Grammar is universally logical and can be taught and comprehended. Sound quirks are a matter where at some point, if you didn't grow up with it, you will effectively lose the capacity of ever distinguishing and reproducing the sound at a native-level.

Is there a phoneme, or more than one, in Danish that is practically impossible for English/German/Slovene speakers to produce?

It seems that extreme grammatical differences are difficult to learn and reproduce well, even if they're at least possible. I'm reminded of Mannerheim's poor Finnish from a book on the Russo-Finnish War I read a long time ago. How long does it take on average for someone learning a very different and grammatically complex language as an adult to be able to speak with few grammatical mistakes? (weasel words "on average" and "few" are deliberate)

So is every language other than Greek.
Bar-bar! Bar bar bar bar. Bar bar; bar bar bar. Bar bar bar?
 
Why?

(I like your interesting linguistic comments. Take it as a lowbrow provocation.)

Because at the end of the day, the purpose of a language is for it to be learned and spoken. It's not a conlang made by some dude in an armchair mashing together the oddest/most obscure examples of phonemes, syntax, word order, morphology, and alignment they can think up to form the most interesting language 5everr. Natural languages are strictly utilitarian. If they were so difficult that they would baffle even people with 150 IQs they would have ceased existing as languages long, long ago.

It simply needs to be remembered that Magyar is a real language spoken by real people every day. Mystifying its complexity like the above gets away from that in service of exotifying the Thing and, by extension, to some extent dehumanizing its speakers. It's certainly not what you're doing explicitly, but it comes across as the subtext, and it's kind of gross.

All languages exist to serve an equal number of use-cases for an everyday speaker, and so will have a more or less equal amount of complexity in terms of semantic inventory size and grammatical complexity. What you're commenting on, really, is weirdness relative to English. Because, yes, Magyar has an assload of cases, and reading about them can seem extraordinarily complex to someone without a lot of linguistic experience. But that complexity is equalled in pretty much every language in some area or another. Think about the amount of complexity which exists in the nuance of English word order, or preposition and particle usage, or tone, to a lesser extent. They're all different answers to the same question of "how do I organize the world into units of content understandable to the person I'm communicating to. It's 5 = 1+1+1+1+1 vs 5 = IIII and I vs 5 = 3 + 2 rather than 5 vs 11 vs 19.

But also, like I said. When we're talking weirdness relative to English. It's not that weird. Any language which doesn't: a) use tones or ejectives, and b) uses an N-A alignment just doesn't seem that weird to me on an absolute scale.

Is there a phoneme, or more than one, in Danish that is practically impossible for English/German/Slovene speakers to produce?

It seems that extreme grammatical differences are difficult to learn and reproduce well, even if they're at least possible. I'm reminded of Mannerheim's poor Finnish from a book on the Russo-Finnish War I read a long time ago. How long does it take on average for someone learning a very different and grammatically complex language as an adult to be able to speak with few grammatical mistakes? (weasel words "on average" and "few" are deliberate)

With Danish, I'm speaking specifically of stød, which is a suprasegmental unit applied in some contexts in Danish words more or less consistent with creaky voice. Functionally to an untrained speaker it would sound like a glottal stop, but it's not. It's something wholly unique which doesn't exist in Europe outside of Denmark. And like I said, grammar can be taught. Learning to think in Latin terms where the verb comes at the very end of a sentence, or in German terms where you have to distinguish between locative, ablative, and accusative spatial position, takes some time to wrap your head around, but eventually your mind partitions a space for thinking in those terms. I haven't worked with anything truly weird, but I can understand how an ergative-absolute alignment works. However, with sounds it's different; there comes a point where you physically lose the ability to distinguish or produce certain sounds, or at least produce them at the level of a native speaker.

As to your second part, I mostly do historical linguistics, so I'm not super familiar with the developmental side, though my girlfriend is, and I'll ask her next time I see her. But like I said, Finnish is really not that weird if we're talking "the full range of what is possible grammatically". To give a quick example: English and Latin have two voice: active and passive, and Greek has a middle voice. Some of the Austronesian languages on the Philippines have up to 5 voices: Agent, Patient, Goal, Locative, and Circumstantial. Ojibwe marks nouns not only for agent-patient, but also in accordance to their relative position on a prescribed hierarchy of nouns. Grammar can get really, really weird when you start looking outside the traditional Indo-European/Semitic/Finno-Ugric canon.
 
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Is there a phoneme, or more than one, in Danish that is practically impossible for English/German/Slovene speakers to produce?
The one represented by the ‘sj’ digraph, I think.
Bar-bar! Bar bar bar bar. Bar bar; bar bar bar. Bar bar bar?
ΙΞΑΚΤΛΙ

Moderator Action: You should know better than post in foreign languages or scripts without an English translation. ~ Arakhor
 
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The one represented by the ‘sj’ digraph, I think.

it's the [ˀ] in

hun /hun/ vs hund /hunˀ/ or
ven /vɛn/ vs vend /vɛnˀ/
læser (reader) /ˈlɛːsɐ/ vs læser (reads) /ˈlɛːˀsɐ/
hænder /ˈhɛnɐ/ (happens) vs hænder /ˈhɛnˀɐ/ (hands)

etc.
 
No, no, Sj is a different sound. It's actually Swedish, apparently.

Sj-sound, a sound in northern Germanic languages with disputed articulation location

In Swedish phonology, the sj-sound (Swedish: sj-ljudet) is a voiceless fricative phoneme found in most dialects. It has a variety of realisations, whose precise phonetic characterisation is a matter of debate, but which usually feature distinct labialization. The sound is represented in Swedish orthography by a number of spellings, including the digraph ⟨sj⟩ from which the common Swedish name is derived, as well as ⟨stj⟩, ⟨skj⟩, and ⟨sk⟩ before front vowels. The sound should not be confused with the Swedish tj sound [ɕ], often spelled tj or k in Swedish.

The sound is transcribed ⟨ɧ⟩ in the International Phonetic Alphabet. The International Phonetic Association (IPA) describes [ɧ] as a "simultaneous [ʃ] and [x]", but this claim is disputed among phoneticians, including at least one former president of the IPA.[1] Other descriptive labels include voiceless postalveolo-velar fricative, voiceless palatal-velar fricative, voiceless dorso-palatal velar fricative, voiceless postalveolar and velar fricative, or voiceless coarticulated velar and palatoalveolar fricative. The closest sound found in English is [ʃ], with another approximation being the voiceless labialized velar approximant [ʍ] found in some English dialects.​
 
You do realize that when you live in a country with a different "accent" for a long period of time, you begin to pick up that accent, don't you? Living in Canada these past years has softened my Irish lilt a little, and I use Canadian slang. How is that different from Gwynneth and Madonna acquiring English/British slang/accents?

Nyet. It happens naturally over time, but Americans can't cope with that without their heads exploding.

...it was just a joke.


I could have gone with Edwin Hubble (the namesake of the space telescope) who affected a fake British accent after spending all of about 5 years there over the course of his entire life but I didn't think it would have been as funny. But this is the first time I've heard this is a big deal to Americans, please tell me more.
 
The stress on the second syllable is particularly good. :)
 
...it was just a joke.


I could have gone with Edwin Hubble (the namesake of the space telescope) who affected a fake British accent after spending all of about 5 years there over the course of his entire life but I didn't think it would have been as funny. But this is the first time I've heard this is a big deal to Americans, please tell me more.
In my experience, Americans get into a big snit if someone moves away to another country and gradually picks up the accent of the new country. It seems like Americans think that these people are "putting on airs" or being stuffy, or worse yet, have betrayed the motherland. There was one actress(?) whose name I can't remember who was on the Surreal Life a few years ago, who was American and moved to Britain. She'd been there long enough to develop a mangled accent and had picked up some slang. You would have thought she was a member of Al Queda the way the Americans on the message boards carried on. She was vilified.

But then, yours is a country that feels the need to subtitle English politicians (Tony Blair) when they are talking on the TV - in English!
 
yours is a country that feels the need to subtitle English politicians (Tony Blair) when they are talking on the TV - in English!
The differences in spelling alone already justify this. ;)
 
I could have gone with Edwin Hubble (the namesake of the space telescope) who affected a fake British accent after spending all of about 5 years there over the course of his entire life but I didn't think it would have been as funny. But this is the first time I've heard this is a big deal to Americans, please tell me more.

It's funny because when talking to Americans from other regions of the country I've been known to start affecting parts of their accent after all of five minutes!
 
It's funny because when talking to Americans from other regions of the country I've been known to start affecting parts of their accent after all of five minutes!
That's cultural appropriation Lex :nono:
Spoiler :
:lol:J/k :p I do this too sometimes, moreso when I was younger... it has always come naturally for me. In my old age I consciously try to resist doing it... sometimes anyway:)
 
I pronounce creek "crick" but that's because I'm a backwoods hick ****
 
Sometimes I like to say "car" like I'm from Nova Scotia.

"Get in the carrrr, Ricky."

ZNl55ZDl.jpg
 
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