
The Swedish phoneme notorious for having a dedicated IPA symbol, /ɧ/ (2016) - vilhelm_s
https://possessivesuffix.tumblr.com/post/154745464918/lets-talk-sj
======
username90
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!

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
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.

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

~~~
DFHippie
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.

~~~
einr
_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.

~~~
henrikschroder
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.

------
bklyn11201
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):

[https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=en&t...](https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=en&tl=sv&text=seventy-
seven%20hospitals%20near%20the%20lake)

~~~
jfk13
Or my (Swedish) mother's old favourite, "Sju sjösjuka sjömän på skeppet
Shanghai".

~~~
jbarberu
My sister likes to poke fun at our grandmother as she tries to do this one.
Granny usually counters with "Jamás jamarás jamón, jamón jamás jamarás"...

~~~
narag
That's cruel, not only because the throat rasping for the foreigner but also
because the meaning.

------
hashmush
The Wikipedia article on the Sj-sound has some audio samples for those wanting
to know what it can sound like.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sj-sound](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sj-
sound)

~~~
uoaei
I lived in Sweden for a little over a year. This sound wasn't the hardest to
figure out, but it's one of the harder ones to remember to use since the
natural instinct is to make the "syuh" sound.

To make the sound with your mouth, make a really guttural 'H' sound like a
golf swing.

------
russellbeattie
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](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/English))
isn't particularly helpful.

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](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwich)).

~~~
henrikschroder
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13514258)

~~~
usr1106
I studied English and French 2 decades before affordable computers and speech
synthesizers. Reading IPA for a single language is not all hard. You just get
used to the symbols needed in that language.

If you take a random language and believe that you can pronounce it correctly
by reading IPA, well that won't work. Or at least be very hard.

------
Tomte
The bane of my learning Swedish.

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.

~~~
bjoli
As a native swedish speaker I like to tease people with word stress (accute vs
grave accent). Words like tomten, regel and slutet mean different things
depending on accent, which is very confusing for people who don't have swedish
as a native tongue.

An example video:
[https://youtu.be/lXp7_Sjgm34?t=273](https://youtu.be/lXp7_Sjgm34?t=273)

~~~
stevekemp2
Even English has words that are pronounced differently depending on context.

For example "I read to my son" could be pronounced two different ways
depending on tense. "I read", vs. "I red".

There are other examples too, off the top of my head "I polish my shoes", vs.
"I have a polish friend.". Or "the bow of a boat", vs. "at the end of the play
the actors take a bow".

~~~
goodcanadian
Polish is fine, but Polish should be capitalized. ;-)

I am wondering about your accent, though, because, to me, "bow" is pronounced
the same in both of those examples. Robin hood shooting an arrow from his bow,
however, has a different pronunciation which is the same as the bow tied on my
present.

~~~
bjoli
He/she might mean the bow of a ship? If I am not completely wrong about my
English pronunciation, that is.

~~~
goodcanadian
Yes, the bow of a ship is pronounced the same as taking a bow. At least, it is
in my accent.

[https://www.dictionary.com/browse/bow](https://www.dictionary.com/browse/bow)
agrees indicating IPA baʊ for both.

~~~
bjoli
I should read the parent comment before replying.

I just assumed they meant bow as in bow and arrow. The other example I did not
know. "Read before you think before you write".

------
knolax
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?

[0]
[https://sail.usc.edu/~lgoldste/General_Phonetics/Source_Filt...](https://sail.usc.edu/~lgoldste/General_Phonetics/Source_Filter/SFc.html)

~~~
Qwertystop
IPA seems to describe areas as far as I can tell; each consonant is how-do-
you-make-the-sound and where-is-the-sound-made, not specific frequencies,
charted on a grid. The vowel chart is "where is your tongue in your mouth".

~~~
knolax
But it seems that the "where the sound is made" aspect is being described as
discrete whereas the positioning approaches more of a spectrum. Even if it
were discrete, the fact that most phonemes can be produced with multiple
positions would require at least a list of points.

~~~
DonaldPShimoda
IPA is about phones, not phonemes. Phones are described precisely and are
(mostly [1]) constant across all languages; phonemes are broader and are
language-specific.

Multiple phones can belong to a single phoneme within a given language. For
example, English groups the aspirated stops with their non-aspirated
counterparts (e.g., [pʰ] and [p] both belong to /p/ because they are non-
contrastive, despite being different sounds phonetically).

This is why it is the International _Phonetic_ Alphabet, and not the
International _Phonemic_ Alphabet.

[1] Worth noting that there can be some variance among different speakers when
it comes to the articulation of specific phones, but the IPA essentially is
the result of determining whether languages draw any meaningful distinctions
among these. If there are separate symbols in IPA, the phones are noticeably
distinct. It is very uncommon for multiple sounds to get mapped to a single
phone in IPA by rule, and this usually happens based on some dispute among
linguists. A good example might be the "tensed" consonants of Korean, which
have their own diacritic applied but are not fully understood (meaning
linguists cannot precisely identify what, if anything, separates them from
their un-tensed counterparts).

~~~
knolax
Ok so does that mean phones are atomic and also consistent across languages?
If so that makes a lot more sense. Thanks for the clarification!

~~~
henrikschroder
Phones are pretty consistent, but I think the biggest piece of the puzzle is
that different languages don't _care_ about all the differences. A phone
exists in IPA if _a_ language cares about the difference.

For example, if you pronounce "sju sjösjuka sjömän" with [ʃ] instead of [ɧ],
I'll understand you just fine, but I'll instantly know that you aren't a
native Swedish speaker. (Or, you are, and you're speaking a Swedish dialect
that has replaced [ɧ] with [ʃ], because of course that's also a thing)

But if you mis-pronounce "skön" (nice) as [ʃøːn] instead of [ɧøːn], you're
getting awfully close to [ɕøːn], which is how you pronounce "kön" in Swedish,
which means gender. So as a Swedish speaker, the phoneme has changed, I no
longer know if you're saying "skön" or "kön", or maybe "schön" in German?
Swedish "cares" about this difference. But you, as an English speaker, might
not be able to hear the difference.

And if there was a hypothetical language that had even further subdivisions of
these sounds, speakers of that language would be upset that neither you nor me
could tell the difference between two sounds that speakers of that language
care about.

So the mapping of phones to phonemes is highly language (and dialect)
dependent, and you should think about it in terms of continuous ranges or
tolerances, instead of a discrete 1:n mapping.

------
tom_mellior
Not to poop on this article, but isn't the point of IPA that _every_ phoneme
has "its own dedicated IPA symbol"?

~~~
crazygringo
Actually no -- otherwise there would be thousands of them, because languages
often have sounds that are very close to a sound in another language but not
identical.

The point of IPA is to provide a phonetic alphabet that can provide enough
symbols, each covering a _range_ of similar sounds across languages, such that
for _each_ language, _every_ sound within that language has a _unique_ symbol
to differentiate it from other sounds within that language.

E.g. "bête" in French and "bet" in English are identical in IPA: /bɛt/. But
all three sounds are definitely slightly different, which is how you can tell
whether the speaker is, say, American or French.

The process of coming up with IPA and deciding what sounds in different
languages deserve the same symbol or not involved just as much art as science,
since there are tons of gray areas, especially when dialects are involved.

~~~
hoseja
Huh. I thought IPA was universal. Bummer.

------
gpvos
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](https://youtu.be/PDJLvF1dUek)

------
lukego
This is the same sound as in "cool whip" a la Family Guy, right? Like the way
a southern gentleman would pronounce "wh."

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZmqJQ-
nc_s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZmqJQ-nc_s)

~~~
ethor
More similar to the sh sound in shell (am swedish).

~~~
lukego
Sorry, hadn't read TFA, was thinking of the "sk" ("skönt") sound rather than
"sj" ("sjuk.")

EDIT: Clear as mud now, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x7C6qeh-
SQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x7C6qeh-SQ).

~~~
henrikschroder
Wait, what? Would you pronounce those two words with a different sound? I
can't think of any Swedish dialect where that is true?

------
scandinavegan
Pronouncing the sound is one thing, spelling it is another.

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...](https://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid=411&artikel=3963073)

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.

~~~
boomlinde
IMO the list confuses a number of different dialectical oddities and makes it
seem more of a labyrinth than it really is.

It makes some rather sveamål-centric assumptions, even then for some subset of
sveamål, which is rather notorious for joining long stretches of consonants
ending with an "sj" phoneme into just "sj". For example any of the variants
that start in "r" only happen in dialects where the "r" is barely pronounced.
In most of Sweden, it is distinct; guttural or rolling. Others only occur when
consonants that are distinct in other dialects are dropped, and definitely not
only the ones marked as "sloppy pronunciation".

Others occur only when crossing words in compound words with distinct "sj"
sounds (again, in _some_ dialects), where pronouncing them as a single phoneme
again may happen in some sveamål. Some of them seem really forced.

~~~
henrikschroder
Yeah, the list has examples where someone in some dialect might pronounce a
word with the sound.

I would say that a word like "duschschampo" has two different sounds for me.
I'm from Stockholm so I would do the "schsch" part like /ʃ ɧ/, I have a friend
from Kalmar who would say it like /ɧ ɧ/, and probably, somewhere, someone
would merge them into a single /ɧ/, but I have no idea where you'd find that
person.

------
neilwilson
It's not uncommon for languages to have a sound with a dedicate phoneme.

There are still some slots free in the sounds matrix that no language as yet
uses.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uZam0ubq-Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uZam0ubq-Y)

~~~
DagAgren
The issue here is that this symbol does not correspond to a single position in
the matrix, but varies quite wildly depending on regional accent.

------
ars
Is this sound basically the same as the Hebrew Chet? You can hear it here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iI5EJGAUGsc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iI5EJGAUGsc)

~~~
yxhuvud
No. Generally saying I'd say it is pronounced more to the front of the mouth,
without involving the throat.

------
jefftk
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.)

~~~
taejo
For some people "being it" [biŋɪt] and "be hit" [bihɪt] are minimal pairs. I
can't think of any vowels that can both come at the ends of words and before
[ŋ] in my own speech, though.

~~~
jefftk
English has juncture, so "the grey tape" and "the great ape" are also
distinct. We'd write your two as [biŋ+ɪt] and [bi+hɪt].

------
headcanon
Sorry but I'm not clear on what IPA means, I assume we're not talking about
the beer?

~~~
jfk13
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet)

------
gerikson
"Stjärn" is not the Swedish word for star, that's "stjärna".

~~~
viceroyalbean
The author seems to be from Finland, so I wonder if it's a difference between
"normal" Swedish and Finnish Swedish (finlandssvenska)

~~~
nils-m-holm
It's "stjärna" in both, it is just pronounced a bit differently.

~~~
tilt_error
The Finnish form of Swedish resembles how Swedish was like a hundred years a
go.

"Skjorta" (a shirt) uses the pronunciation described in the article, but was
earlier pronounced as "Skiorta" which I believe is the form used in Finland.
Same thing with "Stjärna" (a star) which was formerly pronounced "Stierna".

On the other hand, I was born a Norwegian so I could be all wrong :)
Norwegians have a special relationship with "kj"-sounds -- which the younger
generation is avoiding. Youngsters are actually replacing the hard "kj" with
the soft sound described in the article.

~~~
jacobush
Stierna is closer to proto-indo-european. :)

------
blissofbeing
I'm more curious with this question

> "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.

~~~
knolax
TBF linguistics as a field doesn't seem to apply empiricism as strictly as the
hard sciences. It seems that it was only relatively recently that
descriptivism became the norm.

------
ksaj
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.

~~~
blompa
The 'wh' sound /ʍ/ isn't the same as the Swedish 'sj' sound /ɧ/, but depending
on the realisation (like how it's pronounced Stockholm) it can sound fairly
similar. The 'sj' sound is more fricative.

Also, some English dialects (such as those in Ireland and Scotland) definitely
still pronounce 'wh' that way, I refer to the following article for an
overview:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_of_English_%E2%9...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_of_English_%E2%9F%A8wh%E2%9F%A9)

------
dariosalvi78
this is one of my favourite videos about the sound:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFyAN1m2iug](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFyAN1m2iug)

The guy has some really good videos BTW!

------
galaxyLogic
What about Danish? I think they would need a lot of IPA symbols of their own?

~~~
AnanasAttack
Only stød is unusual. It is written with a superscript glottal stop (ˀ) letter

~~~
galaxyLogic
:-)

