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Comment by Tomte | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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".

I understand what you mean, but those are not grave or accute accent differences. In swedish T<o>mten and T<o>mt<e>n (for lack of a better way to show stress off the top of my head) the o and e both sound the same, but have intonation differences.

The vowel sound is different between past tense and present tense "read", even though they're spelled the same.

But that's not what's going on in the Swedish example above. The vowels are exactly the same between "anden" (the spirit) and "anden" (the duck), but the pitch accent is different, the "song" of the words is different.

Here's a video showing the difference:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXp7_Sjgm34

(And if you can't hear the difference in that video, don't worry too much, it's Swedish that's weird, not you. :) )

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.

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

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 agrees indicating IPA baʊ for both.

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".

It also has words that are pronounced the same despite of context, cf. Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo ;)

Ever-relevant poem: http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html

English is kind of a hot mess.

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