Counting backslashes is unpleasant in any language, and Bourne shell excluding `...` does not seem worse than any other. Pascal-style quote doubling is the only reasonable alternative I know of, and except for occupying one character instead of two it’s not all that much better. (Also, trick question, because the first line, with its odd number of backslashes, is a syntax error if given on its own.)

More importantly, the difficulties humans have with the language are different from the difficulties computers do, and I was mostly thinking about the latter, what with the mention of LR parsing and everything.