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Comment by geocar | Hacker News Reader

> one of the rarer sounds in the worlds languages

Is that true? Seems like it's in every other word when I visit Spain...

This is just a feature of Castilian Spanish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Spanis... \th\ only occurs naturally in like 5% of the thousands of human languages that have ever existed. Just because those languages are some of the most widely-spoken ones worldwide does not make the sound a commonly-occurring one in a meaningful phonological sense.

I know Japanese does not have a th sound, and I don't think chinese or most other asian languages have it, but am less sure about that. Unfortunately I lack the data needed to substantiate my claim.

    with
    lang_sounds as (
    select
        lang,
        unnest(string_to_array(ipa, null) ) as sound
    from world_dictionary
    ),
    totals as (
    select
        lang,
        count(sound) as sound_count
    from lang_sounds
    group by lang
    )

    select
        lang,
        totals.sound,
        count(sound) / totals.sound_count
    from
        lang_sounds join
        totals on
        lang_sounds.lang = totals.lang
    where sound = 'θ' or sound = 'ð' or sound = 'θ̠' or sound = 'z'
    group by lang, sound
    order by count(sound) / totals.sound_count

https://phoible.org/parameters has the data you seek: 5% of languages in the database have eth (ð) and 4% have theta (θ). Z is not a 'th' sound and fairly common at 30% of languages, though.

> I know Japanese does not have a th sound, and I don't think chinese or most other asian languages have it, [...]

There's no single th sound in English. There's a few different sounds you get from that letter combination in different words (and in different dialects).

Out of all Asian languages (East and South East) I can think of, only Burmese has ð and θ.

It’s true. English and the main Spain version of Spanish are two of the few languages in the world which have the sound. Even most Latin American versions of Spanish (maybe all?) do not have it.

Can you give an example of a common Spanish word that has it?

In "distinción" spanish, the classic pair is the word for house and for hunt - "casa" and "caza" respectively. If you pronounce them the same (with an S sound), you're a Seseo speaker like (most) latin america. If you pronounce them with different sounds, one an S sound, the other a TH sound, you're a "distinción" speaker, and if you pronounce them both with a TH sound, it's the more uncommon ceceo accent, usually largely Andalusian.

Any c+e/i (cena, cine) or z+a/o/u (zarza, zorro, zurrar) is a good heuristic.

c+a/o/u sounds like k (casa, cosa, cuchara) and z+e/i does not exist.

Z+e/i does exist, but it is not very common. A few examples:

- Words that are only written with Z: zepelín, zigurat, zigzag.

- Words that can be written with either Z or C: zénit, zinc, zirconio, azimut.

I stand corrected. All of those seem loanwords, but you are absolutely right.

My main point is that if you hear the sounds "th" (za) with e or i 99% it is cena or circo and will not be zena or zirco. It is an heuristic but very reliable.

P.S. Or pececín, as a random example :P

You are right, and yes, my nickname is an intentional misspelling from the old cybercafe days when I was a silly teenager trying to look cool xD

My favourite word to troll people who are learning the language is "cerrojo" /θe'roxo/, meaning "latch" or "lock", as it contains the three most difficult consonants in the language in sequence xD

In Polish there is 'szczoteczka', which took me just about forever to learn how to pronounce. I just could not hear what I was doing wrong.

Same word in Russian is "щёточка". The lengths to which Poles are willing to go instead of just using Cyrillic will never stop to amuse me :D

I struggled quite a bit with "существительное" when learning Russian.

I was talking about spelling. I can clearly see how these clusters of consonants characteristic of all Slavic languages can be a pain for a beginner, no matter how you spell them.

No Cyrillic imports, thank you. Russia decided to be the bully and murderer of its closest neighbors, don't need any more russian influence, even if literally just on paper. The further one is from them the more safety and prosperity there is, in every possible way.

Dude, this is a linguistics thread. Ukrainian also uses Cyrillic, btw

And Cyrillic is, if anything, Bulgarian originally.

What I found helpful in parsing those z combinations is just replacing them with h instead. for example, if you went up to a random monolingual English speaker and showed them "shchotechka" they could probably pronounce it reasonably well. All those z's just throw people off.

With Polish it may be even harder to go backwards, look for a clip from "Jak rozpętałem drugą wojnę światową" movie on Youtube.

Since we're piling on with hard to say words: Danes love to ask people to say "rødgrød med fløde".

https://translate.google.com/?sl=da&tl=en&text=rødgrød%20med...

(click the speak icon)

cien

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