Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by VTimofeenko 928 days ago
> Ichthyophthirius

Anecdata, but for a native Russian speaker this is not a tongue twister at all. We borrowed quite a few letters for Cyrillic alphabet and have dedicated sounds for them. This word becomes a shorter "ихтиофтириус", which has a much nicer visual balance of vowels and consonants
1 comments
gerdesj 927 days ago
I'm not an expert in linguistics but I do know how my mouth and tongue works! I apologise that I can't give examples in Cyrillic.

This word is roughly pronounced "ick", "thee", "oh", "fuh", "thirius". The surprising thing in English is the ph-th bit - we only see that in Greek words and perhaps some Russian or other Cyrillic based borrow words.

When I look at it, we English use two letters for each of these phonemes: ph (fuh) and th (thuh). In Cyrillic I think you have a single letter: phi and theta (Greek) - I don't know the actual Russian names but it will be similar.

We can say fuh/thuh in a word as consecutive phonemes but it is rare.

link
VTimofeenko 927 days ago
> This word is roughly pronounced "ick", "thee", "oh", "fuh", "thirius". That's very close in Russian (and other Slavic languages FWITW); if I were to transliterate Russian pronunciation it would be "ikh-tio-fte-rius".

> The surprising thing in English is the ph-th bit

Interesting! I thought it would be the "ch-thy" part since "ch" usually sounds "t-sh"-ish in English, like "child".

I wonder if in English this phoneme uses the "k" sound only for words like "chrysanthemum" or "chrysalis" borrowed from Greek-ish languages.

> I don't know the actual Russian names but it will be similar.

Actually "ф" is just "ph" as in Philadelphia and "т" is "t", very close to how it sounds in the word "term". I think the key difference is that the "th" (sounds like in "the", "they", etc.) phoneme is a separate letter so it's decoupled from "t".

link
dragonwriter 927 days ago
> This word is roughly pronounced "ick", "thee", "oh", "fuh", "thirius".

Nah, closer to "ick-thee-off-thirius": https://www.merriam-webster.com/medical/ichthyophthirius

> the surprising thing in English is the ph-th bit

Right, especially not having a vowel between them, because "f" -> "th" without an intervening vowel is very unusual in English.

link