While I’m on the topic of language, let my introduce you to my favorite unclassifiable consonant, ɧ. Yes, I have a favorite unclassifiable consonant.
Generally, I’m pretty happy to have been born where I was born. It’s a very comfortable existence. But as a language nerd, I find myself wishing I was born into a more exotic language. Perhaps one with funky morphosyntactic alignment, or weird click consonants. But it turns out there’s an exotic specimen lurking right next door: the Swedish sj-sound.
The linguists can’t seem to agree on just how to classify it. You can hear it for yourself here. It’s one of the realizations of the phoneme usually written sj, as in sju [ɧʉː] “seven”. To me, it sounds like [ʃ] (as in ship) and [x] (like the ch in German bach) at the same time. This is also IPA’s classification, but it’s controversial.
Swedish is a boring language: it is a very standard Germanic language that doesn’t show much of anything out of the ordinary. Except it has a phoneme not found in any other languages on Earth. That’s pretty cool, I guess.
Jan 13, 2012