Words you love because of their sounds

[linguofreak]

English:
squirrels /skwrlz/ [skwɚlz]

If you take the /r/ to be a syllabic consonant rather than a rhoticized vowel, the whole word is one consonant cluster.

[linguoboy]

English: squirrels /skwrlz/ [skwɚlz]

I love to say this word. I can't even imagine the hair-pulling and teeth-gnashing it must cause most of the world's population.

[finlay]

I would call it something like hlandidno (can't be bothered to do IPA, use your imagination). I might be pronouncing the Ll correctly, I might not. It's a bit like hl and a bit like thl.

Well, you could at least use terminology... voiceless alveolar lateral fricative.

Or [ɬ].

[ɬandɨdno]

[Herr Dunkel]

Xichtn - /ɡziçtn/
Gschichtn - /ɡçiçtn/
Bossa - /bɒsa/
Stood - /ʃtɑːd̥/

There are more cool words like this.

[Šm Mepuyoš ab Duhen]

Chicken!
/tɕɪkən/
I don't want a quarrel about how to pronounce chicken

[finlay]

well, except that in english we would normally write it /tʃ/.

[Travis B.]

Even if we do have [tɕ] as an allophone thereof.

[finlay]

since they're not very distinct and certainly aren't distinguished by english.

[Drydic]

also [tɕ] smells funny.

[Herr Dunkel]

also [tɕ] smells funny.

It smells terribly Serbocroatian.

[Amuere]

German:
Dachau
Reich
Brauerei ( I was talking with my grandma (she's German) last month and we we're on the topic of beer and she said this word. I LOVE this word, it's eargasm to me!!!
diese
meine
Sonne
Seben
Zwei
Himmel

(Ok, I'll stop there. German is my favorite language, so I have too many words I LOVE to list in a post.)

Spanish:
esperanza
pescado
jalapeño
oso
llama
jovenes
leche
pollo

Portugese (Brazilian):
estado
gostosa
Anything that ends in, ão or ões
Brazil

Romanian:
eu
este
dragoste
iubesc ( and most other verbs with the -esc conjugations)
Any word that ends in "-ți"
The prepositional combination " pe tine"
inimă

[Herr Dunkel]

German:
Dachau
Reich
Brauerei ( I was talking with my grandma (she's German) last month and we we're on the topic of beer and she said this word. I LOVE this word, it's eargasm to me!!!
diese
meine
Sonne
Seben
Zwei
Himmel

And what about "Zunge"? "Schlagen"? "Schwerst" and "Xicht/Gesicht"?
There are some tonguetwisters such as "Angstschweissellos" - "without the little fearsweat" but those are, yes, tonguetwisters. Edit: And constructed unnaturalistic examples.

[Radius Solis]

English: squirrels /skwrlz/ [skwɚlz]

I love to say this word. I can't even imagine the hair-pulling and teeth-gnashing it must cause most of the world's population.

/plrlz/ "plurals" would be good for that too, with its three phonetically distinct liquids in a row. And "spendthrift" has a wonderful mashup of four coronals in the middle, two of them challenging to many in the world.

[Jipí]

Seben

I think you mean sieben.

"Xicht/Gesicht"?

That's usually spelt Gsicht if you're implying Southern German dialect.

"Angstschweissellos" - "without the little fearsweat"

I think you mean angstschweißlos (and Angstschweiß is only a tonguetwister if you're overpronouncing). There's no Schweißel in my mental dictionary.

[Whimemsz]

English: squirrels /skwrlz/ [skwɚlz]

I love to say this word. I can't even imagine the hair-pulling and teeth-gnashing it must cause most of the world's population.

/plrlz/ "plurals" would be good for that too, with its three phonetically distinct liquids in a row. And "spendthrift" has a wonderful mashup of four coronals in the middle, two of them challenging to many in the world.

There's also "rural" which if you wanted you could analyze as /rr.rl/, at least IMD

[Ser]

squirrels /skwrlz/

/plrlz/ "plurals"

There's also "rural" which if you wanted you could analyze as /rr.rl/, at least IMD

English is a silly language. But then we have Moroccan Arabic...

Whimemsz, I thought you were German.

[Whimemsz]

No, I'm American, and English is my L1. Why did you think I was German?

[Travis B.]

squirrels /skwrlz/

/plrlz/ "plurals"

There's also "rural" which if you wanted you could analyze as /rr.rl/, at least IMD

English is a silly language. But then we have Moroccan Arabic...

Note these are rather silly analyses, and not realistic ones.

At least the English I am used to clearly lacks neither any kind of phonemic syllabification (due to problems with the behavior of word or morpheme-final syllabics when followed by vowels) and there cannot be any kind of predictable syllabic structure (as it would be simply impossible to form some actual words if there were).

Hence for me these are all:

squirrels:
Normally, /ˈskwərlz/ > [ˈskwʁ̩ˤːɯ̞̯s]
Carefully, /ˈskwərəlz/ > [ˈskwʁ̩ˤːʁˤɯ̞ːs]

plurals:
Normally, /ˈplərlz/ > [ˈpʰɰʁ̩ˤːɯ̞̯s] or, somewhat more carefully, [ˈpʰʟ̞ʁ̩ˤːɯ̞̯s]
Carefully, /ˈplərəlz/ > [ˈpʰɰʁ̩ˤːʁˤɯ̞ːs] or, somewhat more carefully, [ˈpʰʟ̞ʁ̩ˤːʁˤɯ̞ːs]

rural:
Normally, /ˈrərl/ > [ˈɰˤʁ̩ˤ(ː)ɯ̞̯]
Carefully, /ˈrərəl/ > [ˈɰˤʁ̩ˤːʁˤɯ̞(ː)]

Note that the process of /ərəl/ > /ərl/ does not go the opposite direction, if one were to eliminate the vowel phonemes altogether and have syllabicity be assigned allophonic. For instance, I am not used to, say world /ˈwərld/ > [ˈwʁ̩ˤːɯ̞̯d̥]~[ˈwʁ̩ˤːɯ̞̯t] becoming */ˈwərəld/ > *[ˈwʁ̩ˤːʁˤɯ̞ːd̥]~*[ˈwʁ̩ˤːʁˤɯ̞ːt].

The most plausible process in at least the English I know of is actually that all the schwas marked above are actually underlyingly there as vowels, with them taking on the quality of a following /r/ or /l/, and with that /r/ or /l/ in turn being elided if it is not followed by another vowel. This is actually specifically supported by the behavior of words ending in /ər/ or /əl/, where I am used to a separate /r/ or /l/ being realized in addition to the syllabic consonant if they are followed by another word starting with a vowel.

However, I should note that I am not speaking for even North American English in general here; the above may all very greatly in varieties other than those I am personally familiar with.

[Whimemsz]

Note these are rather silly analyses, and not realistic ones.

Mine wasn't really meant to be silly at all, though I can't speak for anyone else. I haven't done too much thinking about the theoretical implications of different analyses of what's going on with the rhotics IMD, but for me "rural" really is either /rr.rl/ or /rɚ.rl/ (or possibly something like /r(r/ɚ).rɪl/...) (I don't have any reappearing final -r before vowel-initial following words, as far as I can tell, btw).

"Squirrel" is actually something of a shibboleth--some people pronounce it as one syllable, others as two (for me it's one: /skwɚl/~/skwrl/). My impression from just listening to people I know and talking to people about it is that such words have a good deal of variation in pronunciation across the US. I couldn't speak to the situation overseas.

[Travis B.]

Note these are rather silly analyses, and not realistic ones.

Mine wasn't really meant to be silly at all, though I can't speak for anyone else. I haven't done too much thinking about the theoretical implications of different analyses of what's going on with the rhotics IMD, but for me "rural" really is either /rr.rl/ or /rɚ.rl/ (or possibly something like /r(r/ɚ).rɪl/...) (I don't have any reappearing final -r before vowel-initial following words, as far as I can tell, btw).

From thinking about it some more, in dialects in which all cases of what could be called /ərl/ and /ərəl/ historically have been completely merged in all registers, the main problem with analyzing things as having allophonic syllabicity is in hiatus after vowels, where both syllabic /r/ and /l/ and non-syllabic /r/ and /l/ would have to be able to be placed (and thus would be ambiguous). In this kind of analysis the two main ways out are either add phonemic syllabicity (which does not require the aforementioned merger) or phonemic syllable boundaries. Of course, phonemic syllable boundaries are untenable when you have frequent reshuffling of syllable onsets and codas in derived forms (as is the case in English in general).

So that leaves one with phonemic syllabicity as being the only realistic option aside from having "extra" schwas present as I analyze the English I am familiar with personally. Phonemic syllabicity may actually make sense in varieties that do not "double" syllabic consonants before another vowel (which in itself implies said "extra" schwas). Even still, from an analysis standpoint, one would have to try hard to justify this approach if you have it so that a /ər/ never contrasts with a posited /r̩/ or a /əl/ never contrasts with a posited /l̩/. (Indeed this is a major reason as to why I favor the "extra" schwa analysis personally, because in the English I am familiar with all these sorts of cases are clearly allophonic when one looks at them carefully.)

"Squirrel" is actually something of a shibboleth--some people pronounce it as one syllable, others as two (for me it's one: /skwɚl/~/skwrl/). My impression from just listening to people I know and talking to people about it is that such words have a good deal of variation in pronunciation across the US. I couldn't speak to the situation overseas.

From what I am used to, it can be either, but it is a matter of register and stress that conditions how one pronounces it at any given moment. But yes, this is the kind of area where there very likely is a great deal of variation, even amongst individuals which have both forms (i.e. the level of carefulness that forms the dividing line between the two could easily vary significantly).

[AnTeallach]

British English (my variety of) has
squirrel [ˈskwɪɹl̩]
rural [ɹʊːɹl̩]
plural [plʊːɹl̩]
all of which are perhaps less striking than some of the American versions.

[Nortaneous]

Words like "squirrel" are why I analyze (at least my dialect of) English as having a vowel /ɚ/ instead of a sequence /ər/. I can't think of any words that have /Vrl#/ for any V other than, in the conventional analysis, /ə/, besides the name Carl, which commonly (hell, more often than not) gets pronounced as two syllables -- i.e. /kʰarəl/.

I have no problem with analyzing the other syllabic liquids as /əl/ sequences, though; as far as I know, that doesn't complicate the phonotactics, and they only appear in unstressed syllables anyway. (Except arguably syllabic /l/, sometimes/in some dialects, but that's from /ʊl/.)

[jmcd]

I never have a rhotic followed by a lateral myself in English so I have squirrel [skwV4V5] or [skwI4I5] and world [wV4V5d] (The [d] usually not actually a [d] exactly but preglottalised).

[Astraios]

The present optative stem of Albanian fshij:

fshifsh-

[Herr Dunkel]

[ˈɰˤʁ̩ˤːʁˤɯ̞(ː)]

Holy fuck Mekoshan here I come