Re: Sukhotin's Algorithm

["Rafal T. Prinke" <rafalp@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Rene Zandbergen wrote:

> >  The orthography's a little inconsistent here: the c is pronounced in this context
> > like "sh" in "shot",
> 
> "ch" as in "chip" (?)

That's right - "sh" is "s-hacek". But interestingly (in Sukhotin's
context)
the same sounds which are represented by a letter+hacek in Czech are
encoded by the same letter+"z" in Polish - so the algorithm should
produce different results for very similar languages. The Czech
"r-hacek"
is perhaps the most difficult sound in any (European?) language and
Czech children learn to pronounce it correctly very late.
In Polish it was merged with the "z-hacek" sound so that even
though we still have the distinction of "rz" and "z-dot", they
are pronounced the same.

Polish, on the other hand, has a 3-letter consonant "trz". You may
try this:

   Trzy cytrzystki [Three female zither players]

The above has no diacritics. The most famous Polish tongue-twister
always served to foreigners is:

   Chrzaszcz brzmi w trzcinie [A beetle sounds in the weeds]

which has an "a-ogonek" in the first word.

> Czech has in fact
> quite a few more consonants than, say, English, but I don't
> know how it was written in the 15th C. Mnishowski (17th C)
> does in fact use at least one odd symbol: a gamma-like
> symbol which appears only at the beginning and end of the
> word, and represents 's'.

Perhaps it was his personal variant of the "long-s"? 

Best regards,

Rafal