{"id":8010,"date":"2012-12-20T17:50:02","date_gmt":"2012-12-20T17:50:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=8010"},"modified":"2012-12-20T17:50:02","modified_gmt":"2012-12-20T17:50:02","slug":"origins-of-hard-to-pronounce-sounds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=8010","title":{"rendered":"Origins of hard-to-pronounce sounds"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>According to an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.scienceandreligiontoday.com\/2012\/12\/18\/might-languages-have-developed-hard-to-pronounce-sounds-to-mark-outsiders\/\">article<\/a> I came across today, hard-to-pronounce sounds in languages might have developed to show who belongs to particular groups and who doesn&#8217;t.<\/p>\n<p>Apparently ancient tribal groups recognised that such sounds are a good way to identify &#8216;insiders&#8217; and &#8216;outsiders&#8217;, something they considered very important, as the sounds can only be made properly by those who have grown up speaking a particular language and pronouncing the particular sounds of that language. This is especially true of the clicks found in languages in southern Africa. This is possibly why some languages have a lot more difficult-to-pronounce sounds than others, and perhaps applies most to languages spoken in linguistically and culturally diverse regions &#8211; this last speculation is my own and doesn&#8217;t appear in the article.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>According to an article I came across today, hard-to-pronounce sounds in languages might have developed to show who belongs to particular groups and who doesn&#8217;t. Apparently ancient tribal groups recognised that such sounds are a good way to identify &#8216;insiders&#8217; and &#8216;outsiders&#8217;, something they considered very important, as the sounds can only be made properly [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8010"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8010\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}