…around the foreigners who can’t (or don’t). It makes me feel so exotic. Like people who speak those languages with all the gutteral sounds we don’t have.
Or people who click. That always amazes me.
And Texans. They’re practically foreign.
What foreigners don’t “th”?
I ask because I never could tell the difference between the “th” anf the “f” sound, though I can pronounce the two sounds they sound precisely the same to me.
Francophones have a major problem with the “th” sound, they tend to replace it with a “d” — 'dis, 'den, is what we shall do…
My mother, who was born and raised in Italy, had trouble with certain letter combinations, “th” being one of them. Depending on where it was in the word, it would come out with a much sharper sound, a slightly softened “t” sound. She could never say the word “dirty” correctly either. It always came out “dlirty”. Because she was raised in Northern Italy, her accent was never what the sterotypical Italian accent you hear is (which is generally taken from Southern Italy). She spoke in a much more staccatto manner as oppposed to that lilting, slurred “movie” accent. Much more of a Germanic influence.
I think English is the only major language with the “th” sound.
What about Casillian Spanish?
Yeth, dan, I think you are onto thomething.
Arabic has three letters that would be associated with “th” in English. First, there’s ﺙ , pronounced roughly like the “th” in “think.” Second, there’s ﺫ , pronounced roughly like the “th” in “then.” Finally, there’s ﻅ, pronounced roughly like ﺫ, only throatier and more emphatic.
Greek has it too.
My boyfriend’s mother’s from Quebec originally, and she calls tongs “thongs” and vice versa. It’s pretty cool.
Publius… where can I get an Arabic keyboard? 
Speakers of certain South Asian languages had problems in years past with “th”… now almost everyone speaks Hindi or Urdu as well as the state dialect, so the problem has mostly disappeared, since both languages have “th-s”…
The Germans and Spanish speakers can almost choke themselves trying to put “th” in words.
In fact, asking World Series questions and requsting pronunciations of “th” words were the order of the day when rumors had Germans dressing in American uniforms in DubDub2.
Many of the Asian immigrants here seem to have trouble with the ‘r’ sound. Which makes me wonder why they change their childrens’ names to English ones like Sawah and Loger (hehe)
Heh, guess not.
The “th” often disappears in Hiberno-English as well (three is pronounced “tree”, Thursday is “Tursday” etc).
Languages besides English that possess(ed) the “th” sound:
Castilian Spanish, Yapese, Welsh, Arabic, Danish, Pukapuka, Icelandic, Greek, Albanian, Burmese, Sakao, Galician, Hebrew, Fijian, Aramaic, Syriac, Cornish, Avestan, Swahili, Daur, Catalan, Ladino, Ojibwe, Somali, Tamil…
I think the English “R” is actually more bizarre, but if you want something really unusual check out Welsh’s voiceless lateral alveolar fricative “ll” in Llewelyn!
As a Scot, I would like to celebrate the voiceless velar fricative in “loch”, “dreich” and “houghmagandie”. It’s also in Gaelic, Welsh, most Germanic tongues including German and Old English, and doubtless Arabic, but them southern Europeans just can’t kkkhhhh like we can.
Most English people can’t kkkhhhh either, refusal (at least not as well as I can). The Dutch, on the other hand, do it a little bit too well.
I love to rrrrroll my Rs.
My best friend can’t do it, for some reason.