A tongue twister is a phrase that is designed to be difficult to articulate properly, and can be used as a type of spoken (or sung) word game.
[1] For example, the following sentence was said to be "the most difficult of common English-language tongue twisters" by William Poundstone.
The popular "she sells seashells" tongue twister was originally published in 1850 as a diction exercise.
"She sells seashells" was turned into a popular song in 1908, with words by British songwriter Terry Sullivan and music by Harry Gifford.
The following twister entered a contest in Games Magazine on the November/December 1979 issue and was announced the winner on the March/April 1980 issue:[6][7] Shep Schwab shopped at Scott's Schnapps shop; One shot of Scott's Schnapps stopped Schwab's watch.
Tongue twisters are used to train pronunciation skills in non-native speakers:[9] The sheep on the ship slipped on the sheet of sleet.
Some twisters are amusing because they sound incorrect even when pronounced correctly: Are you copperbottoming those pans, my man?
In 2013, MIT researchers claimed that this is the trickiest twister to date:[10][11] Pad kid poured curd pulled cold Based on the MIT confusion matrix of 1620 single phoneme errors, the phoneme with the greatest margin of speech error is l [l] mistaken for r [r].
As a result, speakers may naturally transform ch [tʃ] to t [t] or when trying to pronounce certain tongue twisters.
[citation needed] An example is Georgian baq'aq'i ts'q'alshi q'iq'inebs ("a frog croaks in the water"), in which q' is a uvular ejective.
Another example, the Czech and Slovak strč prst skrz krk ("stick a finger through the throat") is difficult for a non-native speaker due to the absence of vowels, although syllabic r is a common sound in Czech, Slovak and some other Slavic languages.