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. Some tongue-twisters produce results that are humorous (or humorously vulgar) when they are mispronounced, while others simply rely on the confusion and mistakes of the speaker for their amusement value.
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Types of tongue-twisters
Tongue-twisters may rely on rapid alternation between similar but distinct phonemes (e.g., s [s] and sh [ʃ]), combining two different alternation patterns, familiar constructs in loanwords, or other features of a spoken language in order to be difficult to articulate. For example, the following sentence was claimed as "the most difficult of common English-language tongue-twisters" by William Poundstone.
The seething sea ceaseth and thus the seething sea sufficeth us.
This type of tongue-twister was incorporated into a popular song in 1908, with words by British songwriter Terry Sullivan and music by Harry Gifford. It was said to be inspired by the life and work of Mary Anning.
She sells sea-shells on the sea-shore.
The shells she sells are sea-shells, I'm sure.
For if she sells sea-shells on the sea-shore
Then I'm sure she sells sea-shore shells.
A slight variant replaces "on" with "by".
Many tongue-twisters use a combination of alliteration and rhyme. They have two or more sequences of sounds that require repositioning the tongue between syllables, then the same sounds are repeated in a different sequence. An example of this is the song Betty Botter ( listen ):
Betty Botter bought a bit of butter.
The butter Betty Botter bought was a bit bitter
And made her batter bitter.
But a bit of better butter makes better batter.
So Betty Botter bought a bit of better butter
Making Betty Botter's bitter batter better
The following twister won the "grand prize" in a contest in Games Magazine in 1979:
Shep Schwab shopped at Scott's Schnapps shop;
One shot of Scott's Schnapps stopped Schwab's watch.
Some tongue-twisters take the form of words or short phrases which become tongue-twisters when repeated rapidly (the game is often expressed in the form "Say this phrase three (or five, or ten, etc.) times as fast as you can!"). Some examples include:
A Proper Copper Coffee Pot.
The sixth sitting sheet slitter slit six sheets.
Irish Wristwatch, Swiss Wristwatch.
Pad kid poured curd pulled cold.
Peggy Badcock.
In 2013, a psychologist at an Acoustical Society of America conference claimed that “Pad kid poured curd pulled cod" is the trickiest twister to date.
Shibboleths
Shibboleths, that is, phrases in a language that are difficult for someone who is not a native speaker of that language to say might be regarded as a type of tongue-twist. An example is Georgian baq'aq'i ts'q'alshi q'iq'inebs ("a frog croaks in the water"), in which "q" is a sort of gulping sound. 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.
Finger-fumblers
The sign language equivalent of a tongue twister is called a finger-fumbler. According to Susan Fischer, the phrase Good blood, bad blood is a tongue-twister in English as well as a finger-fumbler in ASL.
Alliteration without tongue-twisting
Although many tongue-twisters use alliteration to make them difficult to speak, there are other uses of alliteration that do not result in tongue-twisters. For example:
There's a train at 4:04 said Miss Jenny. Four tickets I'll take. Have you any? Said the man at the door. "Not four for 4:04, For four for 4:04 is too many."No tongue-twister results in this example, because "4" is pronounced the same in all spellings.
One-syllable article
One-syllable article is a form of Mandarin Chinese tongue twister, written in Classical Chinese. Due to the Mandarin Chinese only having four tonal range (compare nine as in Cantonese for example), these works sound like a work of one syllable in different tonal range when spoken in Mandarin, but far more comprehensible when spoken in other dialect.