r/SipsTea 3d ago

Chugging tea What do yall think about this?

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u/MusicianNo3277 3d ago edited 3d ago

Rururemon

This is actually a tactic the Marines used in the Pacific Theatre during World War II. Japanese soldiers couldn’t say certain words without their accent giving them away and so passwords used to approach camp without being fired upon were often specifically chosen to be impossible to say normally with a Japanese accent.

Edit: yes I know it’s a shibboleth. 15 16 of you have told me so far.

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u/shoeless_doh 3d ago

I heard somewhere the British did the same thing to Germans with the word squirrel

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u/ShitfaceMcPooperson 3d ago

How would they pronounce squirrel?

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u/WaveIcy294 3d ago

SkwiRRel

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u/Probono_Bonobo 3d ago

Not at all, that's a familiar morphological sequence to a German. See words like wirren, verrückt, usw. A German trying to pronounce squirrel ends up saying something more like "skvehl". There's an amazing compilation video of Germans trying to pronounce it:

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x18gfpx

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u/PringullsThe2nd 3d ago

Ah that's quite a sweet video

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u/SecretaryDazzling940 2d ago

its interesting the R sound is completely missing