See also the Christmas carol “Joy to the world, the Lord is come.”

“Think of it like a dice roll: You either roll or 6, or you don’t, so basically it’s 50/50.”

Brazilian Portuguese speakers change ‘t’ and ‘d’ to ‘ch’ and ‘j’ respectively before ‘i’ and ‘e’ sounds. For example, the word ‘de’ meaning ‘of/from’ is pronounced more like ‘juh’.

This happened in Japanese too, where the original “ti, tya, tyo” became “chi, cha, cho”! These are all types of palatalisation, which is one of the most common types of sound change across languages.

Dr Geoff Lindsey has a fantastic video on the related phenomenon of why the <t> in statue is pronounced like a “ch” and why English people pronounce tube as *“choob”

Fun fact: when the boroughs of West Ham and East Ham merged in 1965, some of the suggested names by the public included Hamstrung, Hamsandwich, Smoked Ham and Hamsweetham.

They settled on the new name Newham, which, y’know, is elegant and all, but it’s disappointing once you know they could’ve been a sandwich.

:.|:;

To explain: /eː/ and /oː/ exist in Australian English, but they’re the vowels in SQUARE and NORTH respectively, so Australians don’t naturally associate them with foreign /e/ and /o/. If you can force an Australian to say “care-sore”, it sounds remarkably like Spanish “queso”!