I dont know if it is present in Italian but i think not. Generally in italian the ch and gh digram is used to write the k and g IPA sounds before e and i, but are pronounced c and ɟ. In fact like [ki] [ge] dont exist and there are the allophones. In Tuscan there is a feature, reported as nearly extinct, when you pronounce secchi, plural of secchio (bucket) and secchi (dry; skinny. Mas. Pl.). While in italian are pronounced both [ˈsecːi], in tuscan we pronounce the noun like that but the adjectives [ˈsekːi].

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  3. One that can differ between accents is the sentence “marry merry Mary”. In my accent, from the south of England, all three words are pronounced differently. A lot of Americans would probably pronounce them all the same.

  5. Umfahren is a fun one. Depending only on whether you put the stress on the U or the A, it can mean driving around someone/something or driver over someone.

  6. I work with a lot of foreigners here in Italy.

    Most of them speak Italian, to a greater or lesser degree.

    Some pronunciation ‘differences ‘ that made me smile…’penne’ (as a type of pasta) pronounced ‘pene’ (penis)…lots of foreign Italian speakers struggle with those double consonants!

    Also ‘scoraggiare’ (to discourage) and ‘scoreggiare’ (to fart).. you need to be quite careful with that one!

  7. Many foreigners who learn Dutch have trouble distinguishing “huur” [hy:r], which means rent, from “hoer” [hu:r], which means whore.

    So if you’re not pronouncing it correctly, a “huurhuis” (rental house) can be understood as a whorehouse.

    Dutch also makes a distinction between long and short vowels, so many words can get a different meaning depending on the length of the vowel: zat (drunk) and zaad (seed), rat (rat) and raad (council), bot (bone) and boot (boat), lag (lay) and laag (low), rot (rotten) and rood (red), god (god) and goot (drain) etc.

    EDIT: a ‘d’ at the end of a word is pronounced as a ‘t’, since Dutch has [final-obstruent devoicing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final-obstruent_devoicing?wprov=sfla1)

  8. To explore italian more, how about words pronounced differently but written the same way? (luckily they are extremely rare), ancora depending on the tonic accent (if it’s on the first a or on the o) it can mean anchor or again, pesca depending on how you pronounce the e can mean peach or fishing (I don’t know which is which as I’m a pleb who pronounce the two words the same way).

  9. There is this classic example in portuguese to warn learners to not forget the acentos:

    cágado vs cagado (cágado is a pond turtle, while cagado is someone who shat themselves).

    The difference is very subtle but makes all the difference. In cágado, the first a is open and the second is closed. In cagado, it’s the opposite.

  10. Slightly different:

    Geschift – insane

    Geschrift – writing

    Lemen – loam (type of soil)

    Lenen – borrow

    Jou – you

    jouw – your

    Kou – cold

    Kauw – western jackdaw

    We don’t have many words like this, because there are not many consonants or vowels that sound very close unless you’re mumbling. All the above words should sound different.

    We do have a lot of homonyms, though. Some common examples:

    Kool – carbon, cabbage

    Cool/koel – cool, chilly

    Bank – couch, bank, (sand) bank

    Vorst – frost, monarch/sovereign

    Schop – kick, shovel

    Gezet – put/placed, chubby

    Eng – scary, narrow

  11. We have a lot of those because of double letters. The letters need to be pronounced right for the word to be right, either long or short.

    kuka (who) – kukka (flower)

    kasi (spoken language for eight) – kassi (bag)

    kusi (pee) – kuusi (number six or spruce)

    kello (clock) – kelo (a dry, dead pine tree)

    vessa (wc) – vesa (sapling, also a male name)

    pallo (ball) – palo (fire, like house fire)

    maali (goal or paint) – Mali (the country Mali)

    and so on

  12. My friend is teaching English in Korea and her greatest struggle atm is getting them to pronounce beach where it’s more natural for her students to say it like bitch.

    In Irish, the pronunciation isn’t as much of a problem as spelling, but especially with fadas (an accent on vowels). Like the difference between cáca (cake, pronounced kawka) and caca (poop, pronounced kaka) is just one small line. This gets dropped a lot in names, but it means the name Seán (pronounced shawn) is commonly spelled Sean, and sean (pronounced shan) just means old.

  13. Voorkomen and voorkomen.

    They’re pronounced the same way, but with different stress.

    Vóórkomen means ‘to appear’, while voorkómen means ‘to prevent’.

  14. This is a pretty niche, Scottish only* case, but the different i sounds. Words like tide and tied, side and sighed etc. aren’t homophones in most Scottish accents but seem to be in all other English speaking accents. The other side is that most Scottish accents pronounce look and Luke the same way.

    *Maybe it’s found in some of the north of England and maybe even into the north of Ireland at a push.

  15. In Danish the word “råd” can mean “rot” or “(a) council” depending on if you add a very minor guteral stop (I think that’s what it’s called) after the vovel (å).

  16. Hmm from the top of my head:

    Pippa (to fuck) pipa (squeak or tobacco pipe)

    Snippa (child word for vagina) snipa (a kind of boat)

    Vad (What, calf, bet) Vadd(cotton wool)

    Actually a lot of our words change meaning and pronounciation by just adding two consonants instead of one

  17. Dziewka – girl (a bit outfashioned)

    Dziwka – wh*re

    Only one letter difference and it changes everything.

  18. One classic example:

    * Skjede – vagina / sheath

    * Kjede – chain / bore (as in lacking interest)

    * Skjedde – happened

    *[Pronunciation via Google translate](https://translate.google.com/?sl=no&tl=en&text=skjede%20…%0Akjede%20…%0Askjedde%20…&op=translate)*

    In Norwegian, we have two different “sh” sounds – kj & skj (but many more letter combinations for the same sound). They are, technically speaking, pronounced slightly differently, but many people don’t know the difference or have simply forgotten the distinction. I’m pretty sure we are on our way to one of them completely replacing the other due to language evolution.

  19. Classic “poisson” (fish) vs “poison” (poison), with the sounds [s] and [z] respectively

    A lot of foreigners have trouble distinguishing between our nasal vowels so “vin” (wine), “vent” (wind), “vont” (3rd person plural of present tense of to come) sound the same for them. Respectively [ɛ̃], [ɑ̃] and [ɔ̃].

    Some Germans* have trouble distinguishing between [ʒ] and [ʃ] so words like agé (aged) vs haché (minced) will sound similar. Respectively [aʒe] and [aʃe]. That’s the same problem as [s] and [z].

    Cul (ass) vs cou (neck) ([y] vs [u]) also tricky for many foreigners.

    *Sample size of 4, all in Bavaria.

  20. Hungarian is riddled with this

    ​

    Fa szállító = Tree transporter

    ​

    Fasz állító = Erection giver (lit. “dick stander”)

    ​

    Szarvas = deer (male)

    ​

    Szar vas = shit iron

    ​

    Róma = Rome

    ​

    Roma = Gypsy/Romani

    ​

    Örül = [Someone] is happy

    ​

    Őrül = [Someone] is being driven mad

  21. Serbo-Croatian has a pitch accent system, which isn’t marked by diacritics, so there are many words which are spelled the same, and differ only in accent. There are four different accents (long rising, short rising, long falling and long rising) and also unaccented long vowels.

    I’m gonna list some examples:

    pȁra (steam) vs. pàra (slang for money) vs. pȃra (genitive singular of par (couple)) vs. pȃrā (genitive plural of pȁra) vs. párā (genitive plural of pàra)

    lȕk (onion) vs. lȗk (bow)

    lúka (port) vs. Lȗka (male name, Luke)

    grȃd (city) vs. grȁd (hail)

    There’s also the classic example “Gore gore gore gore” (“The mountains up there burn worse”), where each of the four “gore” in the sentence is pronounced differently.

    As I said, these diacritics are almost never marked in writing, but usually you can guess from the context what the supposed meaning of the word is.

  22. In Polish the slightest difference is between certain soft consonants and their even softer longer counterparts. It usually denotes the difference between singular and plural or nominative and genetive: [nić](https://en.bab.la/pronunciation/polish/ni%C4%87) – [nici](https://en.bab.la/pronunciation/polish/nici) (thread – threads), koń – koni (horse – of horses), maź – mazi (gunk – of gunk), miedź – miedzi (copper – of copper)

    But there’s one I recall when it ends up to be completely different words: słońce – słonice (sun – female elephants)

  23. Swedish (along with Norwegian and a few other IE languages) use a pitch accent. This means that all words are pronouned with one out of two accents (or *melody*), *grave* or *acute*. For example, the words *bilen* (the car) has a different melody than the word *frusen* (frozen), even though they both have a stress on the first syllable. Saying words with the wrong accent sounds weird, but most often not unintelligible.

    But there are some word pairs that have the same spelling and stress, but the different meanings are only indicated by the accent, for example:

    *Anden – *the duck* & Anden – *the (holy) spirit*

    *Buren – *the cage* & Buren – *carried*

    *Droppen – *the drip* (?) & Droppen – *the drop*

    *Fallen – *the cases* & Fallen – *fallen*

    *Rutten – *the route* & Rutten – *rotten*

    [And many more.](https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lista_över_svenska_ordaccentsskilda_minimala_par)

  25. Māori has phonemic vowel length like classical Latin, and this sometimes carries over into New Zealand English when it borrows Māori words. One word a lot of foreigners know is “wētā” (both vowels long) which is a giant cockroach-like insect, used as the name for the special-effects company Weta Workshop that did most of the work on the Lord of the Rings movie. Problem is that the foreigners pronounce both vowels short, and “weta” means “shit”.

  26. If I understand the question correctly, In french we have many of those, we even have a word for it, we call it an « Homographe », a few example are:

    – Fils/fils : son/threads
    – Moule/moule : mussel/mold
    – Est/est : be/east
    – Livre/livre : book/deliver
    – Couvent/couvent : convent/hatch
    – Fier/fier : proud/trusting

    As you can see those are all written the same way, now we also have some that are pronounced the same, but written differently and which have a different meaning, for example:

    – Maire/mère : mayor/mother
    – Père/perd/paire : father/lose/pair
    – Vert/vers/verre/ver/vers: green/toward/glass/worm/verse (yep, all pronounced exactly the same)

  27. In German, umfáhren vs. úmfahren comes to mind: When stressing the second syllable, it means *to go around somebody with your car;* when stressing the first syllable, it means *to run somebody over with your car.*

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