Oh, I thought it was /tS m O d/.

/tS/ is quite a different story due to it being an affricative.

That's... two syllables.

It isn’t. There’s no vowel sound between sh and m. Think schmear.

Onset: shm. Nucleus: o. Coda: d. One syllable.

Y'all would probably enjoy Wikipedia's discussions of English phonotactics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonotactics#English_phonotact...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phonology#Phonotactics

/ʃm/ is not a legal onset in native English. (Let alone /tʃm/, which is how I pronounce "chmod" - two syllables, /tʃə 'mɔːd/.)

"Schmear" is a Yiddish loanword coming from German, where /ʃm/ is perfectly legal. So it's pronounceable by the human mouth, it's just a little awkward for English speakers.

/sm/ and /ʃr/ are both legal in English, so you might think of it as something like those. Can you pronounce "smear" or "shrine" as one syllable?

(I'm not sure /tʃm/ is valid in any language - words or names that start with "chm" seem to be Polish/Russian words transliterating /xm/.)

> (I'm not sure /tʃm/ is valid in any language - words or names that start with "chm" seem to be Polish/Russian words transliterating /xm/.)

Oh it sure is in Croatian (and other Slavic languages), "tʃ" is written as "č". We even have slang words like "čmr-lji-ti" [t͡ʃmrʎiti]. "r" (rolling r) can function as a vowel.

“vzkvět” is a word in Czech that is pronounced in one syllable, exactly how it's spelled, of course.

The Dutch word “striktst” is of course also pronounced exactly how it's spelled, and in one syllable.

Or Swedish "västkustskt" (lit. west coast-ish), where "kustskt" is one syllable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_phonology#Phonotactics

On-topic, I pronounce chmod as one syllable with "sh", like schmuck.

Forgive me, but I don't understand how you can pronounce it as one syllable. I would have to pronounce /shmod/ as either /sh-mod/ or /shm-od/, making it two syllables. I'm happy to be corrected, I just physically can't understand how to pronounce it as one syllable.

If you think about a lisping pronunciation of smoke, sounding like "shmoke", this is how I imagine it would sound. One syllable.

I wonder if the grandparent is French, because I would never have considered to pronounce chmod like this. Then again, I say C H mod and C H own, which apparently isn't the standard pronunciation, so what do I know!

Ha! This is great. I would have loved to have had this insight when I worked on Midori, at one point there was an M# keyword shmutable (for shared mutable objects) and one objection was the concern (beyond the obvious objections to silly keywords) that if said as sh'mutable that it sounded very close to shimmutable which would be a critically bad confusion

White-bread American Midwesterner. :-) Not sure where I picked this pronunciation up.

I think what I’ve learned today is that no one pronounces any of these words even remotely the same!

...and while we’re at it, let’s do “char.”

As in chard, but maybe we should all say it as in chardonnay

First half of carrot.

I pronounce chmod and chown same as you do. Although sometimes I'll pronounce chown as one syllable... not sure the when or the why..

I hear ya. It’s not a terribly common consonant cluster. (In fact I think all English words that start with s[c]hm are Yiddish loanwords, but don’t quote me on that.) Try pushing your lips forward before making any sound, and drawing them back+together as you make the sh sound. It’ll come out as a single shm sound.

It’s pronounced similar to schmaltz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schmaltz

The trick is one continuous motion of pursing your lips, closing and then opening your mouth as you roll the constants together.