It’s a genuinely difficult phoneme to articulate. Back in the 80s, when the Guinness Book of Records was more than a picture book, it was listed as the most difficult to acquire—kids are supposed not to pick it up until they’re 7, and our own Zeibura S. Kathau says they have cram schools for it.

So what’s the deal with [r̝]? (See: Dental, alveolar and postalveolar trills)

• Trills are hard to articulate to begin with. As witnessed by questions here on Quora.
• There’s two articulations going on at the same time: both fricative and trill. That’s a much harder task. Much harder.
• And bugger me if I can hear anything but [rʒ] in the Wikipedia recording. Like any learner of Czech. Though I’m notorious for having a tin ear.
• It’s a complicated articulation, and (cause–and–effect) it’s very infrequent in human language, so it’s not like lots of people get exposed to it outside of Czechia. Kobon language has it as well, but it’s only one of like eight allophones of /r/; so if ever you have to learn Kobon (10000 speakers, which is huge for Papua New Guinea), you could get away with mangling it. Whereas in Czech, ržát [rʒaːt] (‘to neigh’) and řád [r̝aːt] (‘order’) are a minimal pair. Nice one, people of Czechia.

Brian Collins says “Probably because the protolanguage did not distinguish between those forms.”

Actually, Brian has sketched the answer in his response, but the foregoing isn’t quite it.

Indo-European languages often use notions of “morning”, “tomorrow”, and “early” interchangably. The Ancient Greek for “tomorrow”, aurion,  is cognate to the Lithuanian aušrà “dawn”; and the Ancient Greek for “morning”, prōi, is transparently related to the word for “before”, pro. So it’s tempting to say “‘coz Proto–Indo-European”.

But (a) that doesn’t tell you why Proto–Indo-European conflated the two notions. And (b) it doesn’t tell you why Polish turned the word for “early” into the word for “morning”, as Brian reports. The Poles didn’t speak Proto–Indo-European.

Neither did Mediaeval Greeks, when they ditched both aurion and  prōi, and instead started suing forms of taxia to mean both “tomorrow” and “morning”. Unsurprisingly, taxia comes from the ancient Greek word for “fast”, takhy… which in this context means “soon”, as in “early”: Remember: “morning”, “tomorrow”, and “early”.

If the same meaning shifts keep happening again and again, it’s not because  Proto–Indo-European: it’s because those shifts make sense.

So: why conflate morning and early? Because morning is the early part of the day, duh.

So, more interestingly: why conflate morning and tomorrow?

If you don’t do something by COB today, what do you tell your boss?

“I’ll do it in the morning.”

What does that mean?

That you’ll do it tomorrow.

It’s even more true if you’re a peasant, like most speakers of most languages have been. When do you think of tomorrow? Not first thing in the morning; but in the evening, when you’re planning what you’re going to do the next day. What do you think of tomorrow as, in the evening when you’re planning your work? Not as tomorrow evening—that’s when you’re meant to have finished the stuff you’re going to do the next day. But as tomorrow morning, when the next day’s work starts.

So a lot of people would say a lot of times “I’ll do it in the morning.”  In that common context, morning is ambiguous with tomorrow. So morning ends up standing in for tomorrow, as a more vivid or concrete way of referring to it.

And not because people have forgotten how to say “tomorrow”. Words rarely change to fill a gap: they change to make communication more vivid.

I’m not going to do this question justice.

Phonological differences in the dialect that carry across to the accent:

• Lots of /n/s that have dropped off in standard Greek, and longer [n]s than in standard Greek. So it sounds nasal: not French, nasal vowel nasal, but lots of nnnns nasal.
• The Greek counterpart of the Onion has an article on a tech upgrade to RIK (Cypriot TV) eliminating their Cypriot accents. The title of the  piece is Χωρίς κυπριακή προφορά τα ελληνικά στο ανανεωμένο ΡΙΚ HD • Το Κουλούρι  (“No Cypriot accent in the Greek of the rejuvenated RIK HD”). The web page file name is more direct: rik_without_ni, “RIK with no n’s”.
• Different stop contrasts. Standard Greek contrasts voiceless [t] and prenasalised [ⁿd], which increasingly ends up as [d]. Cypriot contrasts [tʰ] (initial geminate t), geminate [tː], and prenasalised [ⁿd]. That means that in the dialect, there are unfamiliar geminates and aspirates; and when speaking standard Greek, the stops sound wrong.

More singsong than Standard Greek (which isn’t hard, Standard Greek is pretty rat-tat-tat). Because of the geminates and the long [n]s, somewhat slower and more deliberate sounding (again, in contrast to  Standard Greek rat-tat-tat).

I no longer follow Greek politics for the same reason I stopped following US politics: too depressing.

I refer you however to the Greek version of “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me”, as I have illustrated here:

Nick Nicholas’ answer to What does the Greek word “malaka” mean?

I also look forward to hearing about Tsipras what I heard about Andreas Papandreou during recent visits: “A demagogue! A deceiver!” And that it doesn’t take twenty years and an economic collapse for people to see through this instance of populism.

EDIT: the question photo, btw, is why the Greek people shouldn’t give Tsipras a second chance. It’s from the Thessalonica International Fair, and it was where Tsipras the candidate, in September 2014, announced all the things he was going to do—the notorious “Thessaloniki Programme“.

We campaign in poetry, we govern in prose. But it’s handy as a politician not to get too surrealist in your poetry.

Originally Answered:

What does Turkish sound like to foreigners?

Like French with a /ɯ/ in it.

I was about to say “and without the annoying mumbling”; but, having been to Istanbul:

Like French with a /ɯ/ in it.

I do actually like the sound of it. (Although as a Greek I’m not allowed to say that.) And vowel harmony is cute.

Three Finns and a bottle of vodka. They drink in silence for three hours.

After three hours, one Finn says: “Nice vodka.”

The other Finn says, “Did we come here to talk, or did we come here to drink?!”

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Mayakovsky was acting like an avantgarde artist (or, as  we call it in my country, an arsehole) before the Revolution at a dinner, and a Finnish diplomat eventually broke down in tears and yelled like a wounded walrus, in broken Russian, Много! “Too much.” I always found that scene very poignant.

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Best education system in the world, even if Sam Seaborn says so: they pay their teachers gajillions, and even respect them.

They reinvented themselves from a dependency on forests to a high tech hub. Nokia, rest in peace.

I had a cousin work for Nokia a while back. There was no point ringing central office in Helsinki in July: everyone was south for the holidays.

Uralic language. Long agglutinated words. Gemination, which means the language sounds a bit like Dothraki.

Swedish minority, including Sibelius and Linus. And that kickarse general dude, who recorded Hitler.

Lordi, Santa Claus impersonators. Lakes.

Got out of the Russian Empire just in time. Had to be careful with how they handled their Eastern neighbour. Gave the Red Army what for.

They sneer at Greece these days, but then again, all of Northern Europe does.

How’d I do?

Answering as a Greek.

The Greek humorist Freddy Germanos (Φρέντυ Γερμανός, Freddie Germanos), God rest him, visited Denmark in the ’60s. This was his take on OP’s question (Ταξίδι στην Δανία, from the collection Το Δις Εξαμαρτείν):

The first thing you work out in Scandinavia is that the Danes do not adore the Swedes and the Norwegians, the Swedes do not adore the Danes and the Norwegians, and the Norwegians do not adore the Danes and the Swedes.

The Swedes will not forgive the Danes for Sweden once being their colony. The Danes will not forgive the Swedes for Sweden no longer being their colony.

The Norwegians don’t like the Danes because they beat them in soccer. The Danes don’t like the Norwegians because they have a lot of mountains. The Danes and the Norwegians don’t like the Swedes because they have a lot of money.

[…]

When a car and a bicycle cross paths, the car goes back. When a car and a bicycle cross paths with a dog, the car and bicycle go back. The dog is a sacred animal in Denmark.

In general all animals are sacred in Denmark, so long as their blood is not contaminated with Swedish or Norwegian blood.

[…]

The Danish national inferiority complex is that they have no mountains. Their tallest mount is the Mountain of Heaven in Jutland, which is 157 m tall.  Danes say proudly, “It’s a wonderful view from there”.

Norwegians, who have a surfeit of tall mountains, usually reply: “Of course it’s a wonderful view. So long as you stand on a chair.”

In the vernacular: νονός or νουνός. From a Hellenistic word νόννος ~ νέννος, which could mean dad, uncle, or granddad (Wiktionary says the Hellenistic word in turn is from Latin nonnus).

“The Godfather. One of the greatest best sellers of all time”. (Yes, Best Seller is untranslated. Why do you ask?)

In the language of the church: ἀνάδοχος, “guarantor”.  In Modern Greek the term has been extended to sponsor of a child:

“Sponsor a child in Palestine.”

Allow me to write a more general answer.

The phonotactics of a language, and the conventions of its spelling, can lead  speakers to expect letters to be pronounced differently in different contexts—for example, at the start or at the end of a word.

Truncation, in words like (re)frig(erator), takes a sound from the start or middle or end of a word, and makes it a new word. So [ɹɛfrɪdʒəɹeɪda] becomes [frɪdʒ].

But when you come to spelling that truncation, you find that keeping the old spelling can be misleading in its new context (which is after all, a brand new and unfamiliar word). So as both other respondents have written, you can’t spell  [frɪdʒ] as (re)frig(erator) > frig: <g> at the end of a word in English is always [ɡ], so you have to add a final <e>.

Moreover, English typically spells final [dʒ] as <dge>. Plain <ge> does exist, particularly in old –age loans from French; but an unfamiliar word ending in <ige> could be taken for a recent loan from French, and pronounced in the recent French fashion: [ʒ]. Even if that risk didn’t exist, spelling will prefer the usual <dge> pattern anyway, because familiarity in spelling is important (and when deciphering unfamiliar new words, we need all the help we can get).

Australian English truncates words a lot, and has to deal with this issue. The truncation of breakfast can’t be breakie: the shortening of the <ea> is irregular, and wouldn’t be extended to the new word. So it’s usually spelled brekkie. The truncation of poverty can’t be povo, because English shortens long vowels on the third syllable back, not the second; so it is spelled povvo instead, with the double consonant indicating that the first <o> is short. Ditto Seppo as the truncation of Septic Tank = Yank = American.

Traditionally in Europe: religion. As a more general answer than religion, which covers the other answers here: culture. Scripts comes from a particular culture, and adherents of that culture adopt that script. If speakers of the same language belong to different cultures, they use different scripts. If there is a massive cultural shift in the language community, then everyone shifts script.

The critical thing to note here: writing is a cultural artefact, much more thoroughly than language is. So it does not pattern with language, and can change even more quickly. It can change by fiat, or by proselytism, more quickly than language does.

So three hundred years ago, Greek Orthodox Christians wrote Greek in the Greek script; Greek Jews wrote Greek in Hebrew script; Greek Muslims wrote Greek in Arabic script; and Greek Catholics wrote Greek in Roman script. Four hundred years ago, Orthodox Cretan authors wrote Greek in Roman script too—because they were writing Renaissance plays influenced by Italian culture, and all their Ancient Greek references were via Italian. The Orthodox churchmen in Crete at the same time were writing in Greek script.

Ditto Albania, with the added mess that some Albanians made up their own scripts. Coming up with a single Albanian alphabet was a necessary step to having Albanian nationalism override  the credal identities of Albanian subcommunities.

Hence what used to happen with Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian. It flabbergasts me that Serbs also use the Roman alphabet, but that’s about a new culture (or religion): Westernism. Which is also why Turkey switched to Roman.

Hence also the merry-go-round of scripts in the former Soviet Union. Arabic (Islam); then Latin (Westernism); then Cyrillic (Sovietism); then Latin again (Pan-Turkism).

Chinese Traditional vs Simplified is partly about culture (rejection of the past), though of course many of the simplified characters are older cursive forms, so they’re hardly made up out of thin cloth. There  was some Westernising enthusiasm around Pinyin, but certainly not enough to displace the ideographic script.