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xkcd #2942: Fluid Speech
Alt text:
Thank you to linguist Gretchen McCulloch for teaching me about phonetic assimilation, and for teaching me that if you stand around in public reading texts from a linguist and murmuring example phrases to yourself, people will eventually ask if you’re okay.
And in my case, it’d be more like /gna/. And yes I do pronounce the “t” in hot potato.
I feel like it’s the glottal T. I know for me, personally, my tongue doesn’t touch my teeth, but there is still a T sound. I am not British, though I am from Jersey (New).
I am from Jersey (New) too, and we love our our glottal stops. Once I was telling someone from out-of-state that I was from Trenton, and even after I said it three times, they still said they’d never heard of it. And I realized it’s because we pronounce it almost like “chre’in”. I don’t really pronounce the “nt” in the middle, it’s just a gap.
My tongue definitely touches the teeth/roof of mouth there. I do swallow the vowels though.
You pronounce the t in hot and then pronounce the p of potato?
Yeah. If I try going faster, it turns into “ht’ptayto”. Like a hard stop with tongue against the roof of the mouth before the teeth.
Although admittedly, this is self-reporting.
I’m sitting here trying to replicate what that sounds like from your description and I’ve only succeeding in sounding like a madman.
Different accents, then.
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How do you know that no-one enunicates the t sound? I just asked my partner to say hot potato and she definitely does.
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I don’t need to, i know she that correctly. There are definitely words we pronounce incorrectly but nit that one. You and the OP are conflating your local experience for a global one. I don’t live in the US, we enunciate differenrly
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Bullshit
Well, the only way to check beyond me muttering at myself would be to have a recording of me talking casually about hot potatoes :D
And yeah, I definitely pronounce “could you” as “couja” when relaxed. Hanging out with people from different countries makes you pretty conscious about your accent some times. Mostly when half the voice chat can’t understand what you just said and the other half can’t understand why they’re having an issue.
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I’d say part of this is the intended / official descriptipn isn’t actually that. The spoken word existed first, then someone tried to capture that spoken word using a finite list of characters and character combinations that map back to phenomes. The written word isn’t phonetically accurate to the letters it is composed of, and the written word is just close approximation of the spoken word itself.
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Yeah, as I said my awareness is just “people make fun of my accent some times” (and I make fun right back, it’s that kind of a friend group).
My six year old daughter is getting the hanging of the spelling and whatnot, but earlier on in her Kindergarten year, words like “driver,” to her, started with a J. I had never thought about it, but it absolutely (at least in our NJ dialect) has a J sound, because, as you say, we all talk fucked up (paraphrasing).
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