Speaking English using French vocabulary is a real cheat code

I once did an English language vocabulary test that yielded that I’m amongst the top 0.01% in terms of amount of English-language vocabulary.

English is not my mother tongue and I still and often make mistakes in the use of “in”-vs-“on” or even in certain forms of past tense.

However I read a lot in English, in various areas of knowledge, plus it turns out lots of really obscure words in English are pretty much the same as a the word in some other language I know or even pretty much the Latin word, so when I didn’t know that was the English word for that, I can often guess the meaning.

All this to say that I absolutelly agree with you that it’s a reading thing, plus at more specialized language level, the “knowledge of foreign languages” also has some impact.

Got called a rich kid for knowing the word “carafe.” Pretty sure I learned it from a book, my parents didn’t have carafe with mountain spring water or some shit around the house.

That’s a different issue from sandhi. Vocabulary and dialect are another area of active study (often paired with yet another realm: sociolinguistics: the language you speak changes according to your social environment) that is a real rabbit hole.

I think Verlan is pretty neat. We had a full lesson on it in middle school because of one of our country’s most popular musicians, Stromae, which is Verlan for Maestro.

Lol is that what happens when they have an official institute that dictates correct French? “Oh it’s not slang, it’s verlan!”

Is that a pun on l’inverse?

Hah, I’ve seen it years ago. Classic.

I can only get to /gә̃/ if I make an effort to say it faster than I ever actually talk. Otherwise, it definitely always has that “n” sound in there.

The alien impersonator was me all along!‌ HAHAHA!!!

I mean, seriously, I am not a native English speaker, but even with my weird English accent, it only became weirder if I try to speak fast while keeping the emphasis on that ‘t’ at the end of “hot”. My native accent also probably lends to that glottal stop taking over the ‘t’ and merging it with the upcoming ‘p’ sound. It also helps that the two sounds (glottal stop and the bilabial ‘p’) are on opposite sides of my mouth, so I‌ can quickly sound them in succession. The end result sounded to me like an exaggerated “posh British” rendition, as if the alien watched way too much‌ BBC before invading Earth.

It just sounded way weirder than I otherwise would be. I can’t really describe it.

Are you the alien? Nobody calls a potato for eating hot potato… If you’re eating a potato it’s going to be hot. Hot potato is referring to the game where you pass something along very quickly. It’s saying you’re all passing something along that no one wants to get caught with or stuck with, and it’s almost never literally, it’s usually taking about a responsibility being passed or something like that.

When I hear someone from that city say their city’s name, it sounds like it should be spelled “Trono.”

Vangcouver. =] Also every city in Australia.

Like the other reply said, it’s all over the place in Australia. You can easily tell a tourist—especially an American tourist—because they’ll say “can-bair-a” instead of “can-bruh”.

It’s not unusual in the UK, too. Worcester is Wost-er, Magdalen(e) is mawd-lin, and Leicester is lester.

We have a Bradenton nearby which gets shortened to branton (pronounced like brain-nton). Gotta have the long A or else you’ll accidently send someone half an hour away to Brandon.

Surely you mean “Trahnah”?

Something like “Adams Smith” probably fits the bill. People would hear “Adam Smith”

RP drives me crazy with its bizarre pronunciation rules. Like never pronouncing ‘R’ unless it’s not there.

“Law and order” under RP approximates “lo ran doh duh” where literally every ‘R’ in the phrase is not spoken, but they jam one in place of the ‘W’.

ARGH! THE SPIDERS ARE EATING MY EYEBALLS FROM THE INSIDE!

My tongue definitely touches the teeth/roof of mouth there. I do swallow the vowels though.

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.

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.

How do you know that no-one enunicates the t sound? I just asked my partner to say hot potato and she definitely does.

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.

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).