xkcd #2942: Fluid Speech

https://xkcd.com/2942

explainxkcd.com for #2942

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.

  • ZootEnglish
    10•5 months ago

    You slow down for the t in hot? If you say hot potato aloud, in a sentence, you’ll likely drop the T. This also really depends on your accent.

    Atleast when I slowed down to say it aloud, it sounded quite unnatural to purposely slow down for that T sound in Hot

    • southsamuraiEnglish
      3•5 months ago

      Nah, no need to slow down. Molasses flows faster in winter unless I’m pissed off and swearing. The t and p are distinct. The o vowels in potato get drawn out, and essentially turn into puhtaytuh, unless I’m paying attention and speaking formally but the t and p are separate. I’ve been annoying my wife trying to make a sentence where it happens, even asked my dad to do it so I could hear him.

      I plan to annoy other family and friends tomorrow because it seems weird for something universal enough to end up in an xkcd to not happen at least enough to have encountered it, but because “hot potato” is a game, and a slang term, I’ve heard it a lot. I can’t think of any time there wasn’t at least a partial stop between the t and p, with the t being distinct. Plenty of mangling potato until it sounds like a foreign word, but that’s a different thing

      Maybe it’s regional? Gods know the Appalachian dialect is full of some weird quirks.

      • @[email protected]English
        4•5 months ago

        You’re not supposed to just say hot potato. Use it the middle of a sentence then say it fast.

      • @[email protected]English
        2•5 months ago

        Turning ‘potato’ into ‘puhtaytuh’ is an example of what they’re talking about. Saying ‘puhtaytuh’ involves less mouth movement than saying ‘potato’.

        Try using ‘hot potato’ in a sentence and you’ll probably notice that the glottal stop at the end of ‘hot’ gets toned down or dropped. The ‘t’ sound will still be there, but your tounge wont move as much as if you say ‘hot’ on it’s own.

    • southsamuraiEnglish
      1•5 months ago

      I keep fucking saying that I’ve been doing that, and it doesn’t fucking happen.

      Y’all motherfuckers apparently never come into the mountains where speech is slooooow by default.

      Even speeding up on purpose, it doesn’t happen. Which is why I made the original comment in the first place. Wouldn’t waste my fucking time otherwise. Jfc people can be assholes over nothing at all