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.

  • @Dozzi92English
    4•5 months ago

    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).

    • GTG3000English
      1•5 months ago

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

    • @[email protected]English
      1•5 months ago

      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.