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.

  • @kaffieneEnglish
    4•5 months ago

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

    • 🇨🇦🇩🇪🇨🇳张殿李🇨🇳🇩🇪🇨🇦English
      1•5 months ago

      You’re skewing the results by a bad test.

      Don’t “ask your partner” to say a particular word or phrase. The very act of asking that will have changed results. (This is experiment design 101 stuff here!) Ask her to read a lot of stuff that has “hot potato” in it in various places. (We tend to use sandhi in flowing streams of speech, not isolated clips.) Or, ideally, engage her in conversation and get her to say “hot potato” naturally as an organic outgrowth of the conversation.

      But … make sure you record what she says. Your own brain, as a listener, fills in stuff that’s not there while removing stuff that is. You have to play it back, concentrating on only the sounds, not the words, and do it repeatedly, ideally isolating this one phoneme at a time.

      Really, sandhi is a thing, and it’s a thing that literally every native speaker of every language in the world uses. There is variance by dialect, naturally (entire phones vanish or come out of nothing from dialect to dialect), but some elements of sandhi (like consonant assimilation) happen no matter what your dialect unless you’re specifically concentrating on having it not happen.

      • @kaffieneEnglish
        1•5 months ago

        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

        • 🇨🇦🇩🇪🇨🇳张殿李🇨🇳🇩🇪🇨🇦English
          0•5 months ago

          Look at the flags on my ID (not to mention the name in the middle).

          I do not live in the USA either.

          And trust me, unless you’re some kind of very weird outlier (and if you are, GO TO THE NEAREST UNIVERSITY’S LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT IMMEDIATELY because you’re literally a dozen different Ph.D. theses in a single pair of people!) you use sandhi if you’re a native speaker. Period. You can no more avoid this than you can avoid being pulled toward the centre of the planet Earth.

          This is something that is well-researched. “I talked to my partner” doesn’t even qualify as anecdote!