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.

  • 🇨🇦🇩🇪🇨🇳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!