• @TheBananaKing
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    453 months ago

    What kind of fucked-up Forest-Gump accent does Randall have?

      • @TheBananaKing
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        23 months ago

        Most English accents make a strong distinction between most of the voewls in that sentence. If you relentlessly turn everything to schwa, you get a cross between the aforementioned Forest Gump and “Ermagerd, shers”.

        • @[email protected]
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          53 months ago

          Out of curiosity, what words does your accent pronounce without a schwa? Every single vowel sound in that is a schwa sound in those sentences sounds perfectly natural to me with a schwa sound.

          • @TheBananaKing
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            23 months ago

            /wɒts ʌp? wʌz dʌg gənə kʌm? dʌg lʌvz bɹʌntʃ. nʌʔʌ dʌgz stʌk kɒz ɒv ə tʌnəl ɒbstɹʌkʃən. ə tɹʌk dʌmpt ə tʌn ɒv ʌnjənz. əχ./

            • Deebster
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              3 months ago

              For me it’s more like
              /wɒts ʌp? wɒz dʌg gənə kʌm? dʌg lʌvz bɹʌnʧ. nɜːʔɜː dʌgz stʌk kʌz ɒv ə tʌnəl əbstɹʌkʃən. ə tɹʌk dʌmpt ə tʌn ɒv ʌnjənz. əχ./

              (Gimsonian, anyway, I like the newer, more logical style that would have nurse be /nəːs/)

            • @WoahWoah
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              3 months ago

              Interestingly, “ʌ” is not used in many American linguistics sources, from Merriam Webster to Google Translate. In American English and many dialects of British English (and many others), there is little to no difference between ‘ʌ’ and ‘ə.’ I believe ‘ʌ’ is considered an allophone of ‘ə,’ which aren’t always listed for vowel sounds in IPA.

              The distinction is called the comma-strut split (referenced in the xkcd explainer), and occurs in a minority of English dialects apparently. I didn’t realize Australian English was one of them! Cool.

        • @WoahWoah
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          3 months ago

          I was putting the question mark because Tom Hanks affects a Mississippian accent, which would not necessarily pronounce all of these words with a schwa.

          “Ermahgerd” uses two different vowel sounds, and that ɚ sound is slightly different than the examples in the xkcd, none of which are ɚ.

          Given all three of these items–xkcd, Forrest Gump, and the meme–are from the United States, it makes sense to think of them in that dialect context.

          I realize that you’re Australian, so perhaps you wouldn’t pronounce all these words with a schwa, but one of the defining features of the Australian accent is the abundance of schwas that are added in places that American English doesn’t have it–notably at the end of words. Arguably Australian English actually uses the schwa more than Forrest Gump (or Randall) would.

          It’s also probably important to remember that the entire population of Australia is roughly equivalent to the metro area of New York City. As of 2022, there were roughly 400 million native English speakers in the world, of which roughly 306 million are in the United States, so I’m not sure about your “most English accents” comment either.

          That said it’s a very common second language, and at that level there would basically be innumerable accents, but it would be nearly impossible to analyze relative vowel variance across at that scale. So, maybe!

    • @captainlezbian
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      33 months ago

      Midwestern possibly. It works with my accent at least

  • Deconceptualist
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    393 months ago

    I bet these sentences sound super weird if you try to pronounce them without using any schwas.

    • teft
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      293 months ago

      You would probably just sound like a non-native speaker. I assume it would be similar to weak forms and how weak forms are usually absent from non-native english speech.

      • @NoRodent
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        253 months ago

        As a non-native speaker, I was kinda confused at first by this comic because in my head the vowels definitely didn’t sound all the same. But I personally consider pronunciation of vowels in English to be one of the greatest mysteries in the universe, so no wonder.

        • @[email protected]
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          193 months ago

          As a native English speaker and Spanish learner, consistent vowel pronunciation is so incredible. 🥺 Just looking at a word and knowing how to pronounce it… amazing stuff. Kind of wild that in some languages you don’t have the ‘curse of the self educated’ (randomly mispronouncing words you’ve only read, not heard spoken).

          • @WoahWoah
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            83 months ago

            Yeah that blew my mind about Spanish. I was like, “WHAT DO YOU MEAN ALL THESE VOWELS ALWAYS HAVE THE SAME SOUND??? YOU ARE ALLOWED TO DO THAT!??”

            Then I started trying to learn to conjugate verbs and I was like ohhhhh, ok, so fuck me.

      • @WoahWoah
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        43 months ago

        Non-native to where? These aren’t all schwa in all English-speaking nations. They’re not even all schwa in all US dialects.

        Language is crazy.

  • @[email protected]
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    313 months ago

    Don’t a lot of these use the “strut” vowel (/ʌ/) and not schwa (/ə/) per se?

    My transcription would be

    /wʌts ʌp? wʌz dʌg gənə kʌm? dʌg lʌvz bɹʌntʃ. nʌʔʌ dʌgz stʌk kəz əv ə tʌnəl əbstɹʌkʃən. ə tɹʌk dʌmpt ə tʌn əv ʌnjənz. ʊχ./

      • @[email protected]
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        3 months ago

        Thank you for reminding me of this channel, I’d forgotten about it.

        Interesting about the merging. Schwa has always been weird for me because in my dialect it can be many sounds. I grew up saying “obstruction” as [ʌbstɹʌkʃɪn] like those around me. Then I hit grade school and was told by a straight-faced teacher that both the first and last syllables in this and similar words were schwas while pronouncing them differently :)

      • @[email protected]
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        23 months ago

        The point about stress is interesting. I’ve been playing with pronouncing the phrase, and almost everything tends toward [ɐ] when I speak the syllables one at a time, even the ones I marked with and pronounce as a schwa in normal speech. The notable exceptions are the final schwas in “obstruction” and “onions”, which tend toward [ɪ], and the -nel of “tunnel”, which is something like [nɫ] (vocalic ɫ) ~ [nəɫ].

    • @TheBananaKing
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      113 months ago

      You use the same vowel for ‘what’ as you do for ‘up’?

      :confused Australian noises:

      • @WoahWoah
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        3 months ago

        Oh you’re Australian. Yeah, most dialects in the US say “what” and “up” with a schwa.

        Wut up. The ‘u’ vowel sound in “up” is the same one in “what” in most American dialects.

        The schwa is the same vowel sound in duzza. Wuzza uppa.

      • @mihnt
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        43 months ago

        whut?

    • @TheBananaKing
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      53 months ago

      Australian version is similar:

      /wɒts ʌp? wʌz dʌg gənə kʌm? dʌg lʌvz bɹʌntʃ. nʌʔʌ dʌgz stʌk kəz ɒv ə tʌnəl ɒbstɹʌkʃən. ə tɹʌk dʌmpt ə tʌn ɒv ʌnjənz. əχ./

      • @[email protected]
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        3 months ago

        Dann y’all are good at IPA

        One day I’ll learn it, after I learn the NATO phonetic alphabet, dvorak typing, and Morse code.

        • @[email protected]
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          23 months ago

          It helps when most of the vowels are the same and most other letters match their English counterparts lol.

          In case you get the urge to learn sooner:

          Here are some quick refs for consonants and vowels in English (RP = received pronunciation (a standardized form of English from the UK), GA = General American). Wikipedia pages for specific English dialects (e.g., Australian English) also contain a bunch of word/IPA pairs. Here are audio charts for vowels and consonants.

        • @captainlezbian
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          13 months ago

          Start with dvorak. It’ll ruin you best. You’ll be that person to your it department

  • @Betch
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    273 months ago

    ləl

  • @[email protected]
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    3 months ago

    Most phonologists I know would probably use wedge for most of these since they’re stressed, because schwa is usually considered just an unstressed allophone of a bunch of different English vowels, and not an actual phoneme itself. Also, I have syllabic l in tunnel and barred i in cousin.

    • @[email protected]
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      153 months ago

      I came here to say this. A bunch of these vowels are definitely pronounced with a wedge. Even tried intentionally pronuncing the stressed vowels with a schwa, and it’s noticeably, jarringly off.

  • @HonoraryMancunian
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    193 months ago

    As a northern Englishman, this doesn’t work for me

    • @HonoraryMancunian
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      73 months ago

      Although if I say it fast and lazily I guess it kinda does

  • Ms. ArmoredThirteen
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    143 months ago

    Going through the comments, I’ve just learned so much about what makes my accent distinct and that uh and uh are apparently different

  • @RampantParanoia2365
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    143 months ago

    If I’m understanding it correctly, the name Schwartz has no schwa

    • @fidodo
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      53 months ago

      I was a little slow too because some of those words have other possible pronunciations

      • Deebster
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        13 months ago

        Which is why we shouldn’t have phonetic spelling!

  • Dojan
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    93 months ago

    I love this one. Fucked with my head a bit.

    • @[email protected]
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      133 months ago

      Aaron earned an iron urn + Baltimore accent.

      That video makes me cackle every damn time 🤣.

  • @amanaftermidnight
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    83 months ago

    The trend of dropping all vowels implies schwa subsuming them all.