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.

  • KISSmyOSFeddit@lemmy.worldEnglish
    65·
    2 years ago

    I once met a girl in a bar who spoke such absolutely perfect and grammatically correct German she did sound like an alien impersonating a human.
    Or someone who very much wants to show that she’s better than you.

    Turns out she wasn’t from Germany at all. She was an immigrant from Slovakia, who had learnt German at such a high level that it sounded weird.

    • laughterlaughter@lemmy.worldEnglish
      42·
      2 years ago

      I’ve had Americans ask me the meaning of words I’ve used in a sentence. Like “what’s tranquil?” (I’m non-native.)

      I blame reading.

      • Aceticon@lemmy.worldEnglish
        12·
        2 years ago

        I once did an English language vocabulary test that yielded that I’m amongst the top 0.01% in terms of amount of English-language vocabulary.

        English is not my mother tongue and I still and often make mistakes in the use of “in”-vs-“on” or even in certain forms of past tense.

        However I read a lot in English, in various areas of knowledge, plus it turns out lots of really obscure words in English are pretty much the same as a the word in some other language I know or even pretty much the Latin word, so when I didn’t know that was the English word for that, I can often guess the meaning.

        All this to say that I absolutelly agree with you that it’s a reading thing, plus at more specialized language level, the “knowledge of foreign languages” also has some impact.

      • SkyezOpen@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        2 years ago

        Got called a rich kid for knowing the word “carafe.” Pretty sure I learned it from a book, my parents didn’t have carafe with mountain spring water or some shit around the house.

        • LemmyKnowsBest@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          2 years ago

          I learned that word from my dad when I was a child. we kept a carafe in the refrigerator designated for water. It’s a wine carafe but can put anything in it. My dad was an alcoholic so he had a wine carafe and a lot of other alcohol-related accoutrements like beer steins.

  • cobysev@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13·
    2 years ago

    See, my middle name ends with an S and my last name begins with an S… and my middle name is a pluralized name, so nobody hears the S when I say it in conjunction with my last name. So I’ve gotten really good at pronouncing the S, stopping for a beat, then saying my last name, without it sounding super weird or robotic.

    So properly pronouncing “hot potato” while enunciating the first T doesn’t seem too challenging to me.

  • MajorHavoc@programming.devEnglish
    10·
    2 years ago

    Nice. There’s lots of areas I’ve lived where the locals drop specific consonants from the names of places. So anyone who actually pronounces the place name “correctly” is immediately recognized as new to town.

    • metallic_substance@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      2 years ago

      Phonetically, it’s exactly right, but It visually reads like the name of a Vulcan side character from an episode of star trek

    • Dozzi92@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      2 years 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).

      • GTG3000@programming.devEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        Yeah. If I try going faster, it turns into “ht’ptayto”. Like a hard stop with tongue against the roof of the mouth before the teeth.

        Although admittedly, this is self-reporting.

  • Glowstick@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    2 years ago

    This example doesn’t work for me. I barely pronounce the “t” even when i just say the word “hot” by itself, so when i say “hot potato” i don’t pronounce the t any differently.