xkcd #2942: Fluid Speech
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.
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.
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.
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.
I learned it trying to fix a coffee maker. It’s news to me that it ain’t a coffee specific word.
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.