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'm sorry, but this one fails hard. My country ass drawls like I get paid by the vowel length, and I've never once shortened going to, to a single syllable. Never heard anyone do it either.
And hot potato isn't difficult to say at all.
Is this one a joke rather than something that's supposed to be real?
Now, I'm not saying we don't have some mush mouthed mofos up in these here hills, we do. Just not to that degree at all.
Edit: for anyone coming late to the party, I did say it in a sentence, and even changed the sentence up to see if it was some kind of specific thing like that. Got kind of obsessed with it for an hour or two, calling up friends that know I'm strange about language oddities and don't mind.
No matter how fast I got, no matter what sentence I tried, there was still a distinct, split second pause with an inhalation between them that makes the t and p distinct from each other. There was no ha'patata effect, or anything similar. Just hot, that brief pause as the tongue shifts and the lips purse for the potato, then the potato in a sweet southern drawl.
Maybe it was the "this fails hard" part that set off the parade of "yes it does" regardless of the fact that someone is saying that not only do they not do it, but other people with the same or similar regional accent don't either. And that's the case. The only two people I could rope in to try it out that did it came from Pennsylvania originally, and haven't developed a proper way of speaking yet (and if anyone doesn't recognize that as a joke, bugger off).
Shit, I was enthusiastic about this little quirk of speech. But damn, people maybe not keep repeating the same fucking thing when someone is making a good faith conversation about an oddity of language that should be interesting rather than another chance to feel superior by sticking to a generalization in a fucking comic strip.
It's a broad generalization, but it's not really a matter of opinion. We can scan people's mouths and faces when they talk (and have in order to demonstrate this stuff). I think the last example probably only applies that way in particular circumstances though, since English speakers automatically group, contract, and arrange certain phonemes in certain orders (e.g., I'm not, I ain't, but never I amn't--and in real speech "I ain't" is almost always one syllable). In this example, more frequently my country ass contracts the first syllable of "gonna" away instead of the second, so "I'm 'na head to the store; y'all need anything?"
The hot potato example just stands for the premise that in real speech the t at the end of hot and the p at the beginning of potato slur together, and if you deliberately enunciate both consonants, you sound like you're reading to a transcriber. Compare the way a normal person says "let's go" to the way you sound if you force separate the words: you sound like you're doing a Mario impression.
I'm sitting here sounding like an idiot repeating the phrase, and doing a full sentence. There's a distinct, split second pause in between the t and p, no matter how fast I try to go.I can't seem to say the hot without that t being crisp, with the tongue against the upper part of the mouth, then the shift for the p causing a tiny pause in between.
If anything, there's a brief inhalation, which is kind of a sound that links them. Is that what it's supposed to be? We can't be that far off around here. My dad says it the same way I do, I bugged him about it earlier.
When I force it into one mouth movement, it turns into a "tup" sound, but that feels alien to me.
Prob applies most to the GenAm accent