xkcd #2942: Fluid Speech
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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.
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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.
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.
Speaking English using French vocabulary is a real cheat code
English speakers can really enhance their vocabulary when they know French. English does have a lot of French words that most people don’t use anymore but if you use them, your vocabulary becomes off-the-charts intellectual.
Pseudo-intellectual. A clear communicator uses the simplest, precise word that has the precise meaning they intend, reaching most commonly for the Germanic vocabulary unless they need the subtler shades of meaning from the Latinate. A pseudo-intellectual uses Latinate vocabulary to conceal what they’re actually saying or to intimidate people who aren’t as comfortable on the Latinate side of the fence. It’s a form of intellectual bullying that, to my mind, makes the person using it look insecure (not to mention likely dishonest).
A good communicator’s motto should be “eschew gratuitous obfuscation (see what I mean?)”.
I get as far as the third panel. Anything beyond that is drunk speak
I thought the same at first, but then I tried actually saying it out loud. “Yeah, I’m just gonna go to the shops”. And I actually think Munroe has it right here, at least for my accent. If I had been asked to say it and carefully analyse it myself, I probably wouldn’t have noticed at all that I was eliding more than “going to” to “gonna”. And if I had noticed, I still probably would have analysed it as (and I’m using Hangul here because frankly I don’t know how to spell out the vowel in the Latin alphabet in a way that actually makes sense) 근 (basically “gun”, but with a lazier vowel). But it’s definitely been elided down to a single syllable.
The key thing is that this only happens when putting it into the middle of a full sentence. If it’s the only word I say, it stays “gonna”.
edit: wait 🤦♂️. I can use IPA. I’d have analysed it as /gən/ But realistically, Munroe’s /gә̃/ is probably more accurate.
I can only get to /gә̃/ if I make an effort to say it faster than I ever actually talk. Otherwise, it definitely always has that “n” sound in there.
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.
