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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.
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.
Now I'm just sitting here picturing you saying stuff like "Careful don't touch that! That pan is ho!"
Sounds like I'm exclaiming that something is hot, then clarifying that it was a potato.
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.
I had to think of a ghetto accent "I'm ga'a fuck you up, mate".
So, it's not like there's no movement in that single syllable. A mild attempt is made at pronouncing two syllables, by having the back of the tongue shortly touch the roof of the mouth. But for properly pronouncing an "n", the front of your tongue needs to touch the roof of your mouth, and that's certainly not happening.
Up and at them!
hɒʔpteɪdəʊ
OOoo wiggley wiggely wiggely