For example, if a lyric contains “that you”, it ends up like “thatchoo”. One example of this I can think of is in Karma by Taylor Swift (I know, I know, but it’s one of the most popular songs I listen to). The line where she sings “Karma’s a relaxing thought/Aren’t you envious that for you it’s not?” sounds like “arentchoo”. It doesn’t happen every time but it seems to happen unless you’re consciously making an effort to not make that sound. An example of this is in Love Story where she sings “That you were Romeo/You were throwing pebbles”, and it sounds like if you were just talking to someone and said “that” and “you” separately.
I’m just wondering if this happens in other languages with different combinations of sounds? It probably happens with other sound combinations in English too, but this is the easiest example to think of.
In linguistics this is called a coarticulatory effect, and it’s caused by needing to move the articulators between two positions rapidly. As such, it can be thought of as a kind of “hardware” limitation of humans, as opposed to a “software” limitation of any single language. Whether other languages would have the same sounds in sequence is the main factor.
The “ch” affricate (which is t͡ʃ in the IPA) is a mix of a voiceless alveolar stop component and a post-alveolar fricative component. Because “y” is palatal, you end up getting that post-alveolar fricative component through coarticulation.
The “ch” affricate (which is t͡ʃ in the IPA) is a mix of a voiceless alveolar stop component and a post-alveolar fricative component. Because “y” is palatal, you end up getting that post-alveolar fricative component through coarticulation.
Explain this for the bimbo girlies now please!
This is called connected speech, I think your specific examples would be assimilation where two sounds blend together. There are lots of other sub-topics of connected speech too. I’m sure this pops up in most other languages as well because if you natively speak a language, it’s likely that you’ll naturally find yourself connecting words and sounds. Great question, reading up about this was interesting.
Here’s a link to a site with more examples: https://gonaturalenglish.com/connected-speech-fast-native-english-pronunciation/
Spanish has a ton of these. Sometimes the rules of the language are changed to avoid them. For instance, you’d expect “the water” to use the feminine version of “the” as “agua” ends in “a” (la agua), but because it causes connected speech and makes the stressed syllable difficult to hear, the masculine version is used instead (el agua) to avoid that awkwardness.
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In British English, we do this a lot with ‘u’ sounds. For example, in London we take the Tube, which Americans pronounce ‘toob’ and we pronounce ‘choob’. Strangely enough, almost all English speakers do this with the word ‘train’ and other ‘tr’ words without even knowing it: the first sound is not ‘t’, it’s ‘ch’.
Both British and American English speakers do something similar with ‘s’. For example, ‘issue’ is pronounced ‘ishoo’ except by people with very strong RP accents (that is, posh people), who say ‘iss-yoo’.
It’s a similar phenomenon to the ‘c’ before ‘i’ and ‘e’ transforming into ‘s’, e.g., in ‘science’, ‘ceiling’ and probably hundreds of other words (‘cœliac’ is a particular favourite). Italians do something similar, but they make it ‘ch’ as in ‘ciao’.
Brazilian Portuguese speakers change ‘t’ and ‘d’ to ‘ch’ and ‘j’ respectively before ‘i’ and ‘e’ sounds. For example, the word ‘de’ meaning ‘of/from’ is pronounced more like ‘juh’. In Portugal, though, they use a hard ‘d’.
So, in summary, ‘e/i’ and ‘u’ sounds all have a tendency to transform the preceding consonant, especially if that consonant is ‘t’, ‘s’, ‘c/k’ or ‘d’, more rarely with ‘j’ and ‘z’ and sometimes with ‘b’. If and how they change varies by language and dialect.
(Note: I’d have done this with IPA but I’m not sure about Lemmy’s support for it and I didn’t want to type it all out and have it be a load of non-loading characters, hence my approximations of the pronunciations. Apologies to any linguists out there!)
Love the comment!
Just a note that as soon as you have “cœliac”, you also have [aɪ pʰiː eɪ] (and Z̵̰̦͖̟͕͈̣͙͈͖͕̜̉̋̏̑̓͒̋̈̇̊̓̚͠͠͝Ą̷̡̪̳̳̱̞̒̂̿̓̉̈̀̽͋̚͝L̵̡̰̦̮͖̼̎̈̃̉̀̔̋̓̀̎̾́̉͝G̷̨̬̟̖͎͉͚͇̰͇̠͒͂͛́̐͑̒͊̎̂͝Ǫ̸̢̜̩̹͖͙̥̯̹̥̼̐̓͋̆̈̊̓̒͜͝ͅ), thanks to Unicode.
What if I say “ish-you”?
Well, that’s just plain contrary, sir/ma’am.
I’m going to have to listen to how others with my accent say it now.
Gesundheit.
Brazilian Portuguese speakers change ‘t’ and ‘d’ to ‘ch’ and ‘j’ respectively before ‘i’ and ‘e’ sounds. For example, the word ‘de’ meaning ‘of/from’ is pronounced more like ‘juh’.
This happened in Japanese too, where the original “ti, tya, tyo” became “chi, cha, cho”! These are all types of palatalisation, which is one of the most common types of sound change across languages.
Brazilian Portuguese speakers change ‘t’ and ‘d’ to ‘ch’ and ‘j’ respectively before ‘i’ and ‘e’ sounds. For example, the word ‘de’ meaning ‘of/from’ is pronounced more like ‘juh’. In Portugal, though, they use a hard ‘d’.
Could you give me some exemples of ‘de’ sounding like ‘juh’? It may be because Brasil is a really big place, or a language barrier, but I never heard anyone pronounce ‘de’ like like that, what I commonly see, especially since I also do it, is changing ‘de’ to ‘di’ and ‘do’ to ‘du’ when speaking. Also, this happens with many words with ‘o’ and ‘e’, a lot of people just replace ‘o’ with ‘u’ and ‘e’ with ‘i’.
It’s how the Paulistanos say it, or the ones I know, anyway! I was approximating with my spelling, but perhaps it’s more like ‘jee’. In IPA it’s dʒi.
In French we have liaisons, where in basically every word ending with an s followed by a word starting with a vowel, the s is pronounced “z”. For instance, mes amis (my friends) is pronounced “mez amis” instead of “meh amis”, des oiseaux (some birds) is “dez oiseaux” and not “deh oiseaux”. One of the many things that makes French hard to learn for foreigners.
Yeah but these are a rule and generally consistent.
Some accents of English have “linking r”/ “intrusive r sounds” for similar reasons, like when the end of a word and start of the next are both vowel sounds.
Example, some non-rhotic accents still pronounce the ending r in clear/gear before a vowel sound, or you might get “Pamela [r] Anderson” because of the back to back “a” sounds
“Vaniller ice cream” is my go-to when explaining this.
This also shifts the syllables across the words, i.e. me-sa-mis.
I once had a Parisian waiter complement me on my liaisons. It was really hard to tell if he was being a sarcastic asshole or not, seeing as he was a Parisian waiter.
It’s called Yod-Coalescence:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_consonant_clusters#Yod-coalescence
It happens to other words in English, in some dialects more than others.
Something similar in German is if a verb ends with “st” followed by “du” (you), it’s squashed down to “-stu” …
from a song “Sag mal, weinst du oder ist das der Regen…” becomes “weinstu”
“hast du” …“hastu”
There are also weird German rules about article endings. A band I like has a song called “Herz Eines Trache” which means Heart of a Dragon. I don’t speak great German, so first time I heard it I wasted an embarrassing amount of time trying to figure out what eine Strache is.
It’s actually “Herz eines Drachen” ;)
Ha. Thanks. Like I said, my Deutsch is kinda shit.
Regionally it can also be “haste”.
I think “Sach ma, haste jewent oda is det der Rejen?” sounds just lovely. Ü
“der von deener Nasenspitze tropft”
Truly lovely!
In Scottish gaelic the leading T which is grammically applied under certain circumstances changes the sound of word.
Uisge (water) goes from an oosh-gah sound to a toosh-gah when you say An t-uisge (the rain).
Same with chick, which is Isean (ish anne) to T-isean which is the chick (tish ann).
Definite articles confuse me.
In general in Gaelic many words get smooshed together when spoken. You dont usually say agus (and) youd say 'S which blends words together.
Thats common in many languages. As a native speaker i do not pronounce all my words individually, they often blur together, changing the sounds.
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Lonely Starbucks lovers are all telling Taylor that she’s insane. Don’t ask me why. You cannot convince me otherwise.
You mean that sometimes certain words sound like other words? No, that is uniquely to the english language! /sarcasm
Spanish has a lot of connected speech features, too. Especially with words that start with open vowel sounds, since most Spanish words also have open vowels at the end. Example, “Mijo/Mija” (term of endearment for your kid) comes from shortening “mi hijo/hija” (my son/my daughter). There are like 100 other examples I’m forgetting and my spelling is probably wrong since my Spanish is quite rusty but you get the idea
It happens in mine with the same combination of sounds, a case of iotation. Many words which have a “ch” sound in them arose as contractions of “t-y” or “k-y”, which we write as “ć” and “č” respectively.
Did you eat = jeet
Hi fellow yinzer
:)
Not a yinzer, just an amateur linguist.
“If You Seek Amy” is a song purposefully written using this phenomenon.
