cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/15125500
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 is one of those "weird" (in a good way) posts that could go well either here or in [email protected]. Randall Munroe typically researches the stuff well enough so his comics aren't just some empty joke.
Relevant tidbit: which gestures you're allowed to skip and how much is fairly language-dependent. Sometimes it changes even between closely related variety. English typically has a lot of wiggling room for that due to the stress-based timing, you're expected to reduce unstressed syllables. While Spanish for example isn't too prone for that (it does happen, mind you; just not as much. Except if you're Chilean.), with proficient speakers instead speaking faster.
Those simplifications often have their own names. For example, the ones shown in the comic are mostly adjacent assimilation, with a few deletions.
There's also a qualitative difference between the first two steps and the last one: the first two have been "encoded" into the language's morphology already, to the point that they're productive (cue to "tryna"), so they're a lot like the contractions nowadays. While the last one is mostly phonetic only in nature.
It was a choice of posting to there or here (I assume most people who are in one are also in the other).
I imagine they're fairly dialect-dependant as well, at least at times.
Yes, they are! And the comic shows one - you can pretty much guess that the author is American due to the nasalisation in the last step, that is by no means as common as in, for example, Southern Standard British English.
Other examples in other languages would be:
Folks here in Southern Brazil, specially in the rural area, have a tendency to drop pre-stressed [e] in quick speech, for example rendering ⟨tesoura⟩ "scissors" as [tz̥o:ɾɐ]~[tz̥o:ɾä]. (I'm urban but I do this a lot too.) However, you typically don't see this happening among people from Northeast - even in quick speech they'll still render the same word as something like [tɪˈzowɾɐ].
On the other hand plenty of those Northeasterners debuccalise /v ʒ/ to [ɦ] in quick speech, but you don't typically see people doing it here. Here [ɦ] is basically for /r/ only.
Nowadays the Tuscan gorgia is phonologised for the Tuscan variety, like "gonna" is for English - in some situations, instead of producing an occlusive like [p t k], that variety "expects" a fricative like [ɸ θ h]. But originally in the Middle Ages it was a simple smoothing, it takes far less effort to near two articulators to each other, for a fricative, than to have them touching each other for the full occlusive. And yet you typically don't see people outside Tuscany doing this, even the ones who were raised exclusively with Standard Italian, thus have practically no interference from other local varieties.
Ha, in my original reply I'd started to contrast my SSB accent with American - I wouldn't go as far as the final panel, although I feel I'd understand it easily enough.
Also, even in SSB (as opposed to the more London Estuary type English), we use glottal stops a lot more than over the pond: /h ɔ́ ʔ p ə t ɛ́j t əw/