Talk:2942: Fluid Speech

I've noticed that this doesn't seem to be the case in all languages. For example, when native Polish speakers talk rapidly (even when speaking English), they enunciate every sound accurately in quick succession while flattening out the tone and rhythm of their speech. I wonder if this is because Polish is an inflected language where the grammar of the sentence is determined by endings of words rather than word order. Does anyone know if there have been any studies on this? 162.158.74.49 23:12, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

I'm not linguists but based on how many those are, definitely. -- Hkmaly (talk) 00:10, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

Russian also has vowel reduction like English and it's a Slavic language like Polish, so I don't think so. Although someone who knows more than me might be able to chip in on whether the effect is stronger in English. 162.158.114.198 03:24, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

I've just added a very barebones version of an explanation based on what I could understand from the comic. I can tell that the four diagrams depict that of the human mouth but since I am not a linguist, I lack the knowledge of various terms and thus, can't fully explain the comic. I understand what the comic is trying to convey, I just can't explain it. Looking forward to seeing how this progresses. OmniDoom (talk) 00:22, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

I don't think #4 is a real IPA symbol, but as I am not a linguist, I have no idea. 162.158.91.36 01:38, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

The hovertext joke is that every English speaker fully pronounces the first "t" in "Hot Potato". It's at the end of "hot". Nobody says "ha potato". Nitpicking (talk) 03:01, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

Unless you mean "the glottal stop should be considered an allophone of <t> at the end of syllables" then yes they do. It's /hoʔ/, not /hotʰ/. 162.158.114.198 03:24, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

(Edit conflicted with 162, above, so this is my own reply...) I thought it was that it isn't "ho T'p otato", with the "teh-peh" awkwardness. For me, the natural way to say it is to glottalstop the first T for more "ho'potato" (the other Ts, there I find awkward not to get the "t>s<" out of, the ">s<"-tail being what makes a full-T not a lazy one). But clearly a different accent involved, as "ha" doesn't work at all for me unless I try to use some sort of (probably awful) Goodfellas-type accent. And my native accent is notoriously good at glottlestopped Ts (that most people misinpersonate badly, by attaching them to the wrong adjacent syllable).

As for "going to", experimentally holding my finger over the length of my tongue, it seems it barely has to move at all in "going" (the whole tongue wants to rise on the "i", but I can suppress that and do the tone-change from further back, if not straight from the vocal chords). Though continuing through to the "to", with my finger in there, it's no better than "going ku" as I prevent the tongue-tip doing the necessary small movement to fulfil any form of T. I can do better through basic gastromancy, but behind my unmoving jaw and lips (without the finger almost down my throat, of course), I can feel the tongue tip doing it's small but vital "crossing the T" work. 172.70.86.64 03:53, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

Unless someone's willing to start an "explain explain xkcd", I think this explanation still needs a lot of work to be intelligible to non-linguists (myself included). That aside, I do appreciate whoever took the time to type all that up. 162.158.166.210 03:31, 6 June 2024 (UTC)