• Lvxferre@mander.xyzM
    7·
    8 months ago

    This is one of those “weird” (in a good way) posts that could go well either here or in !linguistics_humor@sh.itjust.works. 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.

    • Deebster@programming.devOP
      3·
      8 months ago

      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.

      • Lvxferre@mander.xyzM
        2·
        8 months ago

        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:

        Portuguese

        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.

        Italian

        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.

        • Deebster@programming.devOPEnglish
          2·
          8 months ago

          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/

      • Lvxferre@mander.xyzM
        2·
        9 days ago

        Hey, I ain’t dissin’ Chilean varieties!

        …plus my native language (Portuguese) is a lot like “Spã’ish but you’re too lazy to prõ’ounce a few softer cõsonants, so you simp’y skip them.”, accordingly to some folks.

        • apolo399@lemmy.world
          2·
          9 days ago

          There’s this book I really enjoy, “From Latin to Spanish” by Paul Lloyd, that goes at length on the phonological and syntactical evolution of spanish and, damn, spanish really did take quite the funky path in the evolution of its phoneme system while portuguese remained conservative in plenty of its inventory. It’s really fun to compare them and see where they diverged and how some phenomena are really quite distinctly romance, like palatalization due to a yod.

          • Lvxferre@mander.xyzM
            1·
            8 days ago

            Portuguese is more conservative on analysis; like, the phonemic inventory doesn’t change that much from Continental Proto-Romance. But once you look at the surface, you find a bunch of weird stuff, like:

            • a general tendency to convert /Cl/ clusters into /Cɾ/; see praia/playa, cravo/clavo, or dialectally *prástico (standard: “plástico”). You typically don’t see this much in Spanish, except in the Caribbean. It’s nowadays stigmatised but still an ongoing process in some dialects (like Caipira).
            • even conservative Portuguese dialects have a tendency to shift to stress timing on quick speech, with vowel reduction and/or elision. On the other hand Spanish typically keeps itself syllable timed, even on quick speech.
            • most intervocalic /l/ and /n/ are gone, except in reborrowings. Some /n/'s got regenerated as /ɲ/, but that’s from a nasal vowel splitting again into oral vowel + nasal consonant. See e.g. cor/color, coroa/corona, boa/buena.
            • the nasal vowels are becoming phonemic, Lombard/French style; in some situations you can’t simply analyse, say, [ẽ] or [ə̃] as /eN/ and /aN/ any more.
            • rhotics. Unlike Spanish, Portuguese never backed /ʃ/ into [x], so there was that “gap” in the phonology that got filled by /r/ instead: [r]→[ʀ ʁ ɦ x χ h], with all intermediate links popping up in some dialect. In the meantime /ɾ/ became [ɾ ɹ ɻ], with [ɻ] trying to split into a third phoneme.

            There’s also a bunch of phenomena that appear in both, but got stigmatised in Portuguese and accepted in Spanish. A good example of that is yeísmo - it does pop up in Portuguese but it’s associated with rural people, and seen as “poor speech”.

            Sorry for the wall of text.

            • apolo399@lemmy.world
              1·
              8 days ago

              No, thank you for the wall of text! I enjoy this type of discussion and even more so on spanish and portuguese.

              I really find interesting the connection you make with the Caribbean dialects. There has been a great influx of venezuelans and cubans in the south of Brazil and I’m astonished by the similarities that they share with portuguese, sometimes in the choice of vocabulary, some other times in grammatical constructions, and I’ve already heard a cuban or two pronounce /r/ as is done in portuguese.

  • pixxelkick@lemmy.world
    2·
    8 months ago

    I feel like I often do 1 step above the farthest right, which is doing “guta”, with the t very soft.

    “I’mma “guta” go to te sto” is how it comes out when I say it quickly.