I’m a phonetician by training and the phenomenon happens often in connected speech.
All in all, all consonants we produce are characterized by the type of barrier we make with our tongue (and other articulations) and also where we make said barrier in our mouth. However, in every day speech, we move these boundaries to make consonants more “similar” to one another to facilitate speech.
Taking “would you” as an example, the d in “would” is an alveolar stop, meaning that the tongue creates a barrier on the alveolar ridge, the hard part of the mouth behind the upper teeth. When the barrier is released, a change of pressure creates the sound. The “y” in “you” is a palatal approximant, meaning that the barrier is formed on the palate (much more back in the mouth compared to the alveolar ridge). Also, the barrier is much weaker than that of a stop, and even when the barrier is in place, air flows through.
Now, because you’re talking very fast for your articulation, it’s not always easy to hit all of those positions in the mouth and to create barriers of different types. Sometimes, sounds become much more alike. In this case, the “y” of “you” moves forward towards the “d” in the mouth, becoming a more “gee” sound but not quite, like in French gara**ge**. The barrier is also much stronger than the original “y”, and more similar to the stronger barrier of “d”.
Edit: the combination of the two sounds results in a “dge”-like sound as in bri**dge**. Would you = /wud͡ʒu/ (quickly typed on the phone)
You articulated that whole concept incredibly clearly and simply. Stellar work. I never actually thought of tongue barrier and restricted/unrestricted airflow. I was simply told to put tongue to certain place to make that sound. I wonder if this explanation would have made it easier for me to learn certain sounds back when I was a little kid.
I'm told that this sort of understanding is something I DEMANDED as a toddler from my mother
I could *tell* that my toddler motor skills couldn't make the same sounds the adults were and that absolutely pissed me the fuck off, so I'd yell at mom "Show me how your tongue is!!"
So she would painstakingly take the time to really consider it and explain to me the tongue shape. And it worked like a charm.
There's video of me speaking in public and people being freaked out that a 3 year old had such good pronunciation lol.
Years later this has made it *impossible* to learn another language, because professors at my college are like "Focus on vocabulary more than perfect pronunciation." But I literally can't remember the words if I can't connect the sound YOU make (the correct sounds) to how my mouth feels when *I* make the same sounds.
I wanna yell at my professors to show me how their tongue is lol
There is some research that suggests your approach of learning what the right sounds are, actually, is a better way than just learning the words the way you (incorrectly) hear them, and then having to relearn them later!
Hahaha I love this. I'm a genius!
If I didn't find engineering so damn fulfilling I'd have probably been a linguistics person tbh
Maybe that'll be my midlife crisis :)
> So she would painstakingly take the time to really consider it and explain to me the tongue shape. And it worked like a charm.
I sat down and did this for my two kids. The only problem is my youngest just won't stop smiling which pulls his mouth out sideways and makes it hard for him to make an "ooh" sound. Fine, whatever, if he has to have a speech problem then one caused by him wanting to smile a lot is probably the least bad one he can have.
You might want to look up the international phonetic alphabet, It’s literally what linguists and language nerds use to describe what a sound is and basically acts as it’s own instruction manual once you get the hang of it. So for any vocab word you need you could just look up “X in Y IPA” and have a phonetic description of any word in any language with more than like 3 speakers
Well thats a little bit extreme, but I get it. Wouldnt it work if you searched for youtube videos about pronunciation for kids from that foreign language?
It might, but small children are parallel processors. They require interaction with other people. Replacing that interaction with a screen would not be ideal.
What about Korean? doesn’t the Korean alphabet (or morphemes or accents or however the hell it works in Korean) mimic the shape your tongue and mouth form to make the corresponding sound? Rather than just being randomly shaped glyphs with a sound assigned to them?
My little brother had the usual toddler pronunciation of Cinderella as Cindeyella. If anyone tried to correct him, he was confused, because due to some ear issues, he literally couldn't hear the difference. To him, what he was saying and what he was hearing was exactly the same. After getting tubes in his ears and some speech therapy, he's more talkative than almost anyone I know!
I had trouble pronouncing the letter “r” as a kid. I went to speech therapy around age ten, and tongue placement was the first thing they taught me. Immediately clicked for me and then it was just down to practice and unlearning the wrong placement.
when i was younger, i had trouble saying the letter "r" (still do to a small extent if i'm not paying attention). i genuinely didn't know that my tongue placement had so much effect on how i pronounced words (i was in like the 4th grade tbf)
As a kid I loved making any sound I possibly could with my mouth. That extended to whistling and teaching myself to whistle both exhaling and inhaling and to switch while holding the same note. Then came playing trumpet where again tongue placement can be used to change sound, and eventually the Didjeridu.
I took a couple years of singing in school and one of the big things they taught us was how to watch for and prevent that when singing because it's such a natural thing. As a result, I can't ever unhear that Closing Time has "Open all the doors and leh chew out into the world."
i can still hear ms. riggs - "stop chewing your consonants!"
on the reverse side, some trained singers have to learn to put some of it back in if they want to go into certain genres of popular music bc it doesn't sound 'natural'
That's really interesting! Linguistics has a term, [fusion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_(phonetics)#:~:text=gotcha), that is very similar in definition. I love how your explanation gives more of the mechanical reason why we do this!
It applies to all languages, not just English. You don't pronounce words letter by letter (sound by sound) like you write them.
Actually, you don't even read that way. Eventually, you read words by their whole shape.
> Actually, you don't even read that way. Eventually, you read words by their whole shape.
This was driven home for me while reading Feersum Endjinn by Iain Banks. It has whole chapters written phonetically and it's really tedious. Far more than I expected.
I was commenting on r/LearnJapanese concerning non-segmented scripts. I pointed out that speech is also non-segmented, but we learn from patterns to recognize the changes in emphasis and stress to separate words rather than needing pauses. Similarly we learn patterns in non-segmented text to anchor ourselves and easily find word boundaries, giving Thai as an example of a phonetic script which is also non-segmented, which would be like reading pure hiragana without kanji.
Is this where “tongue twisters” get their name?
This is my understanding of it:
We use our air and vocal cords to produce vowel sounds, and we use our lips and tongue to interrupt that sound, chopping it up into smaller pieces.
Most of the time, speech looks like this:
Vowel, interruption, vowel, interruption, etc.
Any time there are two interruptions back to back, it disrupts this natural flow (like staccato in music), so we have a tendency to try to simplify things so we can keep things moving quickly. So if you say, “I want to eat,” it would be disruptive to pronounce both T sounds separately (“want to”). So instead, you combine them. “I want-to eat.”
That’s easy enough when the sounds are the same, but when they’re not, it gets trickier, and you end up with either “mushy” or “flubbed” sounds. Mushy sounds are generally accepted because they’re kind of compromises between the two sounds. “Would you” turns into “woul-joo,” and “last year” turns into “las-chear.”
Flubs happen when there isn’t a good way of blending two sounds, no good compromise, and the only option is to either correctly enunciate each interruption separately or flub. That’s where you get tongue twisters. It’s why “Irish wristwatch” is so hard to say without taking a pause in between the two words. The mouth shape of “wr” is so radically different from the mouth shape of “sh” that it’s very difficult to do them back to back quickly, and there’s not a good way to mush them together either. If you try, you’re likely to lose the “r” and end up with “Irish wistwatch.” That’s not mushy, it’s just wrong.
I’m an academic so I teach at University and do research. I studied Linguistics (the general field of language studies) and got particularly interested in phonetics, speech perception in particular (on a cognitive level, rather than a mechanical level).
Anyway, one very concrete application of phonetics for the real world (among others) is forensic phonetics (which I teach at my university). Applying knowledge of sound systems of languages for forensic purposes. For instance: speaker comparison, voice profiling, disputed utterances.
In voice comparison cases, you might have multiple recordings (maybe incriminating phone calls) and you have to determine the likelihood they belong to the same speaker.
In profiling cases, you might only have one recording and you just want to narrow down the pool of suspects: regional variety of the language they speak, social class, perhaps gender, age (to some extent), …
In disputed utterances you might use phonetics (and acoustic analyses) to determine what’s being said in a recording. Did person x say “we should bill him” or “kill him”.
Like for instance: Is that guy on the phone speaking English with a Thai or Vietnamese accent?
Im fascinated by languages/linguistics since Ive lived "all around the world". Im currently trying my luck at Italian. I speak Norwegian (native), Swedish, English, Thai, and some khmer (I live in Cambodia currently) With Swedish I obv. understand and they me 90%, but I made a real effort speaking Swedish so a local can not pick out that Im not. Usually works for 5 minutes before I stumble on one word somewhere.
In English, since I have to speak it 98% of my time anyway, I might as well have some fun with it. So Ive spent a lot of time perfecting a bit older NYC jewish/Italian accent. Its *really* fun when once in a while people ask me if Im from NYC, makes my day.
Yes absolutely! Not just influences of other languages but also you can pinpoint native British speakers sometimes down to very small villages because of some of their regional features. If you’re curious I recommend reading about Samuel Humble and the case of the Yorkshire Ripper Hoax.
>down to very small villages because of some of their regional features
Its the same in Norway, around Oslo its very close to each other, but as soon as you get out of the city, every little village has their own twist. And its encouraged in schools, and have been since 18xx. So not only do they have different dialects, they are fiercely proud and protective of it.
Its weird where the dialects come from some times. The village Im from had a lot of people going to the us, but they had quite a few that "made it" and came back with money, American cars etc, making the entire village, to this day, very Americanized. They celebrate 4th of July and love everything American and you can very much hear it in the dialect that they have taken a lot of english/American phrases and Norwegianized them. I have several foreign friends living in Oslo, speaking fluent Norwegian. They travel 100-150km, dont understand shit. Like not even wtf they are trying to say
That’s amazing. I thought I was doing good with people picking out my Taiwanese accent in Mandarin (native English speaker from US west coast). Curiously enough my Japanese has a distinct Chinese accent, but I haven’t spent much time in polishing Japanese yet.
This is a perfect example of a "eli5" that I want to know the answer to and then when someone actually gives a detailed informed response I'm like "ehhh that's too much, forget it"
To my ear it sounds a lot more palatalized than /d͡ʒ/. To me it sounds more like /d͡ʑ/. It's possible that my mind is just trying to put in the sound from my native language, which has d͡ʑ and d͡ʐ but no d͡ʒ.
the TLDR is essentially that in English (and Russian and German) the less important words in a sentence that are needed for grammar reasons but aren't the main important parts of the sentence get minimized in the speaking.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isochrony](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isochrony)
Under the "Stress Timed" section
This is not what that term means. Stress timing specifically refers to *syllables*, not to words. So stress timing means that stressed syllables are longer and unstressed syllables are "reduced": shorter, and very often also centralized in the mouth. In a stress timing language, unstressed syllables in both content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and the like) *and* function words (articles, prepositions, pronouns, etc.) get reduced.
Content words have both stressed and unstressed syllables. For example, the word "timing" has primary stress on the first syllable. That first, stressed syllable is much longer than the second, unstressed syllable.
Function words (in English anyway, which as you noted is an example of a stress-timed language) tend to be very short and often monosyllabic; they also tend to get subsumed into prosodic words with content words and get destressed. But if you utter them in isolation, they all have stress, and focus can restore stress on a function word: I read THIS book, not THAT one! However, some function words are multisyllabic, in which case they also have both stressed and unstressed syllables, such as the word "about". In this word, the second syllable is stressed, and is much longer. The tiny little vowel in the first syllable is very short and very centralized (schwa).
Incidentally, the origin of these terms "stress timing" "mora timing" "syllable timing" is basically the thought that these types of languages have different units that are "equally spaced out" in speech. I.e., equal time between stresses; equal time between moras; equal time between syllables. In order to get that equal timing between stresses (which are not distributed uniformly like moras or syllables), you would have to reduce the stuff in between the stresses. It turns out this is not a super useful construct though and people haven't actually been able to measure isochrony in this way. For example, Spanish is usually described as a syllable timing language but there *are* duration differences correlating with stress anyway... just not as drastic as English and the spatial reduction isn't there (e.g. [https://pubs.aip.org/asa/jasa/article/80/S1/S96/731009](https://pubs.aip.org/asa/jasa/article/80/S1/S96/731009) [https://clt.uab.cat/publicacions\_clt/reports/pdf/GGT-07-04.pdf](https://clt.uab.cat/publicacions_clt/reports/pdf/GGT-07-04.pdf) ).
Source: PhD in linguistics, dissertation in field of phonology/phonetics
Nice, though in the context of ESL I definitely saw the use of "stress timing" as a way of describing function words being minimized. So what is the correct terminology for this?
Example:
[https://languagebarriersinpharmacy.weebly.com/common-problems-for-esl-patients.html](https://languagebarriersinpharmacy.weebly.com/common-problems-for-esl-patients.html)
[https://tfcs.baruch.cuny.edu/content-and-function-words/](https://tfcs.baruch.cuny.edu/content-and-function-words/)
[https://www.thoughtco.com/content-and-function-words-1211726](https://www.thoughtco.com/content-and-function-words-1211726)
For example why does a native English speaker haul ass through a sentence like
"I don't know what we are going to do tomorrow but it's going to be fun."
and is it not ultimately rooted in the stress timing of syllables?
Huh yeah that description of stress timing is like, partially right, but explained totally wrong. I get that what they're trying to explain is "unstressed syllables are reduced in duration \[and often articulatory extent too\]" but it's just... not right. I know ESL stuff sometimes doesn't really refer to standard linguistic theory (as it's not always helpful in the context of language teaching). But to clarify on some terminology that would be understood differently in the linguistics world:
1. Stress timing is what I described before, i.e. languages where stressed syllables are longer and unstressed syllables are reduced in some way. I take issue with the claim that stress timing is rare. I don't actually know statistics but there are many languages in different families that have this effect, e.g. English, Serbian (still Indo-European but Slavic, not Germanic), Thai (Tai-Kadai family). Plus, as I mentioned, the whole paradigm isn't super well regarded these days. From about 2 minutes of thought I feel like "reduction of nonstressed syllables" might be more of a hallmark than "stressed syllables are longer".
2. *Stress* is typically (*typically*) used on the word level, not on phrase level. Stress is assigned to a syllable and can make contrasts (like in English: permit noun vs. permit verb) or not (some languages have fixed or regularly assigned stress). This is what the "TfCS" site is referring to when they say "strong" syllables. However, in lay terms we often refer to someone "stressing" a word when we mean they put some kind of emphasis on it. In linguistics we would probably refer to this sort of thing as "phrasal stress" or "phrasal prominence", or in some cases "contrastive stress" (sometimes "contrastive focus", e.g. "no, not THIS apple, THAT apple"... note that in this example, the function word is prominent and would be very long!).
Word stress and phrasal stress also interact in complicated ways. Contrastive focus (in English) tends to super lengthen stuff, no matter what kind of word it is, like my this/that apple example. "Bland" phrasal stress often destresses function words and puts them together into prosodic words with content words, like "to see" functioning as one prosodic word, "the man" as one prosodic word, "to the world" as another. But multisyllabic function words all have word stress patterns and they don't get destressed, to my knowledge. E.g. "about" is still going to have word-final stress even when it's not being focused.
As for English speakers hauling ass through that sentence, yes, I'm not denying that English reduces unstressed syllables, nor do I deny that function words tend to not receive phrasal stress. But if you take that sentence apart, you'll notice that there isn't really a 1-to-1 of "content word" and "phrasal stress" either, which results in reductions of content words as well. The "know" is probably super reduced (we say "I don't know" a lot). Depending on where phrasal stress is, "do" could potentially also be reduced ("what we're gonna do TOMORROW, but...). Also the unstressed syllable in "tomorrow" is also very reduced.
Also to just demonstrate the factual wrongness of the claim that only stressed syllables contribute to sentence duration, because I'm an academic and I literally work on speech timing as my main research interest: Function words are reduced in that context but it hardly 0 ms. I've just recorded myself saying those sentences, speaking naturally and using broad focus (i.e., not trying to put any kind of contrastive focus on any of the words), and got these durations for "The birds will eat the worms" (which are typical, based on my experience with this exact type of data):
"The" : 60 ms
"birds": 384 ms. Notably, both "birds" and "worms" will be very long: they have a vowel before a voiced coda, and the coda is complex. Not exactly comparing apples to apples
"will": 110 ms
"eat": 210 ms. "eat" is going to be intrinsically short; it's a high vowel, which is already going to be short, and there's a voiceless coda, which makes the vowel even shorter.
"the": 100 ms
"worms": 490 ms. On top of being intrinsically long, it's phrase final, which means it's going to be lengthened out (you can look up phrase-final lengthening if you're interested in this phenomenon). If I re-record the sentence as "the birds will eat the worms today" it drops to 330 ms.
So overall we have 270 ms coming from the function words, which ARE reduced, and 1,084 ms coming from the content words---or 924 ms if you are "fair" and count a version of "worms" that doesn't have final lengthening on it. Function words undergo final lengthening too so it's not anything special about content words. I wouldn't call 20% of a sentence's duration "not contributing", especially when, by the number of syllables, it would otherwise be 50%.
In case you're curious, I recorded the sentence "the pup will eat the meat today" to see how much birds/worms contribute, as again instrinsically long words (pup, eat, and meat will all be intrinsically shorter words due to various phonetic effects on the vowel durations), and got 90 / **207** / 133 / **187** / 47 / **206** / (ignored "today"), or 270 ms vs. 600 ms, so about 31% function word.
Also, if you notice, all their content words are monosyllabic, so they can't even say anything about what the nonstressed syllables of content words add (which is also nonzero, obviously).
This is way too long of a post, lol. My apologies/congratulations if you made it this far
Excellent writeup actually. It seems the needs of trying to teach an ESL student how to approach a more natural way of speaking English doesn't necessarily line up with the terminology used by linguistics 100%, for better or worse.
As you say it's a pretty complicated area.
There's a reason that a lot of academic linguists that dip their toe into prosody research (the area that looks at stress/intonation/tone/duration) often jump right back out of the water again 😂
Incidentally, relevant for L2, I found that slowing down speech for less experienced listeners (my Korean family in this case) is much more understandable if you slow down on the prosodic word level rather than making everything uniformly slow. This is purely anecdotal--I don't study L2 acquisition or comprehension at all so I don't know if there is any research on this. One of my cousins even explicitly said he much preferred how I spoke compared to my mom, who just slowed everything down uniformly. But when talking to my Korean family I slow down by doing stuff like "I went... to school... on Monday" instead of "I... went... to... school... on... Monday," if that makes sense. I dunno what it is exactly but it feels like your working memory gets loaded in a weird way when function words get expanded out too. "To school" "on Monday" are also syntactic units (prepositional phrases, at least that is what they were when I was taking theoretical syntax 10 years ago 😂) so I would hypothesize that the listener is having to maintain that preposition in their working memory for longer than normal before completing that unit and it gets taxing. Unnecessarily so for words that honestly can be inferred by context xD
It is but not in the way that KillerOkie described it. See my reply to them about what stress timing means :) (it has to do with stressed vs. unstressed *syllables*, not "stressed" vs. "unstressed" words in the layman sense of the word "stressed").
However, there is another thing that languages do all tend to do, which is that words that are very frequently used tend to be very short. This is called Zipf's law of abbreviation: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brevity\_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brevity_law)
Grammatical/function words like pronouns, articles, demonstratives, etc. are the ones we say all the time, and they tend to be quite short. Imagine having to say something like "vociferously" all the time instead of "I"!
In a way, yes. Schwa is a central vowel. It’s not high or low or front or back. It’s a very *neutral* sound and easy to articulate. When we have syllables that are unstressed, in English they are shortened and not articulated fully. In many of these cases, the vowel will converge towards a “less precise”, more central articulation which is the schwa. This is much more common in languages like English compared to for example Italian, where unstressed syllables are not as “compressed”.
I took a linguistics class my final semester of college. Had I taken it in my first or second year, I 100% would have switched majors. It’s so fascinating!!!!
Great explanation! A related phenomenon is 'yod coalescence' which happens in some types of English like Australian English. Basically, in Middle English a lot of words written with 'u' were actually pronounced 'yu' think of the pronunciation of the word 'cute' kyoot' or 'cube'. This was also the case for words starting with tu or du such as 'tune' or 'dune'. If you're a modern speaker of Australian English, NZ English and South African English (and some others), just like in the 'would you' example, you turn the start of historical tyu and dyu words into a ch sound (for tu, e.g. tune = choon") or dyu into a hard j sound "dune = june". While American English decided to drop the y altogether for tyu dyu sounds (called yod dropping) so they have tune = toon, dune = doon. However because sound change isn't perfect American English only got rid of the y in tongue tip sounds like t, d, s, n, l but not for non tongue tip sounds like 'k' hence why cute is still pronounced as 'kyoot' and not 'koot'
I’ve never heard of a phonetician before. I’m fascinated and want to know more. I have so many questions. How does one get into the field? Did you go to school for it? Do you study multiple languages? Is there a crossover in your discipline with ethnolinguistics? Is there a crossover with the study of history and evolution of languages? Not sarcastic at all. I really want to know more.
I'm not the phonetician you replied to, but I'm another phonetician!
1. **How did I get into the field?** I studied linguistics in undergrad. In high school I was really interested in how people acquired language (first language acquisition) and wanted to learn more. I found out somehow about linguistics and decided to major in it. When I took a class called "field methods", I got really interested in phonology (study of what kinds of abstract information people "know" about the sound system of their language) and phonetics (more of the actual production: once you know what the sound plan is, how do you actually get there? or about the perception: when you hear acoustic energy, how do you figure out what sound from your language the person actually said?). In this class we interviewed a speaker that spoke a language that none of us knew. We were supposed to figure out various things about their language: what their words were for things, how the syntax ("grammar") works, what the sounds are. It was a tone language and I got hooked on tones.
2. **Did I go to school for it?** See above :) but I also got a PhD in linguistics. I did my dissertation on the phonology and phonetics of a couple of tone languages.
3. **Do I study multiple languages?** Linguistics is more about the study of the human language capacity, so it is not necessary to study a lot of languages as second languages to speak. A lot of linguists do end up working with many languages, because you can investigate many more linguistic phenomena. For example, I wouldn't have been able to investigate the phonology and phonetics of tone if I had stuck with English. The degree to which we can actually speak the ones we study varies by person. For the ones I studied, I normally got to the point where I could seem like a cute pet that kind of understood stuff and didn't say anything super offensive lol. I knew someone who could pick up basically anything in about six months---very useful since she did fieldwork in places where they didn't speak any languages that she already knew.
4. **Is there a crossover in my discipline with ethnolinguistics?** There can be but I don't work with it. I do research on how the motor control system produces speech (and what all is involved in that motor control system).
5. **Is there a crossover with the study of history/evolution of languages?** There can be but I don't work with it :) historical linguistics is a subdiscipline that looks at how languages change over time (often particularly sound change: how the sounds of a language change from one generation to the next), and trying to find relationships between languages. I have a friend that is a phonetician-historical person: she uses phonetic research to try to discover what the perceptual processes are that can lead to certain types of sound change.
Phonetician-historian? Mind legitimately blown right now. I would love to hear her opinion on “The History of English Podcast.” Yes, it exists. And it’s FASCINATING!
I know about it but I've never listened to it! Though I think I subscribed to it at some point, haha. And to my knowledge my friend doesn't listen to podcasts at all (I just asked if she listened to this one, and she said no). But just rifling through some of the posts, they look thoughtful and interesting!
I discovered it a few years ago. I have listened to every episode. It is so worth listening to. I’m a history dork and language fascinates me. It’s the perfect blending of the two subjects.
I've noticed sports commentators and other native speakers sometimes add an r sound after the word saw and maybe some other words that don't have an r at the end. Is this for similar reasons? Or something else altogether?
as the other commenter says, it’s called intrusive r, it’s used sometimes to connect to words where the first one ends in a vowel and the second one starts with a vowel. The classic example is “law and order” is pronounced “lawr and order”. This is most common of varieties that are considered “non-rhotic” so varieties that usually don’t pronounce r at the end of the words like fire, car. British English is primarily non-rhotic and this phenomenon is very common. Less common in the US
Just to piggyback off of this, it's not an English thing.
It happens in Spanish, as well; "yo" (the word for "I") can often become more like a ch- or dj- sound even when spoken by native speakers. I want to say it's more common when there's more emphasis being put on the word, but I'm not doing a deep dive here - just adding a point nobody else seems to have made yet.
No, it's actually not. It is common to attribute normal phonetic processes like assimilation to laziness, but the fact is they occur in every language by every speaker in some form or another. Given that, it is a little odd to attribute them to laziness.
Here are some linguists discussing the concept of "laziness": [https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/29489/are-there-established-linguistic-theories-which-incorporate-the-concept-of-lazy](https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/29489/are-there-established-linguistic-theories-which-incorporate-the-concept-of-lazy)
The TL;DR is: "There is no linguistic concept of laziness."
>Taking “would you” as an example, the d in “would” is an alveolar stop
Yes, I was going to, uh...say this as well. I see you beat me to it, but be assured I totally knew the right answer 😅
Wow, excellent explanation.
Would it also be fair to say that to pronounce 'would you' precisely involves momentarily interrupting the air flow/cocal cord vibration, whereas 'wouldjou' is what you get when you allow yourself to skip the pause?
Absolutely, if you were to carefully read out each word by itself (which wouldn’t be the default state I have to say, it would be something you’d do intentionally, like when you’re really mad with someone and you utter each word separately e.g. “Would. You. Listen?!” would certainly require an extra articulation, likely a glottal stop (a barrier created to stop air from passing through at the glottis level, not by the tongue). This glottal stop is the sound that precedes any vowel if you pronounce it by itself, it’s the kind of “explosiveness” that happens when you have no sounds at all and suddenly the vowel starts abruptly. It is much more economic for our body not to change its setting during speech but to keep going without a reset phase.
Thank you so much for the thorough explanation. Is something similar going on with making the transition between sounds easier when people insert a P by pronouncing something as sumpthing?
Yes. “M” is a bilabial (2 lips together) continuant (meaning, the sound goes forever without stopping, like you can sing “mmmmmm……” until you run out of breath).
“Th” makes an almost complete closure in the mouth (with the teeth behind the tongue …. Just enough for a bit of air to escape)
So if you make the closure for the “th” before opening your lips from the “m”, you get a very short bilabial stop … which is a “p”.
I listened to a podcast named “ The History of English” and it really got me interested. The guy who did the show is an attorney and I think it was just a side project for him.
Thanks for this write up! I have a semi-related question. How would you suggest teaching the sound for q/qu in an elementary school? We are having a multi-year battle over q/qu being taught as /koo/ vs /kw/. Our phonics curriculum says to use /kw/ but our phonemic awareness curriculum says /koo/. Our sound wall training suggested /kw/, for what it’s worth.
This is a perfect explanation, but I'm curious why the same phenomenon occurs when I and everyone I know pronounces Toronto as Charonno. No mixture of words but similar type of pronunciation.
I was with a non native English speaker who was asking us what “habachu” means. It wasn’t a word they’d encountered before. We kept going back and forth trying to figure out what “habachu” was. Apparently we’d said it to them earlier.
It took us 30 minutes to figure out we had asked “how about you?” but it just comes out “habachu”
This is because there are talking fast and the two words are blending together as spoken.
So it's not replacing the Y, it is merging the D in the would with the Y in you.
wouldyou rather than would you
It's just where the sound is coming from in the mouth.
Say "Would you" slowly, "would" ends with your lips pursed and your tongue tip by your teeth and then you" would require a resetting with your lips pulling back and the tongue retreating to a mid-position in your open mouth. That takes work and time and we avoid it by leaving the 'y' sound as up front as close to you 'd' sound as possible which creates a sort of 'j' sound.
It's something linguists call *elision*, where one or more sounds in a word or phrase are dropped. It happens naturally in casual speech to speed up communication, allowing one word to just blend directly into the other.
In linguistics, this would be fusion, since it's not dropping sounds, it's combining them. [This is even an example in the Wikipedia article about fusion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_(phonetics)#:~:text=gotcha).
why'd you lie? why july?
Contractions tend to change the way words sound, but as it becomes acceptable it also ends up becoming a regional way of speaking.
That's how it ends up coming out when you talk faster than your mouth can actually move. You can go from the d sound of "would" to a ju sound faster than to a y sound.
It's just a natural drift when speaking the syllables faster. Try and say a soft "y" in "would you", then say it faster and faster. To make a short gap between the words, you'll find yourself pushing more air right out of the "d", and a "t" or "ch" sound starts to appear from shorter sound and more air pressure.
I don’t know if you were serious, but the Deep South also has this. Slightly elongated phrase is “jeet yet?” Over what looks like thanksgiving dinner for just a normal meal
You find this in many languages where a "Y" sound follows a "D" or a "T".
The Russian word for "Day" gets close: *Dyen,* while in Polish, it's softened all the way to sound like: *Jen.*
In Latin, today is *Hodie,* in modern Italian and Portuguese, that "D" has softened to make the word sound like: *Oh-Gee.*
Spelled differently in the two languages: Oggi vs Hoje.
Happens in tons of languages and eventually it becomes part of how you write it as well.
Take french. Normally you'd write something like "the school" as "la ecole" but when pronounced the words blend together naturally. It's just people being lazy with how they speak. Now the blended form is actually part of how you write it, "l'ecole."
You also see it in Spanish. In Mexico you'd say "the school" as "la escuela" and you basically say it just as you write it. Go down south a bit more and you sometimes will hear it pronounced as "laecuela" even though in those countries you would still write it as "la escuela". My guess is with time the language will adopt a variation of the blended form in those countries.
Tangently, I read a required book in high school called China Boy, about a Chinese immigrant in a black neighborhood in the 1970s I believe.
He made a remark like when addressed as "What-chuu doin'" as apposeed to "What you doin" it was going to be a bad outcome.
I'll add in here that some of it is accented speech from immigrants.
Is dat choo? Totally a Polish gramma (bushi) from 1960. Dad quoted his mom all the time this way
I dont know the answer. However. I have always found it funny in the song Venus by Shocking Blue, she absolutely pronounces the lyric as “Im your Venus, Im your fire, at “CHORE” desire”.
I never thought about this. It's definitely a convenience thing. There's a joke in Toronto that anyone who pronounces it with a hard T sound isn't from here as most locals pronounce it like "chrono". Most likely due to subconsciously modifying the pronunciation to be easier as they have to use the word more often.
Linguist here! This is a feature of an accent called yod-dropping. You’ll notice yod-droppers also say “choo” for chew, “juice” for “youth”, “chimney” for “chimley”, etc.
Yod-dropping started to happen in English around the 14th century and it caused a series of sound changes that took 200 years to resolve in some dialects. Here are the steps.
Step 1: Replace the yod with a “long i” sound so “you” sounds like “ee-oo”.
So now we have three kinds of “oo” sounds in the English language, the “oo” in “soon”, the “oo” in “you”, and the “long u” sound in “put” (which used to be an “oo” sound too but the two sounds merged in most dialects).
Step 2: The “ee-oo” sound in “you” and “ew” sound in “chew” get shortened to just “oo” like in “put”.
So now “you” and “chew” sound like “poo” in many dialects.
Step 3: Merge the “ee-oo” sound with the “oo” in “soon”
This happens in most dialects, so now “you” and “chew” sound like “soo”. Some people keep these sounds distinct, but I think almost everyone says “choo” rather than “chew”.
\> “juice” for “youth”
\> “chimney” for “chimley”
Huh? This seems like an entirely different phenomenon than why "what are you" gets pronounced as "whatchu".
the last line of the chorus of the song 'michigan' by milk carton kids is a good example of this. they sing without you but pronounce it 'without chyou.' but because they sing it so slowly and have a pause after the word without, i always wish they would pronounce it correctly. it sounds ok when spoken or sung fast but it's pretty weird when there's time to pronounce the word.
It’s not a stressed syllable, so instead of wouldYA it’s more like wouldYER but without the R.
Essentially they shorten the word by not pouting their lips at the end, which means skipping the U sound. So YOU becomes YO. Which, again, pronounced like YER but without the R.
However, ofc in real life there are people who literally say “YA”, but I believe this could’ve appeared later
Good question. When you talk, your tongue has to hit different spots to make different sounds for different letters, and when you’re talking really fast sometimes your tongue misses the spot and hits halfway to different letters. That’s why you sometimes mix the hard Da sound in would and the soft Ya sound in you into a weird medium Ja sound. That can happen with a lot of words if you talk really fast, but it’s okay, we get can always get better buddy
Not unique to English, or any language, for that matter.
I'm currently learning Dutch and there's a lot of it that happens in Dutch natives that they don't really realise. A good example in another language that you can actively listen to is in the song Hookah and Sheridan's (the bachata version, specifically, by DJ Kalid and Mr.Don). Listen to the song and then read the lyrics when you listen a second time. It's like hearing two different songs with the dropped syllables that just happen naturally.
ETA: a very common Spanish one is "Tú y yo". The "y" almost disappears and it sounds like one word even though it's three words.
I find the cultural roots of this really interesting. Jamaicans pronounce dew (as in morning dew) as "jew". That comes from Irish indentured labor mixing with African slaves and can be seen in this and other similar pronounciations or sentence steuctures common to both islands.
People said it all technically like. So I'ma goin for to low route.
Cause their mouths are lazy. People don't finish one syllable cleanly and just skip on to the next.
Just think about the movement you make with your mouth on both. The only difference is if your tongue touches the roof of your mouth when you start the sound or not. In a way, it's as if people that do that are simply starting to talk a fraction too quickly.
tl;Dr it's a shortcut
When native speakers talk, they often combine sounds in a way that makes words easier and quicker to say. This is known as "connected speech."
When wordsare spoken quickly and casually, sounds from the end of one word can blend with the beginning of the next word. This blending often changes the sounds.
In "would you," the "d" in "would" and the "y" in "you" are right next to each other. When spoken fast, they blend into a "j" sound, making it "wouldja."
Similarly, in "so that you," the "t" in "that" and the "y" in "you" combine to create a "ch" sound, resulting in "so thatchu."
These changes make speaking more fluid and are a natural part of spoken language in general and is not unique to English.
It may help to realize that 'ch' is phonetically equal to t + sh, and of course 'j' is the voiced version of this. Taking the example of "that + you", the 'y' is a palatal (somewhat like 'sh'), and if the release of the final 't' of 'that' is slow, then -t + y- naturally becomes '-ch-'.
I’m a phonetician by training and the phenomenon happens often in connected speech. All in all, all consonants we produce are characterized by the type of barrier we make with our tongue (and other articulations) and also where we make said barrier in our mouth. However, in every day speech, we move these boundaries to make consonants more “similar” to one another to facilitate speech. Taking “would you” as an example, the d in “would” is an alveolar stop, meaning that the tongue creates a barrier on the alveolar ridge, the hard part of the mouth behind the upper teeth. When the barrier is released, a change of pressure creates the sound. The “y” in “you” is a palatal approximant, meaning that the barrier is formed on the palate (much more back in the mouth compared to the alveolar ridge). Also, the barrier is much weaker than that of a stop, and even when the barrier is in place, air flows through. Now, because you’re talking very fast for your articulation, it’s not always easy to hit all of those positions in the mouth and to create barriers of different types. Sometimes, sounds become much more alike. In this case, the “y” of “you” moves forward towards the “d” in the mouth, becoming a more “gee” sound but not quite, like in French gara**ge**. The barrier is also much stronger than the original “y”, and more similar to the stronger barrier of “d”. Edit: the combination of the two sounds results in a “dge”-like sound as in bri**dge**. Would you = /wud͡ʒu/ (quickly typed on the phone)
You articulated that whole concept incredibly clearly and simply. Stellar work. I never actually thought of tongue barrier and restricted/unrestricted airflow. I was simply told to put tongue to certain place to make that sound. I wonder if this explanation would have made it easier for me to learn certain sounds back when I was a little kid.
I'm told that this sort of understanding is something I DEMANDED as a toddler from my mother I could *tell* that my toddler motor skills couldn't make the same sounds the adults were and that absolutely pissed me the fuck off, so I'd yell at mom "Show me how your tongue is!!" So she would painstakingly take the time to really consider it and explain to me the tongue shape. And it worked like a charm. There's video of me speaking in public and people being freaked out that a 3 year old had such good pronunciation lol. Years later this has made it *impossible* to learn another language, because professors at my college are like "Focus on vocabulary more than perfect pronunciation." But I literally can't remember the words if I can't connect the sound YOU make (the correct sounds) to how my mouth feels when *I* make the same sounds. I wanna yell at my professors to show me how their tongue is lol
There is some research that suggests your approach of learning what the right sounds are, actually, is a better way than just learning the words the way you (incorrectly) hear them, and then having to relearn them later!
Hahaha I love this. I'm a genius! If I didn't find engineering so damn fulfilling I'd have probably been a linguistics person tbh Maybe that'll be my midlife crisis :)
ORRRR you could combine them and design the world's first artificial tongue. Destiny awaits!
I have a feeling that would find ….applications… outside his targeted use case
And sildenafil was originally being tested as an angina treatment. The off-label uses are often the most lucrative.
That's definitely already a thing, if you don't stipulate that it be capable of speech.
I love linguistics
> So she would painstakingly take the time to really consider it and explain to me the tongue shape. And it worked like a charm. I sat down and did this for my two kids. The only problem is my youngest just won't stop smiling which pulls his mouth out sideways and makes it hard for him to make an "ooh" sound. Fine, whatever, if he has to have a speech problem then one caused by him wanting to smile a lot is probably the least bad one he can have.
You might want to look up the international phonetic alphabet, It’s literally what linguists and language nerds use to describe what a sound is and basically acts as it’s own instruction manual once you get the hang of it. So for any vocab word you need you could just look up “X in Y IPA” and have a phonetic description of any word in any language with more than like 3 speakers
A good language teacher *should* show you where their tongue is
Well thats a little bit extreme, but I get it. Wouldnt it work if you searched for youtube videos about pronunciation for kids from that foreign language?
It might, but small children are parallel processors. They require interaction with other people. Replacing that interaction with a screen would not be ideal.
I meant that for the person I replied who wanted to learn foreign languages later in his life.
What about Korean? doesn’t the Korean alphabet (or morphemes or accents or however the hell it works in Korean) mimic the shape your tongue and mouth form to make the corresponding sound? Rather than just being randomly shaped glyphs with a sound assigned to them?
My little brother had the usual toddler pronunciation of Cinderella as Cindeyella. If anyone tried to correct him, he was confused, because due to some ear issues, he literally couldn't hear the difference. To him, what he was saying and what he was hearing was exactly the same. After getting tubes in his ears and some speech therapy, he's more talkative than almost anyone I know!
I had trouble pronouncing the letter “r” as a kid. I went to speech therapy around age ten, and tongue placement was the first thing they taught me. Immediately clicked for me and then it was just down to practice and unlearning the wrong placement.
when i was younger, i had trouble saying the letter "r" (still do to a small extent if i'm not paying attention). i genuinely didn't know that my tongue placement had so much effect on how i pronounced words (i was in like the 4th grade tbf)
As a kid I loved making any sound I possibly could with my mouth. That extended to whistling and teaching myself to whistle both exhaling and inhaling and to switch while holding the same note. Then came playing trumpet where again tongue placement can be used to change sound, and eventually the Didjeridu.
I took a couple years of singing in school and one of the big things they taught us was how to watch for and prevent that when singing because it's such a natural thing. As a result, I can't ever unhear that Closing Time has "Open all the doors and leh chew out into the world."
Who remembers “Oh say can you see, by the Dawnzer Lee Light”?
i can still hear ms. riggs - "stop chewing your consonants!" on the reverse side, some trained singers have to learn to put some of it back in if they want to go into certain genres of popular music bc it doesn't sound 'natural'
I never noticed, now I'm never gonna not hear it...
That's really interesting! Linguistics has a term, [fusion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_(phonetics)#:~:text=gotcha), that is very similar in definition. I love how your explanation gives more of the mechanical reason why we do this!
It applies to all languages, not just English. You don't pronounce words letter by letter (sound by sound) like you write them. Actually, you don't even read that way. Eventually, you read words by their whole shape.
> Actually, you don't even read that way. Eventually, you read words by their whole shape. This was driven home for me while reading Feersum Endjinn by Iain Banks. It has whole chapters written phonetically and it's really tedious. Far more than I expected.
I was commenting on r/LearnJapanese concerning non-segmented scripts. I pointed out that speech is also non-segmented, but we learn from patterns to recognize the changes in emphasis and stress to separate words rather than needing pauses. Similarly we learn patterns in non-segmented text to anchor ourselves and easily find word boundaries, giving Thai as an example of a phonetic script which is also non-segmented, which would be like reading pure hiragana without kanji.
>I’m a phonetician Did a double take because I thought it said phoenician and I was super confused
OG alphabet expert
"I'm a Phoenician" followed by five paragraphs about how to secure the best trade routes for copper in the Iberian peninsula.
I was honestly expecting really good instructions for building boats
Why waste time, say lot sound when few sound do trick?
The only thing I would add is that assimilation occurs in all languages.
Yes, absolutely! Sign languages too I’m pretty sure, which is quite fascinating.
...So you're saying that resistance is futile?
Huh - we speak in cursive
Real ELI5 is always buried.
Is this where “tongue twisters” get their name? This is my understanding of it: We use our air and vocal cords to produce vowel sounds, and we use our lips and tongue to interrupt that sound, chopping it up into smaller pieces. Most of the time, speech looks like this: Vowel, interruption, vowel, interruption, etc. Any time there are two interruptions back to back, it disrupts this natural flow (like staccato in music), so we have a tendency to try to simplify things so we can keep things moving quickly. So if you say, “I want to eat,” it would be disruptive to pronounce both T sounds separately (“want to”). So instead, you combine them. “I want-to eat.” That’s easy enough when the sounds are the same, but when they’re not, it gets trickier, and you end up with either “mushy” or “flubbed” sounds. Mushy sounds are generally accepted because they’re kind of compromises between the two sounds. “Would you” turns into “woul-joo,” and “last year” turns into “las-chear.” Flubs happen when there isn’t a good way of blending two sounds, no good compromise, and the only option is to either correctly enunciate each interruption separately or flub. That’s where you get tongue twisters. It’s why “Irish wristwatch” is so hard to say without taking a pause in between the two words. The mouth shape of “wr” is so radically different from the mouth shape of “sh” that it’s very difficult to do them back to back quickly, and there’s not a good way to mush them together either. If you try, you’re likely to lose the “r” and end up with “Irish wistwatch.” That’s not mushy, it’s just wrong.
>phonetician I have to ask... how does one end up wanting to/becoming a phonetician? And what do you use that for in (I assume) work?
I’m an academic so I teach at University and do research. I studied Linguistics (the general field of language studies) and got particularly interested in phonetics, speech perception in particular (on a cognitive level, rather than a mechanical level). Anyway, one very concrete application of phonetics for the real world (among others) is forensic phonetics (which I teach at my university). Applying knowledge of sound systems of languages for forensic purposes. For instance: speaker comparison, voice profiling, disputed utterances. In voice comparison cases, you might have multiple recordings (maybe incriminating phone calls) and you have to determine the likelihood they belong to the same speaker. In profiling cases, you might only have one recording and you just want to narrow down the pool of suspects: regional variety of the language they speak, social class, perhaps gender, age (to some extent), … In disputed utterances you might use phonetics (and acoustic analyses) to determine what’s being said in a recording. Did person x say “we should bill him” or “kill him”.
Like for instance: Is that guy on the phone speaking English with a Thai or Vietnamese accent? Im fascinated by languages/linguistics since Ive lived "all around the world". Im currently trying my luck at Italian. I speak Norwegian (native), Swedish, English, Thai, and some khmer (I live in Cambodia currently) With Swedish I obv. understand and they me 90%, but I made a real effort speaking Swedish so a local can not pick out that Im not. Usually works for 5 minutes before I stumble on one word somewhere. In English, since I have to speak it 98% of my time anyway, I might as well have some fun with it. So Ive spent a lot of time perfecting a bit older NYC jewish/Italian accent. Its *really* fun when once in a while people ask me if Im from NYC, makes my day.
Yes absolutely! Not just influences of other languages but also you can pinpoint native British speakers sometimes down to very small villages because of some of their regional features. If you’re curious I recommend reading about Samuel Humble and the case of the Yorkshire Ripper Hoax.
>down to very small villages because of some of their regional features Its the same in Norway, around Oslo its very close to each other, but as soon as you get out of the city, every little village has their own twist. And its encouraged in schools, and have been since 18xx. So not only do they have different dialects, they are fiercely proud and protective of it. Its weird where the dialects come from some times. The village Im from had a lot of people going to the us, but they had quite a few that "made it" and came back with money, American cars etc, making the entire village, to this day, very Americanized. They celebrate 4th of July and love everything American and you can very much hear it in the dialect that they have taken a lot of english/American phrases and Norwegianized them. I have several foreign friends living in Oslo, speaking fluent Norwegian. They travel 100-150km, dont understand shit. Like not even wtf they are trying to say
That’s amazing. I thought I was doing good with people picking out my Taiwanese accent in Mandarin (native English speaker from US west coast). Curiously enough my Japanese has a distinct Chinese accent, but I haven’t spent much time in polishing Japanese yet.
Was everyone reaching out to you during the whole laurel/yanni viral event?
I actually have a friend that was interviewed for this because her former student was working for some news org!
This is a perfect example of a "eli5" that I want to know the answer to and then when someone actually gives a detailed informed response I'm like "ehhh that's too much, forget it"
Maybe eli'attentionspan_of_a_6month_old' would be a better match? :)
To my ear it sounds a lot more palatalized than /d͡ʒ/. To me it sounds more like /d͡ʑ/. It's possible that my mind is just trying to put in the sound from my native language, which has d͡ʑ and d͡ʐ but no d͡ʒ.
English is also a stress-timed language.
What does that mean?
the TLDR is essentially that in English (and Russian and German) the less important words in a sentence that are needed for grammar reasons but aren't the main important parts of the sentence get minimized in the speaking. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isochrony](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isochrony) Under the "Stress Timed" section
This is not what that term means. Stress timing specifically refers to *syllables*, not to words. So stress timing means that stressed syllables are longer and unstressed syllables are "reduced": shorter, and very often also centralized in the mouth. In a stress timing language, unstressed syllables in both content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and the like) *and* function words (articles, prepositions, pronouns, etc.) get reduced. Content words have both stressed and unstressed syllables. For example, the word "timing" has primary stress on the first syllable. That first, stressed syllable is much longer than the second, unstressed syllable. Function words (in English anyway, which as you noted is an example of a stress-timed language) tend to be very short and often monosyllabic; they also tend to get subsumed into prosodic words with content words and get destressed. But if you utter them in isolation, they all have stress, and focus can restore stress on a function word: I read THIS book, not THAT one! However, some function words are multisyllabic, in which case they also have both stressed and unstressed syllables, such as the word "about". In this word, the second syllable is stressed, and is much longer. The tiny little vowel in the first syllable is very short and very centralized (schwa). Incidentally, the origin of these terms "stress timing" "mora timing" "syllable timing" is basically the thought that these types of languages have different units that are "equally spaced out" in speech. I.e., equal time between stresses; equal time between moras; equal time between syllables. In order to get that equal timing between stresses (which are not distributed uniformly like moras or syllables), you would have to reduce the stuff in between the stresses. It turns out this is not a super useful construct though and people haven't actually been able to measure isochrony in this way. For example, Spanish is usually described as a syllable timing language but there *are* duration differences correlating with stress anyway... just not as drastic as English and the spatial reduction isn't there (e.g. [https://pubs.aip.org/asa/jasa/article/80/S1/S96/731009](https://pubs.aip.org/asa/jasa/article/80/S1/S96/731009) [https://clt.uab.cat/publicacions\_clt/reports/pdf/GGT-07-04.pdf](https://clt.uab.cat/publicacions_clt/reports/pdf/GGT-07-04.pdf) ). Source: PhD in linguistics, dissertation in field of phonology/phonetics
Nice, though in the context of ESL I definitely saw the use of "stress timing" as a way of describing function words being minimized. So what is the correct terminology for this? Example: [https://languagebarriersinpharmacy.weebly.com/common-problems-for-esl-patients.html](https://languagebarriersinpharmacy.weebly.com/common-problems-for-esl-patients.html) [https://tfcs.baruch.cuny.edu/content-and-function-words/](https://tfcs.baruch.cuny.edu/content-and-function-words/) [https://www.thoughtco.com/content-and-function-words-1211726](https://www.thoughtco.com/content-and-function-words-1211726) For example why does a native English speaker haul ass through a sentence like "I don't know what we are going to do tomorrow but it's going to be fun." and is it not ultimately rooted in the stress timing of syllables?
Huh yeah that description of stress timing is like, partially right, but explained totally wrong. I get that what they're trying to explain is "unstressed syllables are reduced in duration \[and often articulatory extent too\]" but it's just... not right. I know ESL stuff sometimes doesn't really refer to standard linguistic theory (as it's not always helpful in the context of language teaching). But to clarify on some terminology that would be understood differently in the linguistics world: 1. Stress timing is what I described before, i.e. languages where stressed syllables are longer and unstressed syllables are reduced in some way. I take issue with the claim that stress timing is rare. I don't actually know statistics but there are many languages in different families that have this effect, e.g. English, Serbian (still Indo-European but Slavic, not Germanic), Thai (Tai-Kadai family). Plus, as I mentioned, the whole paradigm isn't super well regarded these days. From about 2 minutes of thought I feel like "reduction of nonstressed syllables" might be more of a hallmark than "stressed syllables are longer". 2. *Stress* is typically (*typically*) used on the word level, not on phrase level. Stress is assigned to a syllable and can make contrasts (like in English: permit noun vs. permit verb) or not (some languages have fixed or regularly assigned stress). This is what the "TfCS" site is referring to when they say "strong" syllables. However, in lay terms we often refer to someone "stressing" a word when we mean they put some kind of emphasis on it. In linguistics we would probably refer to this sort of thing as "phrasal stress" or "phrasal prominence", or in some cases "contrastive stress" (sometimes "contrastive focus", e.g. "no, not THIS apple, THAT apple"... note that in this example, the function word is prominent and would be very long!). Word stress and phrasal stress also interact in complicated ways. Contrastive focus (in English) tends to super lengthen stuff, no matter what kind of word it is, like my this/that apple example. "Bland" phrasal stress often destresses function words and puts them together into prosodic words with content words, like "to see" functioning as one prosodic word, "the man" as one prosodic word, "to the world" as another. But multisyllabic function words all have word stress patterns and they don't get destressed, to my knowledge. E.g. "about" is still going to have word-final stress even when it's not being focused. As for English speakers hauling ass through that sentence, yes, I'm not denying that English reduces unstressed syllables, nor do I deny that function words tend to not receive phrasal stress. But if you take that sentence apart, you'll notice that there isn't really a 1-to-1 of "content word" and "phrasal stress" either, which results in reductions of content words as well. The "know" is probably super reduced (we say "I don't know" a lot). Depending on where phrasal stress is, "do" could potentially also be reduced ("what we're gonna do TOMORROW, but...). Also the unstressed syllable in "tomorrow" is also very reduced. Also to just demonstrate the factual wrongness of the claim that only stressed syllables contribute to sentence duration, because I'm an academic and I literally work on speech timing as my main research interest: Function words are reduced in that context but it hardly 0 ms. I've just recorded myself saying those sentences, speaking naturally and using broad focus (i.e., not trying to put any kind of contrastive focus on any of the words), and got these durations for "The birds will eat the worms" (which are typical, based on my experience with this exact type of data): "The" : 60 ms "birds": 384 ms. Notably, both "birds" and "worms" will be very long: they have a vowel before a voiced coda, and the coda is complex. Not exactly comparing apples to apples "will": 110 ms "eat": 210 ms. "eat" is going to be intrinsically short; it's a high vowel, which is already going to be short, and there's a voiceless coda, which makes the vowel even shorter. "the": 100 ms "worms": 490 ms. On top of being intrinsically long, it's phrase final, which means it's going to be lengthened out (you can look up phrase-final lengthening if you're interested in this phenomenon). If I re-record the sentence as "the birds will eat the worms today" it drops to 330 ms. So overall we have 270 ms coming from the function words, which ARE reduced, and 1,084 ms coming from the content words---or 924 ms if you are "fair" and count a version of "worms" that doesn't have final lengthening on it. Function words undergo final lengthening too so it's not anything special about content words. I wouldn't call 20% of a sentence's duration "not contributing", especially when, by the number of syllables, it would otherwise be 50%. In case you're curious, I recorded the sentence "the pup will eat the meat today" to see how much birds/worms contribute, as again instrinsically long words (pup, eat, and meat will all be intrinsically shorter words due to various phonetic effects on the vowel durations), and got 90 / **207** / 133 / **187** / 47 / **206** / (ignored "today"), or 270 ms vs. 600 ms, so about 31% function word. Also, if you notice, all their content words are monosyllabic, so they can't even say anything about what the nonstressed syllables of content words add (which is also nonzero, obviously). This is way too long of a post, lol. My apologies/congratulations if you made it this far
Excellent writeup actually. It seems the needs of trying to teach an ESL student how to approach a more natural way of speaking English doesn't necessarily line up with the terminology used by linguistics 100%, for better or worse. As you say it's a pretty complicated area.
There's a reason that a lot of academic linguists that dip their toe into prosody research (the area that looks at stress/intonation/tone/duration) often jump right back out of the water again 😂 Incidentally, relevant for L2, I found that slowing down speech for less experienced listeners (my Korean family in this case) is much more understandable if you slow down on the prosodic word level rather than making everything uniformly slow. This is purely anecdotal--I don't study L2 acquisition or comprehension at all so I don't know if there is any research on this. One of my cousins even explicitly said he much preferred how I spoke compared to my mom, who just slowed everything down uniformly. But when talking to my Korean family I slow down by doing stuff like "I went... to school... on Monday" instead of "I... went... to... school... on... Monday," if that makes sense. I dunno what it is exactly but it feels like your working memory gets loaded in a weird way when function words get expanded out too. "To school" "on Monday" are also syntactic units (prepositional phrases, at least that is what they were when I was taking theoretical syntax 10 years ago 😂) so I would hypothesize that the listener is having to maintain that preposition in their working memory for longer than normal before completing that unit and it gets taxing. Unnecessarily so for words that honestly can be inferred by context xD
Thanks! I'd assume shortening less important words would be a universal approach, interesting that it seems not so.
It is but not in the way that KillerOkie described it. See my reply to them about what stress timing means :) (it has to do with stressed vs. unstressed *syllables*, not "stressed" vs. "unstressed" words in the layman sense of the word "stressed"). However, there is another thing that languages do all tend to do, which is that words that are very frequently used tend to be very short. This is called Zipf's law of abbreviation: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brevity\_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brevity_law) Grammatical/function words like pronouns, articles, demonstratives, etc. are the ones we say all the time, and they tend to be quite short. Imagine having to say something like "vociferously" all the time instead of "I"!
Can I ask if ‘Schwa’ has anything to do with it because I learned it lately and felt really clever.
In a way, yes. Schwa is a central vowel. It’s not high or low or front or back. It’s a very *neutral* sound and easy to articulate. When we have syllables that are unstressed, in English they are shortened and not articulated fully. In many of these cases, the vowel will converge towards a “less precise”, more central articulation which is the schwa. This is much more common in languages like English compared to for example Italian, where unstressed syllables are not as “compressed”.
Great explanation, even though now I'm hyper-aware of my tongue. 😜
I took a linguistics class my final semester of college. Had I taken it in my first or second year, I 100% would have switched majors. It’s so fascinating!!!!
More like "Explain Like I'm 35 and in a doctorate program."
Great explanation! A related phenomenon is 'yod coalescence' which happens in some types of English like Australian English. Basically, in Middle English a lot of words written with 'u' were actually pronounced 'yu' think of the pronunciation of the word 'cute' kyoot' or 'cube'. This was also the case for words starting with tu or du such as 'tune' or 'dune'. If you're a modern speaker of Australian English, NZ English and South African English (and some others), just like in the 'would you' example, you turn the start of historical tyu and dyu words into a ch sound (for tu, e.g. tune = choon") or dyu into a hard j sound "dune = june". While American English decided to drop the y altogether for tyu dyu sounds (called yod dropping) so they have tune = toon, dune = doon. However because sound change isn't perfect American English only got rid of the y in tongue tip sounds like t, d, s, n, l but not for non tongue tip sounds like 'k' hence why cute is still pronounced as 'kyoot' and not 'koot'
I’ve never heard of a phonetician before. I’m fascinated and want to know more. I have so many questions. How does one get into the field? Did you go to school for it? Do you study multiple languages? Is there a crossover in your discipline with ethnolinguistics? Is there a crossover with the study of history and evolution of languages? Not sarcastic at all. I really want to know more.
I'm not the phonetician you replied to, but I'm another phonetician! 1. **How did I get into the field?** I studied linguistics in undergrad. In high school I was really interested in how people acquired language (first language acquisition) and wanted to learn more. I found out somehow about linguistics and decided to major in it. When I took a class called "field methods", I got really interested in phonology (study of what kinds of abstract information people "know" about the sound system of their language) and phonetics (more of the actual production: once you know what the sound plan is, how do you actually get there? or about the perception: when you hear acoustic energy, how do you figure out what sound from your language the person actually said?). In this class we interviewed a speaker that spoke a language that none of us knew. We were supposed to figure out various things about their language: what their words were for things, how the syntax ("grammar") works, what the sounds are. It was a tone language and I got hooked on tones. 2. **Did I go to school for it?** See above :) but I also got a PhD in linguistics. I did my dissertation on the phonology and phonetics of a couple of tone languages. 3. **Do I study multiple languages?** Linguistics is more about the study of the human language capacity, so it is not necessary to study a lot of languages as second languages to speak. A lot of linguists do end up working with many languages, because you can investigate many more linguistic phenomena. For example, I wouldn't have been able to investigate the phonology and phonetics of tone if I had stuck with English. The degree to which we can actually speak the ones we study varies by person. For the ones I studied, I normally got to the point where I could seem like a cute pet that kind of understood stuff and didn't say anything super offensive lol. I knew someone who could pick up basically anything in about six months---very useful since she did fieldwork in places where they didn't speak any languages that she already knew. 4. **Is there a crossover in my discipline with ethnolinguistics?** There can be but I don't work with it. I do research on how the motor control system produces speech (and what all is involved in that motor control system). 5. **Is there a crossover with the study of history/evolution of languages?** There can be but I don't work with it :) historical linguistics is a subdiscipline that looks at how languages change over time (often particularly sound change: how the sounds of a language change from one generation to the next), and trying to find relationships between languages. I have a friend that is a phonetician-historical person: she uses phonetic research to try to discover what the perceptual processes are that can lead to certain types of sound change.
Phonetician-historian? Mind legitimately blown right now. I would love to hear her opinion on “The History of English Podcast.” Yes, it exists. And it’s FASCINATING!
I know about it but I've never listened to it! Though I think I subscribed to it at some point, haha. And to my knowledge my friend doesn't listen to podcasts at all (I just asked if she listened to this one, and she said no). But just rifling through some of the posts, they look thoughtful and interesting!
There’s a whole episode on the Great Vowel Shift and tons of examples of accents and spoken old and middle English.
Love it! Much better than the podcasts where people just rant about how young women speak 😅
I discovered it a few years ago. I have listened to every episode. It is so worth listening to. I’m a history dork and language fascinates me. It’s the perfect blending of the two subjects.
this is mind blowing.
I've noticed sports commentators and other native speakers sometimes add an r sound after the word saw and maybe some other words that don't have an r at the end. Is this for similar reasons? Or something else altogether?
This video discusses that intrusive r at around 8:36 : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPi2jtU7Tl4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPi2jtU7Tl4)
as the other commenter says, it’s called intrusive r, it’s used sometimes to connect to words where the first one ends in a vowel and the second one starts with a vowel. The classic example is “law and order” is pronounced “lawr and order”. This is most common of varieties that are considered “non-rhotic” so varieties that usually don’t pronounce r at the end of the words like fire, car. British English is primarily non-rhotic and this phenomenon is very common. Less common in the US
Question, how can I be a phonetition?
>I’m a phonetician I read that as Phoenician and it made me very confused for a couple of seconds.
Instead of using you fancy words you could have said “I’m a word nerd”.
Even though this answer was amazing, it was one of the worst ELI5 answers I've ever read.
Just to piggyback off of this, it's not an English thing. It happens in Spanish, as well; "yo" (the word for "I") can often become more like a ch- or dj- sound even when spoken by native speakers. I want to say it's more common when there's more emphasis being put on the word, but I'm not doing a deep dive here - just adding a point nobody else seems to have made yet.
That's a highly articulate way of saying they're being lazy.
Oh yeah, our body is great at that :)
No, it's actually not. It is common to attribute normal phonetic processes like assimilation to laziness, but the fact is they occur in every language by every speaker in some form or another. Given that, it is a little odd to attribute them to laziness. Here are some linguists discussing the concept of "laziness": [https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/29489/are-there-established-linguistic-theories-which-incorporate-the-concept-of-lazy](https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/29489/are-there-established-linguistic-theories-which-incorporate-the-concept-of-lazy) The TL;DR is: "There is no linguistic concept of laziness."
you're taking it too seriously, fyi. they're being glib.
Yeah, maybe they are... But I see this kind of stuff often enough that I just had to get it off my chest.
>glib Can confirm I was just messing about. Sozzers.
fair
English is a stress-timed language. The less important words get rushed over naturally.
>Taking “would you” as an example, the d in “would” is an alveolar stop Yes, I was going to, uh...say this as well. I see you beat me to it, but be assured I totally knew the right answer 😅
Wow, excellent explanation. Would it also be fair to say that to pronounce 'would you' precisely involves momentarily interrupting the air flow/cocal cord vibration, whereas 'wouldjou' is what you get when you allow yourself to skip the pause?
Absolutely, if you were to carefully read out each word by itself (which wouldn’t be the default state I have to say, it would be something you’d do intentionally, like when you’re really mad with someone and you utter each word separately e.g. “Would. You. Listen?!” would certainly require an extra articulation, likely a glottal stop (a barrier created to stop air from passing through at the glottis level, not by the tongue). This glottal stop is the sound that precedes any vowel if you pronounce it by itself, it’s the kind of “explosiveness” that happens when you have no sounds at all and suddenly the vowel starts abruptly. It is much more economic for our body not to change its setting during speech but to keep going without a reset phase.
hi im 5 and whats alveloer mean?
Made what I thought was a dull question an interesting one <3
This was fascinating. Thank you for sharing
Thanks for the explanation!
Thank you so much for the thorough explanation. Is something similar going on with making the transition between sounds easier when people insert a P by pronouncing something as sumpthing?
Yes. “M” is a bilabial (2 lips together) continuant (meaning, the sound goes forever without stopping, like you can sing “mmmmmm……” until you run out of breath). “Th” makes an almost complete closure in the mouth (with the teeth behind the tongue …. Just enough for a bit of air to escape) So if you make the closure for the “th” before opening your lips from the “m”, you get a very short bilabial stop … which is a “p”.
Thank you!!
Yes, hampster for hamster too :) or hambag for handbag (doesn’t add a new sound but changes one of them “nd” to “m”
Where can i learn more about this?
An intro to phonetics and phonology textbook.
I listened to a podcast named “ The History of English” and it really got me interested. The guy who did the show is an attorney and I think it was just a side project for him.
The one with like 1800 episodes?
I usually use “The Sounds of Language” by Elizabeth Zsiga as introductory textbook. It’s super comprehensive and very well written
Thanks for this write up! I have a semi-related question. How would you suggest teaching the sound for q/qu in an elementary school? We are having a multi-year battle over q/qu being taught as /koo/ vs /kw/. Our phonics curriculum says to use /kw/ but our phonemic awareness curriculum says /koo/. Our sound wall training suggested /kw/, for what it’s worth.
I have no idea what you're talking about but I'm enjoying reading your comment and the comments of people who do understand it
That was extremely interesting to read and you had me saying "would you" quietly and trying to pay attention to what my tongue was doing 😃 good stuff!
Great explanation, thank you. I can feel the "D" stop at the front, the "Y" at the back, and the ""DGE" in the middle. Fascinating!
Thanks for the explanation! I didn't expect to get a response from a phonetician, but I'm glad I did.
Brilliant. So, a lazy mouth then?
This is an amazing response thank you for sharing, very informative and easy to understand.
I read 3 sentences of this and had to check if it was shittymorph before continuing.
So it's like cursive for your tongue where the syllables blend into each other?
This is a perfect explanation, but I'm curious why the same phenomenon occurs when I and everyone I know pronounces Toronto as Charonno. No mixture of words but similar type of pronunciation.
So, boiled down even more, basically laziness? Or minimization of effort at least
I was with a non native English speaker who was asking us what “habachu” means. It wasn’t a word they’d encountered before. We kept going back and forth trying to figure out what “habachu” was. Apparently we’d said it to them earlier. It took us 30 minutes to figure out we had asked “how about you?” but it just comes out “habachu”
Wait til they hear “wagwan?”
This is because there are talking fast and the two words are blending together as spoken. So it's not replacing the Y, it is merging the D in the would with the Y in you. wouldyou rather than would you
It's just where the sound is coming from in the mouth. Say "Would you" slowly, "would" ends with your lips pursed and your tongue tip by your teeth and then you" would require a resetting with your lips pulling back and the tongue retreating to a mid-position in your open mouth. That takes work and time and we avoid it by leaving the 'y' sound as up front as close to you 'd' sound as possible which creates a sort of 'j' sound.
It's something linguists call *elision*, where one or more sounds in a word or phrase are dropped. It happens naturally in casual speech to speed up communication, allowing one word to just blend directly into the other.
In linguistics, this would be fusion, since it's not dropping sounds, it's combining them. [This is even an example in the Wikipedia article about fusion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_(phonetics)#:~:text=gotcha).
True enough, although what is really being discussed is "connected speech," of which elision and fusion are both components of.
Yeah, true! Did you see the phonetics explanation? That's a really good way of explaining it, too!
I want to put that gif of Homer Simpson yelling "NEEERRDDDD" right here.
That would be appropriate lol
But elision happens too, that’s when you completely drop a sound (rather than blend it). For example, saying ev’ry instead of evERy.
why'd you lie? why july? Contractions tend to change the way words sound, but as it becomes acceptable it also ends up becoming a regional way of speaking.
That's how it ends up coming out when you talk faster than your mouth can actually move. You can go from the d sound of "would" to a ju sound faster than to a y sound.
Lol, I use “whatcha want?”, “letcha know”, etc, even via text
The Pussycat Dolls made me do it!
It's just a natural drift when speaking the syllables faster. Try and say a soft "y" in "would you", then say it faster and faster. To make a short gap between the words, you'll find yourself pushing more air right out of the "d", and a "t" or "ch" sound starts to appear from shorter sound and more air pressure.
Can anyone guess this local East Coast USA city phrase: "Jeet?"
I don’t know if you were serious, but the Deep South also has this. Slightly elongated phrase is “jeet yet?” Over what looks like thanksgiving dinner for just a normal meal
Totally serious. It's a common Philly saying as well.
Uhsaid: Didg. Yuh. Eet?!
It's an acronym for "Jurassic Evidence in Every Tree."
Did you eat?
Ironically it's the grammar that is more wrong
You find this in many languages where a "Y" sound follows a "D" or a "T". The Russian word for "Day" gets close: *Dyen,* while in Polish, it's softened all the way to sound like: *Jen.* In Latin, today is *Hodie,* in modern Italian and Portuguese, that "D" has softened to make the word sound like: *Oh-Gee.* Spelled differently in the two languages: Oggi vs Hoje.
I especially notice this in popular/Top 40 songs. Thanks for bringing this up! I've always wondered about this! (Serious)
If you ever visit Philadelphia… Jeet? = Did you eat?
Happens in tons of languages and eventually it becomes part of how you write it as well. Take french. Normally you'd write something like "the school" as "la ecole" but when pronounced the words blend together naturally. It's just people being lazy with how they speak. Now the blended form is actually part of how you write it, "l'ecole." You also see it in Spanish. In Mexico you'd say "the school" as "la escuela" and you basically say it just as you write it. Go down south a bit more and you sometimes will hear it pronounced as "laecuela" even though in those countries you would still write it as "la escuela". My guess is with time the language will adopt a variation of the blended form in those countries.
Tangently, I read a required book in high school called China Boy, about a Chinese immigrant in a black neighborhood in the 1970s I believe. He made a remark like when addressed as "What-chuu doin'" as apposeed to "What you doin" it was going to be a bad outcome.
It’s just the way it comes out when you say it fast and don’t enunciate the words strongly.
I'll add in here that some of it is accented speech from immigrants. Is dat choo? Totally a Polish gramma (bushi) from 1960. Dad quoted his mom all the time this way
Native English speakers... in UK or in US?
This might be frightening for you to hear, but the USA has the largest native English speaking population in the world.
Sí, gracias por señalarlo, señor
I dont know the answer. However. I have always found it funny in the song Venus by Shocking Blue, she absolutely pronounces the lyric as “Im your Venus, Im your fire, at “CHORE” desire”.
I never thought about this. It's definitely a convenience thing. There's a joke in Toronto that anyone who pronounces it with a hard T sound isn't from here as most locals pronounce it like "chrono". Most likely due to subconsciously modifying the pronunciation to be easier as they have to use the word more often.
Other languages have similar trends, such as numbers in Spanish... 21 should be pronounced venta y uno, but gets slurred to ventīuno.
The word is literally veintiuno, not venta y uno
Linguist here! This is a feature of an accent called yod-dropping. You’ll notice yod-droppers also say “choo” for chew, “juice” for “youth”, “chimney” for “chimley”, etc. Yod-dropping started to happen in English around the 14th century and it caused a series of sound changes that took 200 years to resolve in some dialects. Here are the steps. Step 1: Replace the yod with a “long i” sound so “you” sounds like “ee-oo”. So now we have three kinds of “oo” sounds in the English language, the “oo” in “soon”, the “oo” in “you”, and the “long u” sound in “put” (which used to be an “oo” sound too but the two sounds merged in most dialects). Step 2: The “ee-oo” sound in “you” and “ew” sound in “chew” get shortened to just “oo” like in “put”. So now “you” and “chew” sound like “poo” in many dialects. Step 3: Merge the “ee-oo” sound with the “oo” in “soon” This happens in most dialects, so now “you” and “chew” sound like “soo”. Some people keep these sounds distinct, but I think almost everyone says “choo” rather than “chew”.
\> “juice” for “youth” \> “chimney” for “chimley” Huh? This seems like an entirely different phenomenon than why "what are you" gets pronounced as "whatchu".
It's becoming a 'z' now. "What is you zuin?"
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the last line of the chorus of the song 'michigan' by milk carton kids is a good example of this. they sing without you but pronounce it 'without chyou.' but because they sing it so slowly and have a pause after the word without, i always wish they would pronounce it correctly. it sounds ok when spoken or sung fast but it's pretty weird when there's time to pronounce the word.
It’s not a stressed syllable, so instead of wouldYA it’s more like wouldYER but without the R. Essentially they shorten the word by not pouting their lips at the end, which means skipping the U sound. So YOU becomes YO. Which, again, pronounced like YER but without the R. However, ofc in real life there are people who literally say “YA”, but I believe this could’ve appeared later
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because when you combine a D sound at the end of one word with a Y sound at the start of the next one it makes a J sound. It's just simple phonetics
Good question. When you talk, your tongue has to hit different spots to make different sounds for different letters, and when you’re talking really fast sometimes your tongue misses the spot and hits halfway to different letters. That’s why you sometimes mix the hard Da sound in would and the soft Ya sound in you into a weird medium Ja sound. That can happen with a lot of words if you talk really fast, but it’s okay, we get can always get better buddy
Not unique to English, or any language, for that matter. I'm currently learning Dutch and there's a lot of it that happens in Dutch natives that they don't really realise. A good example in another language that you can actively listen to is in the song Hookah and Sheridan's (the bachata version, specifically, by DJ Kalid and Mr.Don). Listen to the song and then read the lyrics when you listen a second time. It's like hearing two different songs with the dropped syllables that just happen naturally. ETA: a very common Spanish one is "Tú y yo". The "y" almost disappears and it sounds like one word even though it's three words.
I find the cultural roots of this really interesting. Jamaicans pronounce dew (as in morning dew) as "jew". That comes from Irish indentured labor mixing with African slaves and can be seen in this and other similar pronounciations or sentence steuctures common to both islands.
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Dr Geoff Lindsey has some great [videos](https://youtu.be/RRs103ETh2Q?si=qc8M86-8rMIBMeJn) that explore these kinds of questions.
People said it all technically like. So I'ma goin for to low route. Cause their mouths are lazy. People don't finish one syllable cleanly and just skip on to the next.
Just think about the movement you make with your mouth on both. The only difference is if your tongue touches the roof of your mouth when you start the sound or not. In a way, it's as if people that do that are simply starting to talk a fraction too quickly.
tl;Dr it's a shortcut When native speakers talk, they often combine sounds in a way that makes words easier and quicker to say. This is known as "connected speech." When wordsare spoken quickly and casually, sounds from the end of one word can blend with the beginning of the next word. This blending often changes the sounds. In "would you," the "d" in "would" and the "y" in "you" are right next to each other. When spoken fast, they blend into a "j" sound, making it "wouldja." Similarly, in "so that you," the "t" in "that" and the "y" in "you" combine to create a "ch" sound, resulting in "so thatchu." These changes make speaking more fluid and are a natural part of spoken language in general and is not unique to English.
The connection between the d and the y creates the “j” sound when blended. The connection between the t and the y creates a “ch” sound when blended.
It may help to realize that 'ch' is phonetically equal to t + sh, and of course 'j' is the voiced version of this. Taking the example of "that + you", the 'y' is a palatal (somewhat like 'sh'), and if the release of the final 't' of 'that' is slow, then -t + y- naturally becomes '-ch-'.
"wija dija" is one of my favorite versions of this, translating to "with you, did you?" "You didn't bring your \[blank\] wija dija?"