h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The word 'exactly' probably isn't the easiest English word to pronounce, but the best the natives seem to manage these days is 'Igzackly'.

Any guesses to how we'll be spelling it or pronouncing it in a few years time?


And do you have any other examples of lazy diction?

Robbie Savage.

PP.

Innit.

They have little purple pills for lazy diction these days.

~jwf~

I remember someone saying that the 'f' in 'twelfth' isn't pronounced. It is where I come from.

Febuary [losing the "r"]

Gonna instead of going.

Jewlery instead of jewelry.

Can't instead of cannot.

Firstly, my friends always say woof instead of wolf, saying its the sane thing. But they don't say woofs, they say wolves in the correct way?!

Additionally, my friends (and lots of not-so-bright enemies) always say liberry instead of library!

Nucular instead of nuclear. Even American presidents can't get it right.

Aluminium being pronounced 'aluminum'.





PP.

Giss and not give, its not axe it is ask, bus not buzz the list is endless.

News presenters on my local radio station BBC Radio WM regularly say seketery.

Deb

Innit

*the Swedish girl shudders in a corner*
All the things we learned in school will be laughed at soon...

Well now. Thing is it's not so much lazy as just a natural consequence of fast speech, most of which we don't notice that much (but all do).

In English we stress meaningful words. English being a stress timed language, we have to squash unstressed words and syllables in. This leads to:

Weakening: the most common vowel sound in English is schwa, a sort of weak uh sound. So in 'Give me a bottle of your finest Champagne' a of and your all sound like uh uhf and yuh. And me is not meeee but mi. and 'comfortable' is COMEftuhbuhl not COME FORT ABEL or 'America' is uhMErikuh not AI ME RI KAH.

Elision. In English we tend to leave sounds out in consonant clusters. So in 'I don't know' we drop the t and ' I need to mend my bike' we drop both ds. Also we say Chrismus not Christ Mas (with weakening too).

However, if we get two vowel sounds together we often add a sound - English speakers find it easier. So 'I went to Africa and Asia' you add an r sound between africa and and. And 'I saw two elephants' is more like 'toowelephants' than 'two. Elephants.' I ate three eggs for breakfast' is threeyeggs not three. Eggs. We call this intrusion.

Catenary ion is when we link a consonant sound at the end of a word to a vowel sound at the beginning of the next. An ice cream and a nice cream are said much the same.

But the one you won't belive us assimilation, which is where we change sounds according to what's coming up next. Green Park is more like Greem Park and Hyde Park is more like Hybe Park because it's easier to go from m to p and b to p than n and d for native speakers. No one ever belived they do this, but I afraid it's pretty well documented.

Of course, there are variations and not all native speakers do everything above all the time. I often do glitterati stops rather than intrusion for eg. But it's all perfectly normal and perfectly good English too. If you are doing this sort of thing are doing it right.

Catenary ion?

That should be catenation. And apologies for other errors. I panicked and didn't perview.

It's one of the best posts I've read for a long time

I'm very self-conscious about assimilation now