For example, if a lyric contains “that you”, it ends up like “thatchoo”. One example of this I can think of is in Karma by Taylor Swift (I know, I know, but it’s one of the most popular songs I listen to). The line where she sings “Karma’s a relaxing thought/Aren’t you envious that for you it’s not?” sounds like “arentchoo”. It doesn’t happen every time but it seems to happen unless you’re consciously making an effort to not make that sound. An example of this is in Love Story where she sings “That you were Romeo/You were throwing pebbles”, and it sounds like if you were just talking to someone and said “that” and “you” separately.
I’m just wondering if this happens in other languages with different combinations of sounds? It probably happens with other sound combinations in English too, but this is the easiest example to think of.
“If You Seek Amy” is a song purposefully written using this phenomenon.
You mean that sometimes certain words sound like other words? No, that is uniquely to the english language! /sarcasm
Something similar in German is if a verb ends with “st” followed by “du” (you), it’s squashed down to “-stu” …
from a song “Sag mal, weinst du oder ist das der Regen…” becomes “weinstu”
“hast du” …“hastu”
There are also weird German rules about article endings. A band I like has a song called “Herz Eines Trache” which means Heart of a Dragon. I don’t speak great German, so first time I heard it I wasted an embarrassing amount of time trying to figure out what eine Strache is.
Regionally it can also be “haste”.
I think “Sach ma, haste jewent oda is det der Rejen?” sounds just lovely. Ü
In British English, we do this a lot with ‘u’ sounds. For example, in London we take the Tube, which Americans pronounce ‘toob’ and we pronounce ‘choob’. Strangely enough, almost all English speakers do this with the word ‘train’ and other ‘tr’ words without even knowing it: the first sound is not ‘t’, it’s ‘ch’.
Both British and American English speakers do something similar with ‘s’. For example, ‘issue’ is pronounced ‘ishoo’ except by people with very strong RP accents (that is, posh people), who say ‘iss-yoo’.
It’s a similar phenomenon to the ‘c’ before ‘i’ and ‘e’ transforming into ‘s’, e.g., in ‘science’, ‘ceiling’ and probably hundreds of other words (‘cœliac’ is a particular favourite). Italians do something similar, but they make it ‘ch’ as in ‘ciao’.
Brazilian Portuguese speakers change ‘t’ and ‘d’ to ‘ch’ and ‘j’ respectively before ‘i’ and ‘e’ sounds. For example, the word ‘de’ meaning ‘of/from’ is pronounced more like ‘juh’. In Portugal, though, they use a hard ‘d’.
So, in summary, ‘e/i’ and ‘u’ sounds all have a tendency to transform the preceding consonant, especially if that consonant is ‘t’, ‘s’, ‘c/k’ or ‘d’, more rarely with ‘j’ and ‘z’ and sometimes with ‘b’. If and how they change varies by language and dialect.
(Note: I’d have done this with IPA but I’m not sure about Lemmy’s support for it and I didn’t want to type it all out and have it be a load of non-loading characters, hence my approximations of the pronunciations. Apologies to any linguists out there!)
>Brazilian Portuguese speakers change ‘t’ and ‘d’ to ‘ch’ and ‘j’ respectively before ‘i’ and ‘e’ sounds. For example, the word ‘de’ meaning ‘of/from’ is pronounced more like ‘juh’. In Portugal, though, they use a hard ‘d’.
Could you give me some exemples of ‘de’ sounding like ‘juh’? It may be because Brasil is a really big place, or a language barrier, but I never heard anyone pronounce ‘de’ like like that, what I commonly see, especially since I also do it, is changing ‘de’ to ‘di’ and ‘do’ to ‘du’ when speaking. Also, this happens with many words with ‘o’ and ‘e’, a lot of people just replace ‘o’ with ‘u’ and ‘e’ with ‘i’.
>Brazilian Portuguese speakers change ‘t’ and ‘d’ to ‘ch’ and ‘j’ respectively before ‘i’ and ‘e’ sounds. For example, the word ‘de’ meaning ‘of/from’ is pronounced more like ‘juh’.
This happened in Japanese too, where the original “ti, tya, tyo” became “chi, cha, cho”! These are all types of palatalisation, which is one of the most common types of sound change across languages.
