Post by Krunchy Fried Games in How to pronounce words that start and begin with the same letter or with letters that might sound the same?

Viewing post in How to pronounce words that start and begin with the same letter or with letters that might sound the same?

Yeah, the thing is, people don't talk with spaces. We anticipate the second word and this affects how we say the first one. The proof for this is- if you record someone talking and then move the words around in Audacity or whatever- it sounds completely unnatural- like an automated train station announcement.

Also, people often slur speech in a way that sounds perfectly natural, but is rarely thought about. So, the word 'ladies' often sounds more like 'lays' if you analyse it in natural speech.

So- 'hot dog' might be prounounced 'hoddog' and so on.

I like linguistics chat on itchio- this was my degree XD

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technicat2 years ago

Yup, despite not having a linguistics background or fluency in more than one (human) language, I find this stuff pretty interesting. Text-to-speech like just using Siri can expose some of these issues (I like to set Siri to non-American English voices to hear how different it sounds).

My dim sum app uses text-to-speech (and speech to text) for Chinese, and when it's fed one word at a time, the compound words sometimes sound unnatural (and in Chinese sometimes a word's tone might change if it's combined with another word, I think for a similar reason, so it's easier to say the combined words).

Out of curiosity, I just tried google translate, and it pronounces hot dog pretty naturally, but for a contrast, the Japanese loanword throws in an intervening vowel.

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Viewing post in How to pronounce words that start and begin with the same letter or with letters that might sound the same?