Re: OT: Intergermansk - Traveller's Phrasebook

On Fri, 4 Feb 2005 07:40:33 -0800, Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...> wrote:

>The English phrase "thank you" already has a vowel
>sound after the "k", namely the "you" sound.
No, actually it has *not*. In Standard English pronunciation, "y" at the
beginning of a word is *always* pronunced like the consonant [j]. At the
*end* of a word it is the vowel [i] (or sometimes [ai], as in [by]).
Your dialect might pronounce an vowel there, but generally this is not the rule.

>If the
>phrase were "thank du" then I think English speakers
>would tend to add a vowel over time.  It's just too
>much effort to pronounce "d" after "k".  Either that
>or they would turn "tank" into "tang" to make "tang
>du" eaiser to pronounce. American English speakers
>tend toward minimum-effort pronounciations, which is
>why we say "thang god" for "thank god", "budder" for
>"butter" and "jeet?" for "did you eat?"
I concur... for me, a word-final *voiceless* consonant is even *a lot*
easier to pronounce than a word-final *voiced* consonant, so changing
"thank" to "thang" would complicate things for me quite a bit and would be
contrary to minimum effort.
Thinking about it, I'd say that *voiced* consonants generally take more
effort to pronounce than *voiceless* ones (at lest for me).
But Americans might have other speech habits there...

>I'm not saying there's anything wrong with "tank du".
>I'm only pointing out how American speakers would
>butcher it over time to fit their own lazy speech
>habits.
The lazy American speech habits might even slur "tank du" into "tanku" or
something =/ You never know...

--
Pascal A. Kramm, author of:
Intergermansk: http://www.choton.org/ig/
Chatiga: http://www.choton.org/chatiga/
Choton: http://www.choton.org
Ichwara Prana: http://www.choton.org/ichwara/
Skälansk: http://www.choton.org/sk/
Advanced English: http://www.choton.org/ae/