An explanation of 'Yod Coalescence' and 'Yod Dropping'! Fly telepod sketchfab.com/3d-models/telep... Rod Stewart Costume escapade.co.uk/products/rod-s...
I discovered your channel a bit more than a month ago and i'm loving your videos so much! As a non-native english speaker they bring so much insight into why I speak with the accent I speak with without me realizing all the phonetic processes that go behind all of that. It's such a mind-blowing feeling to have something that you've been doing unconciously for years finally explained. It's incredible how well put together your videos are; they can be easily understood even by a complete phonetics layman like me! Not even to mention the great humor that just glue the whole video together in such a seamless manner. Keep doing what you're doing! big love
I love how you provide *examples* of where sounds occur. Makes it much easier to grasp the relevance/application as I don't have to sit around thinking of words for 5 minutes every time you mention a sound.
@@ybrahimpalateo1709 Sure. Maybe ”jyude”. Might as well go all the way. Also; pronouncing ”dud” as: ”dood” would be pronouncing it, as written, with respect to the original Latin pronunciations of these letters 🤔.
Gotta love this guy. Lots of positive features in the channel: presentation is clean, without distracting background noises, useless previous chat, he knows whats he's talking about, copious on the spot examples, etc. However, one that's underrated is that he is not lazy. The sheer amount of time he uses for gleaning from zillions of videos, choosing the precise moments and emphasizing them. Pure gold. Already subscribed...
Yes. He's clearly not a "content creator" who merely churns out content to appease the algorithm. He's a genuine expert who is doing this as a passion project.
Watching this video made me feel so much better as a non-native speaker. Living proof that you can do literally you want as long as people understand what you are trying to say
that's literally how language evolves. new influences from wherever are implemented if they are efficient enough to stick around, and don't interfere with being understood.
I'm absolutely thrilled to find this. As an expat in America I've been unable to explain why I pronounce 'dune' as 'june' and 'tube' as 'chube'. I've received a lot of ribbing from my coworkers but now I have validation! hahaha!
I speak English as a foreign language and I've been using it in my job(s) for two decades, so there's a lot of things I do with my speech without noticing. Occasionally, I catch myself saying things like "Youchube", and I start second-guessing myself: is it something native speakers actually do, or is it just some weird mannerism I've aqcuired due to some misguided attempt at being hypercorrect? It's great to find a clear explanation of what's going on here that basically tells me not to worry too much since pronounciation isn't particularly standardized anyway.
Don't worry _too_ much. On the other hand, just like speakers of any other language, English speakers have opinions and prejudices about pronunciations and accents. While no one is likely to think less of someone for having a _foreign_ accent, talking like a farmer can seem odd in a business meeting. So can talking like a member of the British royal family at a farmer's dinner table.
I've stopped worrying about that after my younger brother went to work in the UK. In a casual conversation at the office he said "rubbish" rather than "trash", and was instantly ridiculed for trying to sound British (he wasn't, it was just a word he knew because in Polish schools at the time they taught us BBC English specifically, which is why I spell "colour" and "honour" to this day). Conversely, I once witnessed how a British English native speaker pronounced schedule like "shejehl", and a guy he talked to, who was a Pole, made fun of him because of course it's "skejule". There's really no cure for being an asshole, and I refuse to have my life governed by someone else's sense of entitlement.
You may be unconsciously picking up on other speakers accents and dialects. I think it’s a natural thing. I’m American but I spent months working with people speaking British English and I found myself saying “cheers” all the time
Jacek According to the video, tongue and mouth positions tend to cause the sound change to emerge. Similar tongue and mouth positions are probably responding for a lot of dialect differences in native speech. I’ve never had that particular affliction but English is my first language.
Glad you mentioned Wales' pronunciation as well. I pronounce Dune, UA-cam and Tuesday as such; Dewn, YewTewb and Tewsday. A lot of people here will pronounce "situation" as "sit-ewation" and "statue" as "statew." Very interesting video!
South African English is similar to your pronunciation on this, sort of Dyoon, YooTyoob, Tyoosday, sityoowation. Definite y sound rather than a ch sound. Statue though becomes stat-choo, which a t in the middle.
It was interesting to see this part, that the way I pronounce it, most resembles the Welsh alternative. I am not a native speaker, and my language has a lot of [dj], [nj], [tj] sounds, so probably that's why our way of speaking English includes these. I would not say Toosday or Choosday, but rather Tyoosday, Nyoo York, sitewation, Although YouToob and Dune with hard T and D and simple U like Uma Thurman... because the words have equivalent in our language (tuba, duna) that are without the y sound. Interestingly, you mentioned the word statue.. i would pronounce it with both ch and y Statchyoo
I always have this instinct to say "duke box" instead of "juke box" because my subconscious must think I'm doing that yod coalescence thing...😅 (Thank-you for the video, it was really interesting having it explained so thoroughlly.)
There are very few people who can communicate with the general public about these phenomenons to begin with. Let alone being able to make the video to such a high quality. This is such a blessing for people like me who has a great interest in linguistics and particularly phonetics. Thank you so much Dr. Geoff Lindsey, from the bottom of my heart.
@@davidlawrence5914 They simply mean that they thought *_EVERYONE_* knew that. And, yes, the plural of ”Phenomenon” *_IS:_* ”Phenomena”; and there is a right way, and there is a wrong way, to pluralize it; just like the correct plural form of ”Foot” is: ”Feet”, and not: ”Foots” or: ”Foot”. 🧐
I’m glad you mentioned the few of us who don’t drop the yod or chew the tuna. I’ve lived in the US for sixteen years now and it’s a daily fight to not bend to other people’s preferences, but I am resolute.
Here in Sri Lanka, we got our English from the old RP which was spoken until the 40s and 50s. Sri Lankan English (SLE) still retains some features of RP, which have gone out of use in Standard British English at present. Pronunciations and even vocabulary considered old fashioned or posh in the UK are still widely used in SLE.
"Tuna chewing" in English reminds me of a somewhat similar trend in Slavic languages. Polish language is notorious for amount of hissing sounds, up to the point when most palatilized consonants, which are preserved in other slavic languages, like Russian, turn into some form hiss in Polish. It has always been a source for jokes about Polish, at least here in Russia. Still, Polish is a really beautiful language, something very comforting about this intricacy of it's sound
@@Hadar1991 Darn, that does look complicated. No wonder johneltonisntgay talked about intricacies! But really I've heard very little Polish spoken, so I'm just going by what you two say, not by what I've heard.
I like not only your videos Dr. Lindsey, I also like your humour as it shows through your collection of speech samples. Your videos are made with a lot of care and I very much appreciate that.
English is my second language and I noticed it in phrases like "What did you do?" or "Would you?" where the "d" turns into "j" and quickly adopted it, because I like how it sounds. It may be partly because in my native language there's a lot of fricatives and affricates, so it sounds more natural to me :)
@@RealGrouchy It's valid if you use it! Though I'm not sure if even that has too many letters in it? Usually in my experience the very formal: /wɔt dɪd jʉw dʉw/ Collapses into: /wɔdʒədʉw/ Where the initial /wɔdʒə/ is pronounced the same as the name Roger in the "welease Woger" scene from Monty Python's 'Life of Brian'! Maybe "wojadoo" to rhyme with "Agadoo"? 😂
I think the most surprising thing that I have been learning from these videos, is just how dynamic the English language is, *right now*. It might seem logical that social media and entertainment would be homogenizing the language more and more. Or that certain familiar accents would be "frozen" by their depictions in popular media. But no, instead stuff is changing all over the place, it seems like an ESPECIALLY interesting time for linguists. Thanks for another video full of insights!
I love your videos! I teach English as a second language to Hebrew speakers. I know where the word "YOD" comes from. I'm a native Hebrew speaker and YOD is the name of 10th letter of the Hebrew alphabet . Some people call this letter YOD and some say YUD. In Hebrew, Jerusalem is YERUSHALAYIM ירושלים with the letter YOD twice.
No, it comes from the Phoenician Yodh, which gave the greek iota (ancestor to Latin "i" and "j"), and the English jot, and German jot (pronounced yot). (and the Phoenician one is long derived from some hieroglyphs which represented a hand or arm)
I’ve been speaking my entire life and I’ve never noticed these little things. This channel is mind blowing. I’ve always hated languages but this channel makes them actually fascinating. I’m naming my next dog Yod.
As a Brazilian living in Argentina, this Ty>Ch mutation was the first thing I learned to recognize when speaking Spanish. Brazilians have it, while Spanish speakers afaik always pronounce the T very clearly. I've heard my fair share of [friend mocking my accent by speaking Spanish slowly with a Ch replacing every other consonant] banter
As an English speaker when I started learning (Mexican) Spanish in school I excitedly went to practice with my (Castilian) Spanish speaking grandfather and discovered to my dismay I couldn’t understand a word he said in Spanish. It seemed to me he turned every consonant into ch
As a Mexican learning Brazilian Portuguese, this was also really helpful to know. At first, Brazilian seemed way harder to understand than it should, considering that the written language reads almost the same as in Spanish.
I think it depends on what you are used to. I have studied European Spanish quite a lot and am slightly dismayed when I listen to some Latin American Spanish speakers and can only understand some of what they are saying, it almost sounds like they are speaking Nepalese (apart from Colombians and Mexicans, who speak very clearly).
As a hungarian, I also hear it like a ty and not a ch sound. The word during also sounds me like dyuring and not juring sometimes. My language contains these sounds and there are represented in our alphabet, too (ty,gy,cs). The slavic languages also use ty and dy sounds. I think someone, who speaks english as a mother toung can't realise it, because the ty and dy sound isn't represeneted in the written English.
@@bookcat123 native spanish speaker, but when I ran into some foreign spanish speakers come in from europe, it took me 5 whole minutes to figure out they were speaking spanish. Their accent was just so different to any spanish I have heard from Latin America people, I thought they were speaking an entirely different language. Once, i figured out they were speaking spanish, i went from understanding zero percent, to maybe 70 percent.
you're too funny! not only is this video very informative but you linked the road stewart costume in the description! brilliant video, greetings from somerset.
This is fascinating. I grew up in the US and moved to the UK as an adult, and I've always wondered why British people take the Chube on Chuesdays. Thank you for explaining. And thank you to the YouChube algorithm for suggesting this video. Subscribed!
It never ceases to amaze me when I watch videos like this that I've spoken English for 40 years and never thought about this. It's all just unconscious.
You mentioned that, in some Japanese words, we don't add the yod (Sudoku being the given example). What I find interesting, as 10-year resident of Japan, is that English speakers do change the sounds that should have yod to be an extra vowel instead. The most famous cities in Japan, Tokyo and Kyoto both have a yod-type sound in the Japanese pronunciation, and you would expect them to be 2 syllable words for English speakers (even though they're 4 and 3 mora in Japanese, respectively). However, the kyo sound gets changed to ki-o and both become 3-syllable words in both American and British pronunciations. In fact, when I said Kyoto to my parents with the original Japanese pronunciation, they didn't know what I was talking about! Perhaps we have more trouble with yod before o sound than before u sound?
Many decades ago, when I introduced my newly-married bride Kyoko to my parents (in Britain), I had to engage in a subtle psychological game to get them to pronounce her name almost correctly. In English, the "kyo" combination occurs frequently, but NOT at the beginning of a single word. An example would be "back your car into the garage." So, I just got my parents to say "back your car," then "back your," and then to drop the "b" so that you get "ackyour" and finally drop the "a" so that they can say "kyour." In a non-rhotic British accent (Northern England), this is a good approximation to the "Kyo" in Kyoko or the "kyo" in Tokyo. Another example of this mental block that prevents people from pronouncing things that they actually say every day is the "ts" consonant cluster at the beginning of "tsunami" or "tsetse fly" or "zeitgeist." We say "ts" ALL THE TIME in English, but not at the start of a word. You could train English speakers to articulate this combination with a similar "reduction method." I personally have used the same method to train myself to pronounce the "dh" and "gh" sounds (and others) that occur frequently at the beginning of words in Hindi, which I have been learning. It works, believe me!
@@DieFlabbergast Definitely on the the ts thing! My college roommate had a Chinese last name beginning with Ts and was floored when I called and said her name correctly the first time we spoke. I have fun going the other way in teaching Japanese students to pronounce English sounds. They regularly drop the final vowels in some common words (most frequent is desu - everyone says "des" and it's a big give away that you're a new learner if you actually pronounce the final "u"), but they struggle so much pronouncing English words correctly without adding extra vowel sounds.
@@DieFlabbergast I've done exactly the same thing to explain Māori words that start with "ng" - if you can say "singing" then you've already made the sound twice. Just a bit of practice to start a word like "Ngāuruhoe" with that sound.
We do it with Spanish words too. Tiempo (time) is "tyempo" but in English it comes out as "tee-yempo" as in "Goodyear Tiempo" (TV ad for tires). "Ciencia" (syensya, two syllables) comes out "seeyentseeya" (four syllables).
This is quite interesting as my language (Bahasa Indonesia) used to have the old spelling inspired by the Dutch which was "DJ" for "Juh" and "TJ" for "Chuh" sound and at this time "J" was for "Yuh". It was basically combining the "Duh" and "Yuh" sound to make "Juh" and also "Tuh" and Yuh" sound to make "Chuh".
yep, and İ reckon Malaysians used to wrıte "c" as "ch" before the spelling merger of the two country. thus "contoh" was spelt as "tjontoh" in Indonesia, and "chontoh" in Malaysia.
In modern Dutch the English ch sound is written "tsj" in theory, but it's very rare, because the sound appears mostly in loanwords that keep the foreign spelling. Country names like "Tsjechië" and "Tsjaad" use it, but then you have "brunch" and "chat" from English, and "ketjap" from Indonesian/Malay. Keeping the old spelling, unsurprisingly.
What I think is even more interesting is how this yod-coalescence thing could be found even in Malay/Indonesian. It’s not to the same extent as in English, but many Malaysians and Indonesians pronounce their countries’ names not as “ma-lay-si-a” and “in-do-ne-si-a” but rather as “ma-lay-sha” and “in-do-ne-sha”. It’s even more interesting that this pretty much only happens in these two country names.
@@naufalzaid7500 that's true. in fact, a lot of Indonesians say "Endonesha", which I find interesting since in French, "in" also gets to be pronounced as nasalized "eN", thus "Indonésie" in French is pronounced also like "ENdonezi".
@@xolang in french, vowel followed by coda position n always results in a nasalised vowel without an n. The nasalised vowels are fewer than the normal ones, so i uses the sound of a nasal è (low-mid front vowel)
You can use the same trick to pronounce the French "eu". Start with an [e] or [ɛ] instead of an [i]. You'll get an [ø] or [œ] (which also exist in other languages, often written ö or ø). I'm not sure whether English makes a phonemic distinction between [e] or [ɛ], but some French accents don't make it either.
@@wish-keeper According to Geoff Lindsey (the guy who made the video), the SSB KIT vowel actually could reasonably be transcribed as /e/, and so in this way, yeah, there is a [e]/[ɛ] contrast in SSB like in French. You can check out “The British English vowel system”, a blogpost written by Dr Lindsey himself if you want to know more about it.
As a non native English speaker but with advanced English skills, this is very interesting and answers a lot of questions about differences in how people pronounce words.
I'm originally from the South East of England, that bit where you circled - but I've mostly lost my accent now in favour of 'neutral' (southern) English. The yod dropping is a huge factor and I never realised! As soon as you said it I immediately went 'BOO'IFUL' 🤣 Now to binge the rest of your videos...
There's a very funny passage in the Alan Partridge podcast in which Alan describes how he set about suppressing his East Anglian yod-dropping in order to become a DJ and how he tried (and failed) to correct Bernard Matthews' pronunciation of "beautiful".
@@DrGeoffLindsey By the way, the podcast contains quite a lot of linguistic humour, especially for those with a pedantic cast of mind! For example, Alan has a go at people (very common nowadays in Britain) who use "sat" and "stood" as present participles. Now there's an idea for a video: How "sat" and "stood" supplanted "sitting" and "standing" as present participles in British English.
@@DrGeoffLindsey Hi, doc, I have a suggestion: as a non native english speaker, I've noticed different prononciations of the "h" in words like "huge". I've heard from "hhhiudge" to "sshhhiudge". Is that a real thing or am I completely mistaken? Thanks for your content.
@@hugoestevesrj this does happen. some people will use a palatal fricative [ç] instead of [h]. I guess it eases pronunciation because of the following [j]?
My recent fascination with accent, linguistics, and etymology channels like yours have shown me just how much of my adopted pronunciations are nativized and technically break the rules of English. And sincerely appreciate that!
Yod Coalescence is pretty prevalent in Ireland and The Irish Language has palatalised constonants, which result from a similar phenomenon, and probably reinforced the tendancy towards yod coalescence in accents of Irish English.
If I can make an odd connection here: I have somewhere a book of victorian Punch cartoons by George Du Maurier, which feature a character he calls "Maudle" and who I take to be a broad parody of Oscar Wilde. One of Maudle's comic characteristics is using "tuna chewing" as in "The pickchah is beautiful"! I always took this as perhaps a comment on a fashionable affectation, but maybe he was picking up what was then a typically Irish pronunciation.
Bhí mé ag foghlaim an Gaeilge (I was leaning Irish), now I understand better my own Australian English, ach ní thuigim aon focal, is an teanga an-gheal go cinnte (but I don't understand a word)
I am non-native English (originally Dutch) but am totally fluent in English. This video has funnily enough taught me that I think my accent is literally all over the place xD. I don't really have a Dutch accent when speaking English, so my English accent is from everywhere.
I studied English linguistics but am now working as an elementary school teacher, teaching English as a foreign language here in Germany, and this reminds me of last year. I was teaching absolutel beginners, and our topic was "days of the week". The kids (without my prompting or anything) compared "Tuesday" to "cheese", claiming that it sounds alomost the same, like "Cheeseday".
As a non-native English speaker, this is highly enlightening. It's an entertaining video but it also shows you very well what makes the difference between mostly American and English accents, I feel like this is a treasure trove for actors trying to sound believable doing an accent not native to them. Thank you for how in-depth you make these videos, Dr. Lindsey!
'As a non-native English speaker' is a dangling modifier in your sentence. I don't know why, and this is in no way intended to offend you, but I, also a non-native English speaker, find it absolutely distracting when native and especially non-native English speakers use such dangling modifiers. Apparently it's rather acceptible among the aboriginal English speakers, so I have even stopped bringing it up to them long tme ago. Don't YOU find it odd?
@@anonymator As a _native_ English speaker, I didn't even know that there was a word for that construction, or that it was unusual anywhere. In the contexts here, it's used to establish a context for the following clause, such as the commenter's English status, or the context of the comment chain itself. In English, speaking like this (with dangling modifiers) is completely normal, though would sound strange to here it used for every sentence like in this comment, but that's just from the repetition. Edit: After checking Wikipedia, it seems I may have conflated dangling modifiers with absolute constructions, and I think my sentences might actually be absolute constructions rather than dangling modifiers. Just goes to show how unfamiliar I was with them that I didn't realize they were separate things.
As someone who could never wrap their head around numbers and math, but instead was always drawn to words and language, I am very grateful for your channel😁 Even as a kid I've been mimicking voices and accents so these types of videos are right up my alley. Thank you!
I've found this channel some days ago and have been hooked ever since! This phenomenon is also very typical of Brazilian Portuguese, I believe they call it the "hissed t". For instance, if the last diphthong of an word is the syllable "-te", as in parte or presidente (part/piece or president, resp.), it becomes a "ch" sound, making way for a prolonged "ee" vowel-sound. Whereas in other variants, more akin to the European pronunciation, these words end in a hard "t", as they would in English.
I spend a lot of time in southern Portugal and Brazilian is particularly grating. A simple phrase such as good day in Portuguese is roughly “bong dee ah” but the Brazilian is “bom gee ah”. We had a Brazilian fellow come out to fix the phone line and the neighbours asked him to speak English so that they could stand a chance of understanding him.
@@jonathanfinan722 that's funny, but I wouldn't call it unpleasant, just very characteristic of them. I understand most Brazilians also have a hard time adjusting to our stress-timed pronunciation. Nothing a little exposure can't fix.
I am a long-long time English learner and there are not so many things left that can make me ‘day one’ excited. Your videos and explanations made me feel exactly like this! Binge watched all of your videos first, got your book as a current read, and some other great volumes on phonetics and transcription that you referenced are waiting to be thoroughly examined. I was never particularly interested in studying sounds, just seemed to listen carefully and adopt the patterns which I could identify, so it’s a new and exciting beginning for me. Thank you from the bottom of my heart 🎉
I'm honestly surprised someone can find this exiting. I learned English at quite an young age as a second language, so I was never aware of how I pronounce things, I just learned how to pronounce them. If I was learning English now, this would probably scare me
I love you dude! You're educational about pronunciation without being judgemental! I like this approach to language learning. I'm learning Norweigan and want a similar approach.
It's wonderful to watch a video about a relatively niche thing you researched ages ago. I'm from Berkshire and you do hear age and regional differences, like me and most my friends DON'T coalesce in words like assume, presume etc, but we do coalesce in every other place, and some people take on the Cockney yod-dropping in words like new
I'm a native speaker (Northeaster US), and find your videos fascinating. These are things I would otherwise never think about or even notice at all, and I really enjoy learning about them. Thanks for making them!
Just wanted to comment on “Dude” that there are also many ways of pronouncing this with an American accent. You get the typical Italian-American Doood with no softness to the u, but then some accents will have essentially a Di-Ude where a soft i almost makes it sound like an ü. And as that word has entered for example Australian it has adopted essentially Düde as standard pronunciation there. Language is always evolving, even such a simple word! :)
All of the comments about how informative all your videos are and spot on, but I want to highlight the sick BoJo burn you slipped in there. Wonderful stuff.
I discovered your channel a few months ago and I am so glad I did. As a native English speaker, I am amazed by how much I conCHinue to learn from your videos. Thank you!
Be careful not to overapply, though! There's no yod in continue, just an i like in tip. (If someone's struggling with a puzzle and you tell them you'll give them a "chip", they might be more confyused than ashured.)
No, you've mis-applied the rule. English speakers would not turn "continue" into "conchinue". It occurs in "tu" when the "u" contains a yod sound. spoken word "toon" spoken word "choon"
Terrific video. May I add the example of "assume" (or maybe I missed it?), where British speakers seem to say "ashoom" (yod coalescence) while American speakers say "assoom" (yod dropping). Also, regarding Boris Johnson's yod-retaining pronunciation of "dude" (he probably says "assyoom"), the stereotypical California surfer, from whose speech this term has acquired its currency, would say something that almost resembles Johnson's pronunciation. The southern California version of the U vowel (or, at least, one of the U vowels) seems to be about halfway between "oo" and the "ü" (u-umlaut) sound at which this video begins.
I love how clearly you explain all this. Now I finally understand the Dune, Dyune, June error in my head. Turns out Englisch is a hot mess. Subscribed!
I first began to notice the soft CH sound in TV weather forecasting: 'For Chewsday, more rain I'm afraid...' often following a modern drift in pronunciation from an e to more of an a sound: '...In the Wast of England and Wast Wäyles...' As an aside: Modern English speakers seem to have added an e in coast as 'coe'st', keeping the mouth open in an Australian pronunuciation rather than narrowing the lips. Being older and originating from the South of England, I've kept the strong T, and have been picked up many times when I've said 'Illyustration' rather than using the u in bus!
In the book Borstal Boy, there was a Cockney character who was either named Tulips or Chewlips. No one was certain as to which was right. The book was a memoir of 1940s events written in the 1950s, so "Tuna Chewing" was going on even then.
This was so great! Your dude edit was hilarious. I'm not a native speaker, but I've been studying for really long and I can mimick accents somewhat, but I'm amazed how I'm still only just scratching the surface of phonetics and it's lovely.
Fabyoolous as always. I wish there was a super cut or edited compilation of your videos to be able to share with the non linguaphiles in our lives. Never the less, great work, sir!
I love how you circled the area in England where yod dropping happens all the time. the whole video up till now I was thinking about my elderly grandma (95!) from Suffolk says 'Toosday' rather than Tuesday. the day is said differently too, more like 'Toosdee'
My dad, who grew up in roughly the same place I did but 20+ years earlier is very likely to pronounce the days of the week with a "dee" on the end. I'll do the same thing if I'm listing days of the week in quick succession ("I have history on Mondee-Wensdee-Friday but English is a Toosdee-Thursdee class").
Back in grad school I had a math prof from Ireland who pronounced "dual" as "jewel." I had him for linear algebra, and for the longest time I thought he was talking about "jewel spaces"...until I finally figured out that he meant "dual spaces" :D
Thank you, Dr. Geoff. These lecture videos you release are quite different from others just because it is very engaging and entertaining. I might ascend as an English professor from watching these. 😅
I am currently struggling with RP and your videos are great help to understand the depths of English phonetics... and they are enjoyable too! Thank you, Dr Lindsey!
your videos always make me think a lot about my own accent, i am white british born and raised with english (south london) parents but my ideolect is different to most, i've even had english people asking me where i'm from (country-wise), i say you-tube (not chewb), i pronounce my Ts deliberately, my Rs sound almost Eastern European with the "L" roll, and many common things english people do that i do not do, i'd love someone to actually study my accent and tell me what i'm doing haha, something that always stuck with me was when my Lithuanian ex noticed english people say "me-ōwk" instead of "milk" with a pronounced L, i could never explain that one.
I am so happy to know where this 'u' to 'iu' transition come from. It is absolutely pleasant to hear someone speaking about all those details of phonetic, I dived into them a few years ago to improve my english and I love these knowledges and their impacts in my language learning. Thanks a lot !
Excellent! I'll be showing this to some of my students who like to focus on pronunciation. Thanks for so thoroughly documenting what i call "the hidden Y sound." I've been impressed with your phonetic analysis ever since I saw your video about how the schwa sound and the /^/ sound are actually the same thing.
This is such an awesome video! It looks I've been looking for this video without knowing what I was looking for. One of the curious phonetic phenomena in the Korean language (my native language) is the switching of the consonant ㅅ(fricative alveolar) to the "sh" sound when combined with vowels like ㅑ, ㅕ, ㅛ, ㅠ, etc. (all having the yod component) and even with ㅞ, which does not have a yod at the beginning. It's the same yod merging strategy that Dr. Lindsey is talking about! Also curious in some English loanwords in Korean is that the phoneme su is often transliterated as shu. As in 슈퍼마켓(shupeomaket) for supermarket, 슈퍼맨 (shupeomaen) for Superman, etc. I have always wondered why this happened. My hypothesis now, after watching this video, is that when these foreign words were first introduced or popularized in Korea (probably towards the late 18th century or early 19th century) or more likely when it was first introduced to Japan a lot earlier (many English loanwords were introduced into the Korean language in a roundabout way via the Japanese language during the Japanese colonization period of the early 20th century), whoever brought those words to Korea and Japan (likely the British, or early Americans) were pronouncing words without dropping the yod, like siuper. That's why the Japanese (and by extension the Koreans) later used their own coalescing strategy to turn siuper into shuper! Had the word "super" first introduced to Korea and Japan by the modern Americans who have already dropped the yod (su-per), then the Korean and Japanese loanword for super would have been just su-peo or su-pah instead of shu-peo or shu-pah! This is awesome! I feel like I've made the biggest discovery of my life (at least related to linguistics). In the Korean language itself, both yod dropping and yod merging phenomena can be observed. As mentioned above, when ㅅ(similar to S) is combined with yod vowels ㅑ (ya), ㅕ (yeo), ㅛ (yo), ㅠ (yu) (and also curiously ㅣ (i) for some reason), yod merging happens and "s" becomes "sh." But when ㅈ (similar to J) or ㅊ (ch) is combined with those vowels, yod dropping happens and just becomes ja, jeo, jo, ju, cha, cheo, cho, chu, etc. I'm learning so much about my own language by watching his video on English pronunciation. Thank you, Dr. Lindsey!
You are my new favorite linguist. I found you recently and while I have learned much from others, you cover topics that nobody else does. I really enjoyed your explanation that IPA did not really fully describe how native English speakers actually sound. Keep it up!
This reminded me that when I was learning English at school, I always thought "new" and "knew" were pronounced differently. I always thought "new" was "nyu" and "knew" was "nu", later I realized that they're pronounced the same, but that "same" pronunciation varies from person to person.
Just discovered this channel! Best phonetics channel ever. Brilliant content, brilliant editing. Very amusing selection of clips that illuminate the subject matter. Please keep up the great work!
It's interesting how differently I conceptualize this vs. the "train" thing. In "train", I sort of "think" I'm saying t-rain, the way it's spelled, even though I actually say "chrain". But with, say, "statue" (which I pronounce "sta-chu"), I'm under absolutely _no_ illusion that I'm saying "sta-t-yu": I've just always seen it as one of those numerous English words that's not really pronounced the same way it's written. Also, I had NO idea that every English long-u was supposed to have a "y" in front of it! I thought the letter "u" just naturally had multiple pronunciations, either "oo" or "yoo". Like, I _know_ some accents say "tune" as "tyoon" instead of my "toon", but it never occurred to me that it was _supposed_ to have the "y" sound and that my accent had dropped it.
As an ESL speaker myself, who gained an advanced degree of fluency even though I was past the typical age for this when I emigrated to the US, these videos are fascinating. Spanish is my 1st language but I have some skill with languages in general, including French, German and others.
ASL = American Sign Language. ESL, "English as Second Language," has been replaced by "English Language Learners," recognizing that English may not be the second language. For my daughter-in-law, it's her third language. She grew up learning to speak Spanish and Italian simultaneously.
All of your videos make me really think about how I talk! As far as this topic goes, I seem to mostly fall into the "yod dropping," which makes sense as I'm an Albertan with a lot of rural family and much of rural Alberta was settled from the US. And of course I preserve the yod in most of the typical places. But what's interesting is that there seem to be some words where I'm more likely to use the French "u" than anything else. I wonder if this has to do with growing up in a city founded by French Metis. Despite the population being heavily anglicised and white (though there are still a *lot* of Metis, they just tended not to advertise when I was a teenager), being able to properly pronounce the French names for streets and neighbourhoods as a marker of identity. Even today, saying "Hebert" as "HEE-burt" instead of "ee-BEAR" will single someone out as a new arrival. And of course Canadian English retains more francophone influences than most forms of English - "foyer" is "foi-YAY," not "FOI-er," for example.
I am British and I am learning that I have some unusual pronunciations. I get why sometimes people think I am not British. Your comment about foyer got me thinking in particular as I pronounce it like the French, neither foy-yay or foi-er but rather like fwa-ye. It isn't a word that is often used day to day though.
Interesting. I grew up in Ottawa and took French immersion, so I was always on the alert for pronouncing French names according to French rules. When I went to Alberta for university there happened to be a provincial minister at the time by the name of Guy Boutilier, so I naturally pronounced the entire name as I would in French. If his first name had been something obviously English - like Ralph (the premier's name at the time) - I might have switched out the surname to an English pronunciation, but two French names was enough for my French detector to go with French. Turns out he pronounced his name according to English rules.
@Davyd Atwood I have heard that parts of the Canadian prairies have a lot of Ukrainian influence, with people who speak no Ukrainian sounding like they have a Ukrainian accent. It may be largely extinct by now. My Canadian Ukrainian relatives used to talk about it. Have you ever run across this?
@@Xubuntu47 My Ukrainian relatives mostly sound like they're Mormons, largely because their father (like mine, they're my cousins through my father) grew up in Lethbridge. That side of the family is Anglo-Scots and Irish-Scots and arrived in 1634, so not a lot left of Europe in the accent!
@@davidjames4915 I'd probably do the same! "Guy" pronounced "gai" just feels weird as a name - it's kind of like someone being named "Dude." But pronounced "gee" it seems normal. Last names mostly depend on how the family got to the province, and where they grew up. There are tiny pockets of french heritage scattered around a lot of people who moved from Dakota, Wyoming, South Africa, Sweden, Prussia, and (as noted below) Ukraine.
i’m a huge fan of linguistics and your videos are such a treat, i’m not super knowledge about stuff so a lot of the more advanced linguistics videos just go right over my head but yours are so well described and easy to understand, thank you!
My favourite thing about your videos, Dr. Geoff, is the way you always present pronunciation variations across accents of english as equal variants - none of that elitist nonsense about "proper" and "incorrect" pronunciation that we got in school when I was growing up!
As a non-native speaker I found it really educational and useful in terms of analyzing my own pronunciation. I’ve also caught myself recalling how do I pronounce it and it’s the third way, soft as in chube but with t as in toob (closer to the American version, but with much softer t, something like tyube). And that’s why I’ll never get rid of my accent I guess 😅
I'm not a native speaker, though I speak English since I was nine, but now I realize why actual native speakers consider my accent"weird", even though my pronunciation is proper. I use many different pronunciations for yod and post alveolar, and so inconsistently.
Dr. Lindsey, thank you for another informative video! Could you please cover the topic of the vowel in "word" and "work"? I always pronounced it with a long o, making "work" and "walk" homophones, but as I entered a university where strict SSB is the norm, I've been told I am wrong, and there is a soft, close vowel in "work", that I am not hearing. I still struggle with it and it doesn't sound right to me at all. Is it a strictly British thing? Is it still in fashion?
I'm not Dr. Lindsey, but the vowel in "work" is never the same as the one in "walk" or "wore" for native speakers, at least for ones that grew up hearing the word before they saw it written like the majority. It's the same vowel in "were" or "burr", and the reason it has an O is because of a spelling convention. Writing "wurk" and "wurd" in medieval times would've been harder to read because W hadn't fully developed (they would've been "uuurk" and "uuurd"), so O won out as an easier letter. As another topic, "word" _did_ have an [o] sound in early medieval times, but "work" mostly didn't. When they merged together, changing the spelling to match the first became better.
As someone with a fairly normal SSB accent I would pronounce 'word' and 'work' with a kind of long schwa, whereas I pronounce the vowel in 'walk' the same way as in 'talk', 'jaw' and 'orc'
"word" and "work" should have the NURSE vowel in most non-rhotic British English accents. In Standard Southern British this is a long schwa [əː] as others have said. If you've got a good schwa vowel (see Geoff's other videos on weak forms if you don't, just to emphasise how a good schwa vowel is important if you want to sound native), just try sounding it for longer. If you have a rhotic accent I think you should be pronouncing a syllabic /ɹ/ but I don't know rhotic accents so I could be wrong. Neither option should sound very much like the vowel in "walk" which should have the THOUGHT vowel in most British English dialects.
@@robbadob9929 that's not entirely true - some West Country accents have 'work' rhyming with 'dork', 'word' rhyming with 'cord', 'worm' rhyming with 'form' (and 'warm' rhyming with 'farm', 'ward' with 'bard', etc). For speakers who are non-rhotic, this leads to 'work' and 'walk' being homophones. Though it's probably not a pronunciation that I would advise non-native speakers to adopt.
If you want another UA-cam example of pronouncing Dune like June as you do, theres an Australian youtuber called Skill Up who did a weekly gaming news video on a recent Dune game and apparently enough of his comments thought he was saying June that he often brings jt up as a joke when he talks about Dune.
I know UA-camr ashens included a broad Norfolk accent in his film because he was disappointed at the lack of representation. But then the film was a comedy. It does seem to be an accent that's both interesting and very endangered. In fact a lot of traditional accents of the broad south east of England are critically endangered because of influence from London commuters. If you speak to old people in Hampshire you will often find rhotic accents which are somewhat reminiscent of accents further west but with more 'h' dropping. But I don't think I've ever heard a young person with such an accent.
1:55 "composite vowel" This description sounds a bit weird to me. By this logic, isn't every vowel a composite vowel with one component being how close/open and front/back the vowel is and the other component being whether the vowel is rounded or not?
@@Drabkikker the [y] vowel sounds between /и/ =[i] and /ы/, with some mixed "hæs" addition. Close, not rounded, rather central than back or even front.
@@Drabkikker Cyrillic [у] is rounded, close, and corresponds with latin "u". I meant dutch [y], which was just heared by me from Google Translate speaker.
I found your channel just a few days ago and I can't express just how much I love your videos - complicated concepts beautifully and clearly explained; I remember every little factoid and it's making my life as a languages teacher that much more rich and interesting! So many little tidbits I can pass on to my students as to why English is so weird and especially here why we owe so much to French. This may well be one of my favourite linguistics videos of all time. Thank you, thank you, thank you for this channel!
I discovered your channel a bit more than a month ago and i'm loving your videos so much! As a non-native english speaker they bring so much insight into why I speak with the accent I speak with without me realizing all the phonetic processes that go behind all of that. It's such a mind-blowing feeling to have something that you've been doing unconciously for years finally explained. It's incredible how well put together your videos are; they can be easily understood even by a complete phonetics layman like me! Not even to mention the great humor that just glue the whole video together in such a seamless manner. Keep doing what you're doing! big love
I totally agree with you! 😍😎
I’m just impressed that I found a correct usage of the semicolon in a UA-cam comment. G’day.
@@JJJRRRJJJ tbh i never know if i'm using it correctly or not, i just type and pray it's ok lol
@@kkanden hahahaha. I think you mean:
“TBH, I never know if I’m using it correctly or not; I just type and pray it’s ok. Lol”
@@JJJRRRJJJ ;)
I love how you provide *examples* of where sounds occur. Makes it much easier to grasp the relevance/application as I don't have to sit around thinking of words for 5 minutes every time you mention a sound.
Yes, examples are underappreciated. So many writers fail to include enough examples.
Read the word "occur" twice, pronouncing it differently in my head
And not only examples of words, but examples of clips of real people saying those words.
@@razzle_dazzle "Metaexamples", anyone?
@@yurin516 Let me guess: ”Oc-CER” and: ”Oc-CURE” 😏?
Not only enlightening but also increasingly hilarious! I lost it at BoJo saying "dyude".
We (as humanity) need to start saying ”jude” 😅.
@@PC_Simo As in the famous Beatles song "Hey, dude".
@@beeble2003 Yeah, I guess. I’ll have to give that a listen, I suppose.
@@PC_Simo what about something "dud/dood"
@@ybrahimpalateo1709 Sure. Maybe ”jyude”. Might as well go all the way. Also; pronouncing ”dud” as: ”dood” would be pronouncing it, as written, with respect to the original Latin pronunciations of these letters 🤔.
I enjoyed this program.
I had not expected you to see you here. Nice.
lol that’s crazy love your stuff
i enjoyed this comment
Hey it's Adam! What's up dyood!
Gotta love this guy. Lots of positive features in the channel: presentation is clean, without distracting background noises, useless previous chat, he knows whats he's talking about, copious on the spot examples, etc. However, one that's underrated is that he is not lazy. The sheer amount of time he uses for gleaning from zillions of videos, choosing the precise moments and emphasizing them. Pure gold. Already subscribed...
My life for Aiur!
A perfect summary.
Yes. He's clearly not a "content creator" who merely churns out content to appease the algorithm. He's a genuine expert who is doing this as a passion project.
Watching this video made me feel so much better as a non-native speaker. Living proof that you can do literally you want as long as people understand what you are trying to say
that's literally how language evolves. new influences from wherever are implemented if they are efficient enough to stick around, and don't interfere with being understood.
I'm absolutely thrilled to find this. As an expat in America I've been unable to explain why I pronounce 'dune' as 'june' and 'tube' as 'chube'. I've received a lot of ribbing from my coworkers but now I have validation! hahaha!
I speak English as a foreign language and I've been using it in my job(s) for two decades, so there's a lot of things I do with my speech without noticing. Occasionally, I catch myself saying things like "Youchube", and I start second-guessing myself: is it something native speakers actually do, or is it just some weird mannerism I've aqcuired due to some misguided attempt at being hypercorrect? It's great to find a clear explanation of what's going on here that basically tells me not to worry too much since pronounciation isn't particularly standardized anyway.
Don't worry _too_ much.
On the other hand, just like speakers of any other language, English speakers have opinions and prejudices about pronunciations and accents. While no one is likely to think less of someone for having a _foreign_ accent, talking like a farmer can seem odd in a business meeting. So can talking like a member of the British royal family at a farmer's dinner table.
I've stopped worrying about that after my younger brother went to work in the UK. In a casual conversation at the office he said "rubbish" rather than "trash", and was instantly ridiculed for trying to sound British (he wasn't, it was just a word he knew because in Polish schools at the time they taught us BBC English specifically, which is why I spell "colour" and "honour" to this day).
Conversely, I once witnessed how a British English native speaker pronounced schedule like "shejehl", and a guy he talked to, who was a Pole, made fun of him because of course it's "skejule".
There's really no cure for being an asshole, and I refuse to have my life governed by someone else's sense of entitlement.
You may be unconsciously picking up on other speakers accents and dialects. I think it’s a natural thing. I’m American but I spent months working with people speaking British English and I found myself saying “cheers” all the time
It's dialect, don't worry about it...
Jacek
According to the video, tongue and mouth positions tend to cause the sound change to emerge. Similar tongue and mouth positions are probably responding for a lot of dialect differences in native speech. I’ve never had that particular affliction but English is my first language.
This explains the confusing conversation with my American colleague from Dook university, who denied any knowledge of a place called Juke University
If I were guessing, I'd probably assume (ass-oom) that Juke University was a technical school for automated music machines.
Glad you mentioned Wales' pronunciation as well. I pronounce Dune, UA-cam and Tuesday as such; Dewn, YewTewb and Tewsday. A lot of people here will pronounce "situation" as "sit-ewation" and "statue" as "statew."
Very interesting video!
South African English is similar to your pronunciation on this, sort of Dyoon, YooTyoob, Tyoosday, sityoowation. Definite y sound rather than a ch sound. Statue though becomes stat-choo, which a t in the middle.
It was interesting to see this part, that the way I pronounce it, most resembles the Welsh alternative.
I am not a native speaker, and my language has a lot of [dj], [nj], [tj] sounds, so probably that's why our way of speaking English includes these.
I would not say Toosday or Choosday, but rather Tyoosday, Nyoo York, sitewation,
Although YouToob and Dune with hard T and D and simple U like Uma Thurman... because the words have equivalent in our language (tuba, duna) that are without the y sound.
Interestingly, you mentioned the word statue.. i would pronounce it with both ch and y
Statchyoo
Not just in Wales, I have to say, though (sadly) increasingly rarely elsewhere.
I always have this instinct to say "duke box" instead of "juke box" because my subconscious must think I'm doing that yod coalescence thing...😅
(Thank-you for the video, it was really interesting having it explained so thoroughlly.)
This is probably one of the best channels in YouTyube!
I agree!
There are very few people who can communicate with the general public about these phenomenons to begin with. Let alone being able to make the video to such a high quality. This is such a blessing for people like me who has a great interest in linguistics and particularly phonetics.
Thank you so much Dr. Geoff Lindsey, from the bottom of my heart.
I think Phenomenon is singular and plural.
@@martinhawes5647 , the plural of "phenomenon" is actually "phenomena".
@@lindaybariloche I can't believe you actually have to tell people that.
@@lindaybariloche @DieFlabbergast being prescriptivist in the comment section of a descriptivist channel lol
@@davidlawrence5914 They simply mean that they thought *_EVERYONE_* knew that. And, yes, the plural of ”Phenomenon” *_IS:_* ”Phenomena”; and there is a right way, and there is a wrong way, to pluralize it; just like the correct plural form of ”Foot” is: ”Feet”, and not: ”Foots” or: ”Foot”. 🧐
I’m glad you mentioned the few of us who don’t drop the yod or chew the tuna. I’ve lived in the US for sixteen years now and it’s a daily fight to not bend to other people’s preferences, but I am resolute.
Working in tech you wouldn’t believe how often I have to defend my choice to say YouTyube and Twitter rather than YouToob and Twidder.
Here in Sri Lanka, we got our English from the old RP which was spoken until the 40s and 50s. Sri Lankan English (SLE) still retains some features of RP, which have gone out of use in Standard British English at present. Pronunciations and even vocabulary considered old fashioned or posh in the UK are still widely used in SLE.
"Tuna chewing" in English reminds me of a somewhat similar trend in Slavic languages. Polish language is notorious for amount of hissing sounds, up to the point when most palatilized consonants, which are preserved in other slavic languages, like Russian, turn into some form hiss in Polish. It has always been a source for jokes about Polish, at least here in Russia.
Still, Polish is a really beautiful language, something very comforting about this intricacy of it's sound
As a Pole I am not sure about what hissing you are talking. We still have palatalization and a lot of it: ś, ź, ć, dź, ń, k:cz:c, g:ż:dz, k:cz, g:ż, ch:sz, r:rz, ł:l, n:ń, st:szcz, sk:szcz, m:mi, p:pi, b:bi, w:wi, t:c, d:dz, s:ś, z:ź, t:ć, d:dź, n:ń, k:ki, g:gi, st:szcz:ść, zd:żdż:źdź, sk:szcz, zg:żdż. E.g.:
męka : męce : męczyć
mucha : musze
noga : nodze : nóżka
strata : stracę : stracisz
rada : radzę : radzisz
stół : stole
siano : sianie
kosa : koszę : kosić
wozy : wożę : wozić
miasto:mieszczanin:mieście
jazda : jeżdżę : jeździć
pisk : piszczeć
miazga : miażdżyć
doktor : doktorze.
@@Hadar1991 chyba mowi o n.p. “szczęścia” - “счастье” (sczastie) po rosyjksu
Same process happened in Russian, consider ярко -> ярче
I used to joke that Печенье in Polish would sound like Pshe-chshe-nye :)
@@Hadar1991 Darn, that does look complicated. No wonder johneltonisntgay talked about intricacies! But really I've heard very little Polish spoken, so I'm just going by what you two say, not by what I've heard.
I like not only your videos Dr. Lindsey, I also like your humour as it shows through your collection of speech samples.
Your videos are made with a lot of care and I very much appreciate that.
Right? The supercut of Simon Whistler saying "dude" had me laughing out loud.
Not to mention the Fly teleportation / combination chamber!
Brilliant, if you want me to always remember a concept like Yod Coalescence, that's the way to do it.
I was hooked from the intro, I was so confused and when the D flipped to a J I lold
English is my second language and I noticed it in phrases like "What did you do?" or "Would you?" where the "d" turns into "j" and quickly adopted it, because I like how it sounds. It may be partly because in my native language there's a lot of fricatives and affricates, so it sounds more natural to me :)
It's strange that "wha'd you do" isn't a valid contraction in written English, given it's how many people prinounce it!
Are you Polish by any chance?
@@RealGrouchy Sometimes it's spelled whaddya do. Not exactly formal but oh well
“Wudja do?” “Woodjya?”
My german friend’s mother had trouble understanding me and it made me much more aware of contractions like this.
@@RealGrouchy It's valid if you use it!
Though I'm not sure if even that has too many letters in it? Usually in my experience the very formal:
/wɔt dɪd jʉw dʉw/
Collapses into:
/wɔdʒədʉw/
Where the initial /wɔdʒə/ is pronounced the same as the name Roger in the "welease Woger" scene from Monty Python's 'Life of Brian'!
Maybe "wojadoo" to rhyme with "Agadoo"? 😂
I think the most surprising thing that I have been learning from these videos, is just how dynamic the English language is, *right now*. It might seem logical that social media and entertainment would be homogenizing the language more and more. Or that certain familiar accents would be "frozen" by their depictions in popular media.
But no, instead stuff is changing all over the place, it seems like an ESPECIALLY interesting time for linguists. Thanks for another video full of insights!
I love your videos! I teach English as a second language to Hebrew speakers. I know where the word "YOD" comes from. I'm a native Hebrew speaker and YOD is the name of 10th letter of the Hebrew alphabet . Some people call this letter YOD and some say YUD. In Hebrew, Jerusalem is YERUSHALAYIM ירושלים with the letter YOD twice.
Toda!
No, it comes from the Phoenician Yodh, which gave the greek iota (ancestor to Latin "i" and "j"), and the English jot, and German jot (pronounced yot). (and the Phoenician one is long derived from some hieroglyphs which represented a hand or arm)
I’ve been speaking my entire life and I’ve never noticed these little things. This channel is mind blowing. I’ve always hated languages but this channel makes them actually fascinating. I’m naming my next dog Yod.
Just be sure not to drop it!
@@ibbuntu well played
I was going to name my dog "Schwa", but it was just too obscure...
@@ibbuntu It's Yod'll do the droppings!
that's a sick name for a dog
As a Brazilian living in Argentina, this Ty>Ch mutation was the first thing I learned to recognize when speaking Spanish. Brazilians have it, while Spanish speakers afaik always pronounce the T very clearly.
I've heard my fair share of [friend mocking my accent by speaking Spanish slowly with a Ch replacing every other consonant] banter
As an English speaker when I started learning (Mexican) Spanish in school I excitedly went to practice with my (Castilian) Spanish speaking grandfather and discovered to my dismay I couldn’t understand a word he said in Spanish. It seemed to me he turned every consonant into ch
As a Mexican learning Brazilian Portuguese, this was also really helpful to know. At first, Brazilian seemed way harder to understand than it should, considering that the written language reads almost the same as in Spanish.
I think it depends on what you are used to. I have studied European Spanish quite a lot and am slightly dismayed when I listen to some Latin American Spanish speakers and can only understand some of what they are saying, it almost sounds like they are speaking Nepalese (apart from Colombians and Mexicans, who speak very clearly).
As a hungarian, I also hear it like a ty and not a ch sound.
The word during also sounds me like dyuring and not juring sometimes.
My language contains these sounds and there are represented in our alphabet, too (ty,gy,cs).
The slavic languages also use ty and dy sounds.
I think someone, who speaks english as a mother toung can't realise it, because the ty and dy sound isn't represeneted in the written English.
@@bookcat123 native spanish speaker, but when I ran into some foreign spanish speakers come in from europe, it took me 5 whole minutes to figure out they were speaking spanish. Their accent was just so different to any spanish I have heard from Latin America people, I thought they were speaking an entirely different language. Once, i figured out they were speaking spanish, i went from understanding zero percent, to maybe 70 percent.
you're too funny! not only is this video very informative but you linked the road stewart costume in the description! brilliant video, greetings from somerset.
This is fascinating. I grew up in the US and moved to the UK as an adult, and I've always wondered why British people take the Chube on Chuesdays. Thank you for explaining. And thank you to the YouChube algorithm for suggesting this video. Subscribed!
It never ceases to amaze me when I watch videos like this that I've spoken English for 40 years and never thought about this. It's all just unconscious.
Or unconsc-y-ous?
@@columbus8myhw lol I knew someone would say that.
That opening joke with the D rotating was great.
You mentioned that, in some Japanese words, we don't add the yod (Sudoku being the given example). What I find interesting, as 10-year resident of Japan, is that English speakers do change the sounds that should have yod to be an extra vowel instead. The most famous cities in Japan, Tokyo and Kyoto both have a yod-type sound in the Japanese pronunciation, and you would expect them to be 2 syllable words for English speakers (even though they're 4 and 3 mora in Japanese, respectively). However, the kyo sound gets changed to ki-o and both become 3-syllable words in both American and British pronunciations. In fact, when I said Kyoto to my parents with the original Japanese pronunciation, they didn't know what I was talking about!
Perhaps we have more trouble with yod before o sound than before u sound?
Many decades ago, when I introduced my newly-married bride Kyoko to my parents (in Britain), I had to engage in a subtle psychological game to get them to pronounce her name almost correctly. In English, the "kyo" combination occurs frequently, but NOT at the beginning of a single word. An example would be "back your car into the garage." So, I just got my parents to say "back your car," then "back your," and then to drop the "b" so that you get "ackyour" and finally drop the "a" so that they can say "kyour." In a non-rhotic British accent (Northern England), this is a good approximation to the "Kyo" in Kyoko or the "kyo" in Tokyo.
Another example of this mental block that prevents people from pronouncing things that they actually say every day is the "ts" consonant cluster at the beginning of "tsunami" or "tsetse fly" or "zeitgeist." We say "ts" ALL THE TIME in English, but not at the start of a word. You could train English speakers to articulate this combination with a similar "reduction method." I personally have used the same method to train myself to pronounce the "dh" and "gh" sounds (and others) that occur frequently at the beginning of words in Hindi, which I have been learning. It works, believe me!
@@DieFlabbergast Definitely on the the ts thing! My college roommate had a Chinese last name beginning with Ts and was floored when I called and said her name correctly the first time we spoke.
I have fun going the other way in teaching Japanese students to pronounce English sounds. They regularly drop the final vowels in some common words (most frequent is desu - everyone says "des" and it's a big give away that you're a new learner if you actually pronounce the final "u"), but they struggle so much pronouncing English words correctly without adding extra vowel sounds.
@@DieFlabbergast I've done exactly the same thing to explain Māori words that start with "ng" - if you can say "singing" then you've already made the sound twice. Just a bit of practice to start a word like "Ngāuruhoe" with that sound.
The amount of native English speakers that call Ryuu from Street Fighter as Rai-yu is infuriating lol
We do it with Spanish words too. Tiempo (time) is "tyempo" but in English it comes out as "tee-yempo" as in "Goodyear Tiempo" (TV ad for tires). "Ciencia" (syensya, two syllables) comes out "seeyentseeya" (four syllables).
I'm a band educator in America and people always find it funny how I say "Chooba" instead of "Tooba"
This is quite interesting as my language (Bahasa Indonesia) used to have the old spelling inspired by the Dutch which was "DJ" for "Juh" and "TJ" for "Chuh" sound and at this time "J" was for "Yuh". It was basically combining the "Duh" and "Yuh" sound to make "Juh" and also "Tuh" and Yuh" sound to make "Chuh".
yep, and İ reckon Malaysians used to wrıte "c" as "ch" before the spelling merger of the two country.
thus "contoh" was spelt as
"tjontoh" in Indonesia, and "chontoh" in Malaysia.
In modern Dutch the English ch sound is written "tsj" in theory, but it's very rare, because the sound appears mostly in loanwords that keep the foreign spelling.
Country names like "Tsjechië" and "Tsjaad" use it, but then you have "brunch" and "chat" from English, and "ketjap" from Indonesian/Malay. Keeping the old spelling, unsurprisingly.
What I think is even more interesting is how this yod-coalescence thing could be found even in Malay/Indonesian.
It’s not to the same extent as in English, but many Malaysians and Indonesians pronounce their countries’ names not as “ma-lay-si-a” and “in-do-ne-si-a” but rather as “ma-lay-sha” and “in-do-ne-sha”.
It’s even more interesting that this pretty much only happens in these two country names.
@@naufalzaid7500 that's true. in fact, a lot of Indonesians say "Endonesha", which I find interesting since in French, "in" also gets to be pronounced as nasalized "eN", thus "Indonésie" in French is pronounced also like "ENdonezi".
@@xolang in french, vowel followed by coda position n always results in a nasalised vowel without an n. The nasalised vowels are fewer than the normal ones, so i uses the sound of a nasal è (low-mid front vowel)
👍 for the bonus lesson on how to pronounce the French U. I’ve been struggling with that and this was the best tutorial I’ve encountered.
Agreed. (And as a bonus, you also get Dutch U, German Ü, Turkish Ü, and Hungarian Ü for free. 😉)
You can use the same trick to pronounce the French "eu". Start with an [e] or [ɛ] instead of an [i]. You'll get an [ø] or [œ] (which also exist in other languages, often written ö or ø). I'm not sure whether English makes a phonemic distinction between [e] or [ɛ], but some French accents don't make it either.
@@pierrefley5000 The Dutch U is rather more like the English U in buck, cut, luck. UW would be closer to Ü.
@@wish-keeper According to Geoff Lindsey (the guy who made the video), the SSB KIT vowel actually could reasonably be transcribed as /e/, and so in this way, yeah, there is a [e]/[ɛ] contrast in SSB like in French.
You can check out “The British English vowel system”, a blogpost written by Dr Lindsey himself if you want to know more about it.
The bonus Boris near the end was chef’s kiss
As a non native English speaker but with advanced English skills, this is very interesting and answers a lot of questions about differences in how people pronounce words.
I'm originally from the South East of England, that bit where you circled - but I've mostly lost my accent now in favour of 'neutral' (southern) English. The yod dropping is a huge factor and I never realised! As soon as you said it I immediately went 'BOO'IFUL' 🤣 Now to binge the rest of your videos...
There's a very funny passage in the Alan Partridge podcast in which Alan describes how he set about suppressing his East Anglian yod-dropping in order to become a DJ and how he tried (and failed) to correct Bernard Matthews' pronunciation of "beautiful".
Genius.
@@DrGeoffLindsey By the way, the podcast contains quite a lot of linguistic humour, especially for those with a pedantic cast of mind! For example, Alan has a go at people (very common nowadays in Britain) who use "sat" and "stood" as present participles. Now there's an idea for a video: How "sat" and "stood" supplanted "sitting" and "standing" as present participles in British English.
@@simonvaughan6017 Yeah! "I'm sat here" sounds more like someone commanded you to sit there.
@@DrGeoffLindsey Hi, doc, I have a suggestion: as a non native english speaker, I've noticed different prononciations of the "h" in words like "huge". I've heard from "hhhiudge" to "sshhhiudge". Is that a real thing or am I completely mistaken? Thanks for your content.
@@hugoestevesrj this does happen. some people will use a palatal fricative [ç] instead of [h]. I guess it eases pronunciation because of the following [j]?
My recent fascination with accent, linguistics, and etymology channels like yours have shown me just how much of my adopted pronunciations are nativized and technically break the rules of English. And sincerely appreciate that!
For non-native speakers, your videos give a lot of explanation. Thanks!
Yod Coalescence is pretty prevalent in Ireland and The Irish Language has palatalised constonants, which result from a similar phenomenon, and probably reinforced the tendancy towards yod coalescence in accents of Irish English.
If I can make an odd connection here: I have somewhere a book of victorian Punch cartoons by George Du Maurier, which feature a character he calls "Maudle" and who I take to be a broad parody of Oscar Wilde. One of Maudle's comic characteristics is using "tuna chewing" as in "The pickchah is beautiful"! I always took this as perhaps a comment on a fashionable affectation, but maybe he was picking up what was then a typically Irish pronunciation.
“eejit” has to be the most famous one.
Bhí mé ag foghlaim an Gaeilge (I was leaning Irish), now I understand better my own Australian English, ach ní thuigim aon focal, is an teanga an-gheal go cinnte (but I don't understand a word)
@@electricrussellette what word is that spelled normally?
@@kwekwlos "idiot"
I am non-native English (originally Dutch) but am totally fluent in English. This video has funnily enough taught me that I think my accent is literally all over the place xD. I don't really have a Dutch accent when speaking English, so my English accent is from everywhere.
I'm a native English speaker and when I speak Spanish, I don't usually get pegged as an American, but people *do* wonder where I'm from :)
I studied English linguistics but am now working as an elementary school teacher, teaching English as a foreign language here in Germany, and this reminds me of last year. I was teaching absolutel beginners, and our topic was "days of the week". The kids (without my prompting or anything) compared "Tuesday" to "cheese", claiming that it sounds alomost the same, like "Cheeseday".
I find yod-coalescence especially cool when it occurs between two different words:
as you = "azhu"
miss you = "misshu"
As a non-native English speaker, this is highly enlightening. It's an entertaining video but it also shows you very well what makes the difference between mostly American and English accents, I feel like this is a treasure trove for actors trying to sound believable doing an accent not native to them.
Thank you for how in-depth you make these videos, Dr. Lindsey!
'As a non-native English speaker' is a dangling modifier in your sentence. I don't know why, and this is in no way intended to offend you, but I, also a non-native English speaker, find it absolutely distracting when native and especially non-native English speakers use such dangling modifiers. Apparently it's rather acceptible among the aboriginal English speakers, so I have even stopped bringing it up to them long tme ago. Don't YOU find it odd?
@@anonymator theres not a single native speaker that would have a problem with a "hanging modifier". We all do it.
@@anonymator As a _native_ English speaker, I didn't even know that there was a word for that construction, or that it was unusual anywhere. In the contexts here, it's used to establish a context for the following clause, such as the commenter's English status, or the context of the comment chain itself. In English, speaking like this (with dangling modifiers) is completely normal, though would sound strange to here it used for every sentence like in this comment, but that's just from the repetition.
Edit: After checking Wikipedia, it seems I may have conflated dangling modifiers with absolute constructions, and I think my sentences might actually be absolute constructions rather than dangling modifiers. Just goes to show how unfamiliar I was with them that I didn't realize they were separate things.
As someone who could never wrap their head around numbers and math, but instead was always drawn to words and language, I am very grateful for your channel😁 Even as a kid I've been mimicking voices and accents so these types of videos are right up my alley. Thank you!
The Boris "dyude" is hysterical.
That dude sequence at the end proper tickled me, great edit.
I've found this channel some days ago and have been hooked ever since! This phenomenon is also very typical of Brazilian Portuguese, I believe they call it the "hissed t". For instance, if the last diphthong of an word is the syllable "-te", as in parte or presidente (part/piece or president, resp.), it becomes a "ch" sound, making way for a prolonged "ee" vowel-sound. Whereas in other variants, more akin to the European pronunciation, these words end in a hard "t", as they would in English.
I spend a lot of time in southern Portugal and Brazilian is particularly grating. A simple phrase such as good day in Portuguese is roughly “bong dee ah” but the Brazilian is “bom gee ah”. We had a Brazilian fellow come out to fix the phone line and the neighbours asked him to speak English so that they could stand a chance of understanding him.
@@jonathanfinan722 that's funny, but I wouldn't call it unpleasant, just very characteristic of them. I understand most Brazilians also have a hard time adjusting to our stress-timed pronunciation. Nothing a little exposure can't fix.
I am a long-long time English learner and there are not so many things left that can make me ‘day one’ excited. Your videos and explanations made me feel exactly like this! Binge watched all of your videos first, got your book as a current read, and some other great volumes on phonetics and transcription that you referenced are waiting to be thoroughly examined. I was never particularly interested in studying sounds, just seemed to listen carefully and adopt the patterns which I could identify, so it’s a new and exciting beginning for me. Thank you from the bottom of my heart 🎉
I'm honestly surprised someone can find this exiting. I learned English at quite an young age as a second language, so I was never aware of how I pronounce things, I just learned how to pronounce them. If I was learning English now, this would probably scare me
This channel is pure gold.
I love this channel. Awesome knowledge dropping mixed with great editing and humor.
Phenomenal explanation. I wish all my professors were able to explain things in a clear, precise way like you do.
I love you dude! You're educational about pronunciation without being judgemental! I like this approach to language learning. I'm learning Norweigan and want a similar approach.
Thanks! 😃
I REALLY ENJOY THIS GUY & HIS CONTENT/PRESENTATION!
It's wonderful to watch a video about a relatively niche thing you researched ages ago.
I'm from Berkshire and you do hear age and regional differences, like me and most my friends DON'T coalesce in words like assume, presume etc, but we do coalesce in every other place, and some people take on the Cockney yod-dropping in words like new
I'm a native speaker (Northeaster US), and find your videos fascinating. These are things I would otherwise never think about or even notice at all, and I really enjoy learning about them. Thanks for making them!
Just wanted to comment on “Dude” that there are also many ways of pronouncing this with an American accent. You get the typical Italian-American Doood with no softness to the u, but then some accents will have essentially a Di-Ude where a soft i almost makes it sound like an ü. And as that word has entered for example Australian it has adopted essentially Düde as standard pronunciation there. Language is always evolving, even such a simple word! :)
All of the comments about how informative all your videos are and spot on, but I want to highlight the sick BoJo burn you slipped in there. Wonderful stuff.
Just the number of times Ali says dude! Haha, you got the perfect example.
I discovered your channel a few months ago and I am so glad I did. As a native English speaker, I am amazed by how much I conCHinue to learn from your videos. Thank you!
Be careful not to overapply, though! There's no yod in continue, just an i like in tip. (If someone's struggling with a puzzle and you tell them you'll give them a "chip", they might be more confyused than ashured.)
No, you've mis-applied the rule. English speakers would not turn "continue" into "conchinue".
It occurs in "tu" when the "u" contains a yod sound.
spoken word "toon" spoken word "choon"
Y’all, it was a joke. 😂
Thank you for this, these are probably the most informative videos about English I've ever seen! Very nice editing, too!
This may be one of my favorite videos ever!
Terrific video. May I add the example of "assume" (or maybe I missed it?), where British speakers seem to say "ashoom" (yod coalescence) while American speakers say "assoom" (yod dropping). Also, regarding Boris Johnson's yod-retaining pronunciation of "dude" (he probably says "assyoom"), the stereotypical California surfer, from whose speech this term has acquired its currency, would say something that almost resembles Johnson's pronunciation. The southern California version of the U vowel (or, at least, one of the U vowels) seems to be about halfway between "oo" and the "ü" (u-umlaut) sound at which this video begins.
I love how clearly you explain all this. Now I finally understand the Dune, Dyune, June error in my head. Turns out Englisch is a hot mess.
Subscribed!
slowly becoming obsessed with this channel, not only do I get to learn fun phonetics stuff but the editing makes me laugh every time xD
I first began to notice the soft CH sound in TV weather forecasting: 'For Chewsday, more rain I'm afraid...'
often following a modern drift in pronunciation from an e to more of an a sound: '...In the Wast of England and Wast Wäyles...'
As an aside: Modern English speakers seem to have added an e in coast as 'coe'st', keeping the mouth open in an Australian pronunuciation rather than narrowing the lips. Being older and originating from the South of England, I've kept the strong T, and have been picked up many times when I've said 'Illyustration' rather than using the u in bus!
In the book Borstal Boy, there was a Cockney character who was either named Tulips or Chewlips. No one was certain as to which was right. The book was a memoir of 1940s events written in the 1950s, so "Tuna Chewing" was going on even then.
This was so great! Your dude edit was hilarious.
I'm not a native speaker, but I've been studying for really long and I can mimick accents somewhat, but I'm amazed how I'm still only just scratching the surface of phonetics and it's lovely.
I am German and I love this channel so much! 😇
It is very informative and so entertaining and humorous at the same time!
experiencing good free teaching is such an honour
Wow, I never realized how different accents say the same word so differently.
Fabyoolous as always. I wish there was a super cut or edited compilation of your videos to be able to share with the non linguaphiles in our lives. Never the less, great work, sir!
I love how you circled the area in England where yod dropping happens all the time. the whole video up till now I was thinking about my elderly grandma (95!) from Suffolk says 'Toosday' rather than Tuesday. the day is said differently too, more like 'Toosdee'
Yeah, I know some old people from NZ who shorten the 'day' as well, Wednesdy, Tuesdy etc.
My dad, who grew up in roughly the same place I did but 20+ years earlier is very likely to pronounce the days of the week with a "dee" on the end. I'll do the same thing if I'm listing days of the week in quick succession ("I have history on Mondee-Wensdee-Friday but English is a Toosdee-Thursdee class").
I'm a native speaker of General American English, and I love English! I like you channel. Thanks for sharing this cool stuff.
Back in grad school I had a math prof from Ireland who pronounced "dual" as "jewel." I had him for linear algebra, and for the longest time I thought he was talking about "jewel spaces"...until I finally figured out that he meant "dual spaces" :D
Thank you, Dr. Geoff. These lecture videos you release are quite different from others just because it is very engaging and entertaining. I might ascend as an English professor from watching these. 😅
I am currently struggling with RP and your videos are great help to understand the depths of English phonetics... and they are enjoyable too! Thank you, Dr Lindsey!
I love the humour! I laugh so much watching your videos!
your videos always make me think a lot about my own accent, i am white british born and raised with english (south london) parents but my ideolect is different to most, i've even had english people asking me where i'm from (country-wise), i say you-tube (not chewb), i pronounce my Ts deliberately, my Rs sound almost Eastern European with the "L" roll, and many common things english people do that i do not do, i'd love someone to actually study my accent and tell me what i'm doing haha, something that always stuck with me was when my Lithuanian ex noticed english people say "me-ōwk" instead of "milk" with a pronounced L, i could never explain that one.
I am so happy to know where this 'u' to 'iu' transition come from. It is absolutely pleasant to hear someone speaking about all those details of phonetic, I dived into them a few years ago to improve my english and I love these knowledges and their impacts in my language learning.
Thanks a lot !
Excellent! I'll be showing this to some of my students who like to focus on pronunciation. Thanks for so thoroughly documenting what i call "the hidden Y sound." I've been impressed with your phonetic analysis ever since I saw your video about how the schwa sound and the /^/ sound are actually the same thing.
Hidden? Maybe hidden in plain sight...
This is such an awesome video! It looks I've been looking for this video without knowing what I was looking for. One of the curious phonetic phenomena in the Korean language (my native language) is the switching of the consonant ㅅ(fricative alveolar) to the "sh" sound when combined with vowels like ㅑ, ㅕ, ㅛ, ㅠ, etc. (all having the yod component) and even with ㅞ, which does not have a yod at the beginning. It's the same yod merging strategy that Dr. Lindsey is talking about! Also curious in some English loanwords in Korean is that the phoneme su is often transliterated as shu. As in 슈퍼마켓(shupeomaket) for supermarket, 슈퍼맨 (shupeomaen) for Superman, etc. I have always wondered why this happened. My hypothesis now, after watching this video, is that when these foreign words were first introduced or popularized in Korea (probably towards the late 18th century or early 19th century) or more likely when it was first introduced to Japan a lot earlier (many English loanwords were introduced into the Korean language in a roundabout way via the Japanese language during the Japanese colonization period of the early 20th century), whoever brought those words to Korea and Japan (likely the British, or early Americans) were pronouncing words without dropping the yod, like siuper. That's why the Japanese (and by extension the Koreans) later used their own coalescing strategy to turn siuper into shuper! Had the word "super" first introduced to Korea and Japan by the modern Americans who have already dropped the yod (su-per), then the Korean and Japanese loanword for super would have been just su-peo or su-pah instead of shu-peo or shu-pah! This is awesome! I feel like I've made the biggest discovery of my life (at least related to linguistics). In the Korean language itself, both yod dropping and yod merging phenomena can be observed. As mentioned above, when ㅅ(similar to S) is combined with yod vowels ㅑ (ya), ㅕ (yeo), ㅛ (yo), ㅠ (yu) (and also curiously ㅣ (i) for some reason), yod merging happens and "s" becomes "sh." But when ㅈ (similar to J) or ㅊ (ch) is combined with those vowels, yod dropping happens and just becomes ja, jeo, jo, ju, cha, cheo, cho, chu, etc. I'm learning so much about my own language by watching his video on English pronunciation.
Thank you, Dr. Lindsey!
Love your channel. Always a pleasure to listen to someone with actual expertise in whatever they're talking about
You are my new favorite linguist. I found you recently and while I have learned much from others, you cover topics that nobody else does. I really enjoyed your explanation that IPA did not really fully describe how native English speakers actually sound. Keep it up!
This reminded me that when I was learning English at school, I always thought "new" and "knew" were pronounced differently. I always thought "new" was "nyu" and "knew" was "nu", later I realized that they're pronounced the same, but that "same" pronunciation varies from person to person.
the k in know, knife, knee etc used to be pronounced but were dropped a long time ago so youre half right
Just discovered this channel! Best phonetics channel ever. Brilliant content, brilliant editing. Very amusing selection of clips that illuminate the subject matter. Please keep up the great work!
It's interesting how differently I conceptualize this vs. the "train" thing. In "train", I sort of "think" I'm saying t-rain, the way it's spelled, even though I actually say "chrain". But with, say, "statue" (which I pronounce "sta-chu"), I'm under absolutely _no_ illusion that I'm saying "sta-t-yu": I've just always seen it as one of those numerous English words that's not really pronounced the same way it's written.
Also, I had NO idea that every English long-u was supposed to have a "y" in front of it! I thought the letter "u" just naturally had multiple pronunciations, either "oo" or "yoo". Like, I _know_ some accents say "tune" as "tyoon" instead of my "toon", but it never occurred to me that it was _supposed_ to have the "y" sound and that my accent had dropped it.
As an ESL speaker myself, who gained an advanced degree of fluency even though I was past the typical age for this when I emigrated to the US, these videos are fascinating. Spanish is my 1st language but I have some skill with languages in general, including French, German and others.
ASL = American Sign Language. ESL, "English as Second Language," has been replaced by "English Language Learners," recognizing that English may not be the second language. For my daughter-in-law, it's her third language. She grew up learning to speak Spanish and Italian simultaneously.
All of your videos make me really think about how I talk! As far as this topic goes, I seem to mostly fall into the "yod dropping," which makes sense as I'm an Albertan with a lot of rural family and much of rural Alberta was settled from the US. And of course I preserve the yod in most of the typical places. But what's interesting is that there seem to be some words where I'm more likely to use the French "u" than anything else.
I wonder if this has to do with growing up in a city founded by French Metis. Despite the population being heavily anglicised and white (though there are still a *lot* of Metis, they just tended not to advertise when I was a teenager), being able to properly pronounce the French names for streets and neighbourhoods as a marker of identity. Even today, saying "Hebert" as "HEE-burt" instead of "ee-BEAR" will single someone out as a new arrival. And of course Canadian English retains more francophone influences than most forms of English - "foyer" is "foi-YAY," not "FOI-er," for example.
I am British and I am learning that I have some unusual pronunciations. I get why sometimes people think I am not British. Your comment about foyer got me thinking in particular as I pronounce it like the French, neither foy-yay or foi-er but rather like fwa-ye. It isn't a word that is often used day to day though.
Interesting. I grew up in Ottawa and took French immersion, so I was always on the alert for pronouncing French names according to French rules. When I went to Alberta for university there happened to be a provincial minister at the time by the name of Guy Boutilier, so I naturally pronounced the entire name as I would in French. If his first name had been something obviously English - like Ralph (the premier's name at the time) - I might have switched out the surname to an English pronunciation, but two French names was enough for my French detector to go with French. Turns out he pronounced his name according to English rules.
@Davyd Atwood
I have heard that parts of the Canadian prairies have a lot of Ukrainian influence, with people who speak no Ukrainian sounding like they have a Ukrainian accent. It may be largely extinct by now. My Canadian Ukrainian relatives used to talk about it. Have you ever run across this?
@@Xubuntu47 My Ukrainian relatives mostly sound like they're Mormons, largely because their father (like mine, they're my cousins through my father) grew up in Lethbridge. That side of the family is Anglo-Scots and Irish-Scots and arrived in 1634, so not a lot left of Europe in the accent!
@@davidjames4915 I'd probably do the same! "Guy" pronounced "gai" just feels weird as a name - it's kind of like someone being named "Dude." But pronounced "gee" it seems normal.
Last names mostly depend on how the family got to the province, and where they grew up. There are tiny pockets of french heritage scattered around a lot of people who moved from Dakota, Wyoming, South Africa, Sweden, Prussia, and (as noted below) Ukraine.
i’m a huge fan of linguistics and your videos are such a treat, i’m not super knowledge about stuff so a lot of the more advanced linguistics videos just go right over my head but yours are so well described and easy to understand, thank you!
My favourite thing about your videos, Dr. Geoff, is the way you always present pronunciation variations across accents of english as equal variants - none of that elitist nonsense about "proper" and "incorrect" pronunciation that we got in school when I was growing up!
As a non-native speaker I found it really educational and useful in terms of analyzing my own pronunciation. I’ve also caught myself recalling how do I pronounce it and it’s the third way, soft as in chube but with t as in toob (closer to the American version, but with much softer t, something like tyube). And that’s why I’ll never get rid of my accent I guess 😅
I'm not a native speaker, though I speak English since I was nine, but now I realize why actual native speakers consider my accent"weird", even though my pronunciation is proper. I use many different pronunciations for yod and post alveolar, and so inconsistently.
Mr. Geoff, this was an amazing lesson. You have incredible talent and dedication.
This is fascinating. I love these explanations - thank you so much!
Dr. Lindsey, thank you for another informative video! Could you please cover the topic of the vowel in "word" and "work"? I always pronounced it with a long o, making "work" and "walk" homophones, but as I entered a university where strict SSB is the norm, I've been told I am wrong, and there is a soft, close vowel in "work", that I am not hearing. I still struggle with it and it doesn't sound right to me at all. Is it a strictly British thing? Is it still in fashion?
I'm not Dr. Lindsey, but the vowel in "work" is never the same as the one in "walk" or "wore" for native speakers, at least for ones that grew up hearing the word before they saw it written like the majority. It's the same vowel in "were" or "burr", and the reason it has an O is because of a spelling convention. Writing "wurk" and "wurd" in medieval times would've been harder to read because W hadn't fully developed (they would've been "uuurk" and "uuurd"), so O won out as an easier letter.
As another topic, "word" _did_ have an [o] sound in early medieval times, but "work" mostly didn't. When they merged together, changing the spelling to match the first became better.
As someone with a fairly normal SSB accent I would pronounce 'word' and 'work' with a kind of long schwa, whereas I pronounce the vowel in 'walk' the same way as in 'talk', 'jaw' and 'orc'
"word" and "work" should have the NURSE vowel in most non-rhotic British English accents. In Standard Southern British this is a long schwa [əː] as others have said. If you've got a good schwa vowel (see Geoff's other videos on weak forms if you don't, just to emphasise how a good schwa vowel is important if you want to sound native), just try sounding it for longer. If you have a rhotic accent I think you should be pronouncing a syllabic /ɹ/ but I don't know rhotic accents so I could be wrong. Neither option should sound very much like the vowel in "walk" which should have the THOUGHT vowel in most British English dialects.
@@robbadob9929 that's not entirely true - some West Country accents have 'work' rhyming with 'dork', 'word' rhyming with 'cord', 'worm' rhyming with 'form' (and 'warm' rhyming with 'farm', 'ward' with 'bard', etc). For speakers who are non-rhotic, this leads to 'work' and 'walk' being homophones. Though it's probably not a pronunciation that I would advise non-native speakers to adopt.
If you want another UA-cam example of pronouncing Dune like June as you do, theres an Australian youtuber called Skill Up who did a weekly gaming news video on a recent Dune game and apparently enough of his comments thought he was saying June that he often brings jt up as a joke when he talks about Dune.
The amount of digging it must have taken to find a video example for every single one of your points is astonishing
This is so fascinating to me!!! The examples of people saying the things you are explaining are just so powerful! It really helps you to see it!
It's great to hear Broad Norfolk accents represented in an academic rather than comedic setting
I know UA-camr ashens included a broad Norfolk accent in his film because he was disappointed at the lack of representation. But then the film was a comedy. It does seem to be an accent that's both interesting and very endangered. In fact a lot of traditional accents of the broad south east of England are critically endangered because of influence from London commuters. If you speak to old people in Hampshire you will often find rhotic accents which are somewhat reminiscent of accents further west but with more 'h' dropping. But I don't think I've ever heard a young person with such an accent.
1:55 "composite vowel"
This description sounds a bit weird to me. By this logic, isn't every vowel a composite vowel with one component being how close/open and front/back the vowel is and the other component being whether the vowel is rounded or not?
@@Drabkikker the [y] vowel sounds between /и/ =[i] and /ы/, with some mixed "hæs" addition. Close, not rounded, rather central than back or even front.
@@Drabkikker Cyrillic [у] is rounded, close, and corresponds with latin "u". I meant dutch [y], which was just heared by me from Google Translate speaker.
just to help people not used to phonetics
@@user-bi4eo3ys1f The vowel [y] is the close front rounded vowel.
I love this channel. Having things I'd never in my life notice, nevermind think about, be pointed out and dissected is wild. It's so cool.
I found your channel just a few days ago and I can't express just how much I love your videos - complicated concepts beautifully and clearly explained; I remember every little factoid and it's making my life as a languages teacher that much more rich and interesting! So many little tidbits I can pass on to my students as to why English is so weird and especially here why we owe so much to French. This may well be one of my favourite linguistics videos of all time. Thank you, thank you, thank you for this channel!
Tidbits is titbits in the UK, there's a little titbit for you...