> .. one regiment of flankers of the Young Guard made up of youths barely out of school, had come all the way from Paris to Vitebsk with only a single day’s rest at Mainz and another at Marienwerder. Some units were marched for thirty-two hours at a stretch, with only a couple of hours’ rest in brief intervals, covering as much as 170 kilometres.
From a book on Napoleon's 1812 campaign.
I can't imagine walking with a soldier's backpack (and rifle?) for 32 hours at a stretch. I would die.
Maybe for a single bout of this. Not from Paris to Vitebsk. I can't believe it's possible.
My longest bicycle ride was 168 km, and I felt half dead at the end, although there were stops with some snacking on the way, and walking to look at the sights. And that was without a soldier's backpack, rifle, and on a level asphalt.
I spent the next two days without venturing outside.
Today it would take 508 hours at 5 km/h to walk the 2245 km from Paris to Vitebsk
@Mitch Ugg boots. But here's the thing in Massachusetts: You get teenage girls in Ugg boots and pajama bottoms, older and younger guys in bermuda shorts (mostly in SUV "trucks", and women with polished toenails all wandering around in the middle of winter. It is so freaking weird. Oh yeah, I forgot: All the ice-coffee drinkers when it's zero degrees outside. For the pajama bottoms, it's mostly kids and men. You don't see women so much out there in pajama bottoms.
Anyway, last call: alphabet, Mitchie, me and Laurel. Will be meet up or not? If I do not get a response, I promise I won't mention it again.
@Laurel The "Sanna" pronunciation is related to /nt/-flapping in American English; many people also don't pronounce the /t/ in center or identical or incidental
The "Christmas" thing is a separate phenomenon (alveolar plosive elision); it's why most of us also don't pronounce the /t/ in exactly.
Watch the Fred Astaire movie and you'll see how only the little kids use the "sloppy" pronunciations, be it that word or elsewhere. The grown ups all have a T there.
It's one thing to have mumbled words from semi-intoxicated pub patrons. It's quite another to present that same approach in public addresses meant to be understood and listened to more broadly.
According to this young lady: When the letters “n” and “t” occur next to each other, and they are between vowels, and the second vowel is in an unstressed syllable, you can use a nasal flap instead of the true T sound. sandiegovoiceandaccent.com/american-english-consonants/…. santa is stressed on the second syllable whereas center is stressed on the first.
@Laurel That's a good example of this. There are contexts in which betcha and didja are perfectly appropriate, and others in which they certainly are not.
I think we sometimes forget that we all speak fast at one point or another and we also speak more slowly and articulately (ambiguity works here). So, even within an individual's speech patterns, there is a lot of leeway.
Indeed. Some people do this sort of thing more when speaking rapidly or informally. But many--probably most--of us do /nt/-flapping regardless of context in at least some words.
In any case, let's not over-exaggerate the nt thing. New Yorkers may say: The ren-al and that awful nasalization (the word ending up as a backburst and front burst with nothing in the middle) but for me the t in rental is always there.
If you slow down the speech of a relatively well-educated person who doesn't say all those t's in fast speech, you will get a weird sounding slower speech from the same person.
Speech has a speed. How do I know? I am an interpreter, that's how. And people speak somewhat (either more or less) differently when going fast or slowly. Connected speech from the same person can sound very different depending on the speech flow speed.
Personally, I prefer sounding like biker trailer trash. [side note: I've been watching the latest Fargo, and can hardly understand what they say and it's not because of the nt's.\
Funny thing, say this: Do you wanna go? Sure, I wanna go. OR Sure, I want to. Suddenly, the t comes back to life. All kinds of stuff like that happens all the time. Because we wouldn't say: Yes, I wanna to go.
@tchrist I don't know, I think I'd rather sass them back. If I could go back and do school again I'd have a witty retort for "I don't know, can you use the bathroom?"
This only happens before vowels (among other restrictions), so the /t/ can disappear in frontal but not in front, unless you put a vowel afterward, e.g. in the phrase in front of it.
I have been wondering why this doesn't happen (at least when I talk) in the word minty. I'd attribute it to the morpheme boundary, but flapping does occur in painter. Maybe it's just because the homophony with mini would lead to too much ambiguity.
I listened to 20 of them. The sequence it presented me with had at most one or two in which a distinct T wasn't clearly heard, and even those are arguable. This was true in both American and English speakers.
The elephant in the room is that these are all people making public speeches. That may subconsciously cause them to be more careful with their diction than they would mumbling to themselves in their sleep.
Because, and this is what I am trying to stress in all this, the public-speaking context is a register different from the one used in casual conversation among drinking buddies or playground pals. So you have a sampling bias if you don't take that into account.
It by no means is all completely formal, either.
Please listen to a few dozen of them in quick succession so that you can see what I mean.
When you use next door or front door "attributively" to modify a noun following them, the stress pattern changes and they become more subject to reductions that don't necessarily happen as often when you have next DOOR or front DOOR with the second word stressed.
For pete's sake, I know what attributive means. But the context is often longer speech utterances in any case. My nex-door neighor is an ass. I'm going nex-door to see him. Of course, "Did you open the FRONT door or the BACK door, little Johnny?".
Adjacent stops are always going to be harder to enunciate in fast speech, especially those at the same articulation point; stop basket, squat toilet, background, cupboard.
If you don't say kubberd people won't know what you're saying. :)
There are several factors in play here.
Difficult consonant clusters are often reduced in rapid speech or
over time; think of friendship, spendthrift, twelfth, months.
Much of the difference between an unvoiced and a voiced stop in English
is actually not its voicing but its...
No one says the p in cupboard. I will tell you a short story: I dated a gold-medal-for-English-writing Greek guy (not English mother tongue) in college and the only word he misprounced in English in two years was "cupboard" by pronouncing the p.
cupboard is like would and should. Native speakers know the l's are silent and the p is silent.
Actually, my husband (a Spanish speaker) says cutely: raspaberry.
Also, cheesmonk for chipmunk. Part of the issue is deafness so I have to stand in front of him and exaggerate the sounds for him to hear them. Most final t's. Report becomes repor. Ha.
Akhenaten (pronounced ), also spelled Akhenaton or Echnaton (Ancient Egyptian: ꜣḫ-n-jtn ʾŪḫə-nə-yātəy, pronounced [ˈʔuːχəʔ nə ˈjaːtəj], meaning 'Effective for the Aten'), was an ancient Egyptian pharaoh reigning c. 1353–1336 or 1351–1334 BC, the tenth ruler of the Eighteenth Dynasty. Before the fifth year of his reign, he was known as Amenhotep IV (Ancient Egyptian: jmn-ḥtp, meaning "Amun is satisfied", Hellenized as Amenophis IV).
As a pharaoh, Akhenaten is noted for abandoning Egypt's traditional polytheism and introducing Atenism, or worship centered around Aten. The views of Egyptologists differ...
Now I'm listening to a song where this woman appears to be saying "Chrishmas". Not to be confused with the song where another woman mentioned "Crismash" (spelled as it was written in the lyrics)
@Lambie oMg yeah the pajama thing is weird enough, but also in winter, outside. Is that going to be the fashion shown when they produce "That 20's Show" in 2040?
@Lambie Sure. How does that work though? IRL. As a Large Language Model, I have a hard time figuring out real world plans without emails and DM'ing and stuff.
I think most sloppy people (_raises hand_) have some sort of minimal flap there. But I knew one person who used to have nothing, no flap no glottal stop no nothing and it really stood out in it's attempt to say "didn't" in a way to avoid these lower class glotts and flaps (that's how it seemed). "
@Laurel I don't know. Can you say "Christmas" out loud for us?
naw that was good enough. It sounded non inebriated I guess
I mean people are pretty good at covering
not to say that you are
but
maybe you are?
I saw a comedy show with Mike Birbiglia the other day (I've seen some in the past) and he sounds like he's been drinking. But it also seems like he's not drinking. So all I can think is that he has some progressive disease and I feel like telling him he should ask his docto about it.
But then I looked at something of his online and no that's how he's talked for a long time.
@CowperKettle Soldiers weren't walking non-stop for days. They obviously had to sleep. Walking from Paris to Vitebsk with a 20 to 30 kg backpack probably took around 100 days to Napoléon's soldiers.
@Laurel And yet nearly all of those "nice" humans, despite expressing constant sympathy for the challenges facing our community, work for companies that have never hired a single raccoon.
Most hotels won't even consider renting out rooms to us.
> Maladie non-seulement d'un homme, mais d'un peuple, elle a ses périodes marquées dans l'histoire ; nous l'appelons mélancolie , lypémanie. Saint Chrysostôme la définit parfaitement et la nomme athumia.
> Malheur, hélas! à cette tendance qui fait de nos femmes des poupées aux flancs étroits, à l'allure frivole, qui redoutent le mal de maternité ; de nos enfants des puits de science, au teint blême et maladif, à l'œil vitreux, à la poitrine étroite, aux mains décharnées ! L'air malsain des villes est déjà assez empoisonné , sans calfeutrer encore davantage nos enfants tout jeunes dans les collèges.
> Woe, alas! to this tendency which turns our women into dolls with narrow sides, with a frivolous appearance, who fear maternity sickness; of our children (who return?) from the wells of knowledge, with pale and sickly complexions, glassy eyes, narrow chests, gaunt hands!