The most important CONSONANT in English
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Secrets of what I consider the most important consonant in English, the various ways it's made, and how it differs from other language.
0:00 Introduction
1:40 Important meanings
3:05 Important endings
4:32 Loudness differences
5:00 Surfshark
6:12 UCL's anechoic chamber
7:24 Spectrograms
9:16 Awkward combinations
9:48 months
11:12 Assimilation: howzat
11:52 TH-fronting
13:07 English and Spanish
14:05 English and Japanese
15:57 Articulation: reality check
18:39 The alternative: lips!
Thanks to:
Gordon Mills of Psychology & Language Sciences, UCL
Hernán Ruiz for help with Spanish
Prof. Masaki Taniguchi for help with Japanese
Animation of vocal tract by Speech Graphics • Speech Graphics' Simon...
British National Corpus www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/
The Japanese heavy metal group Babymetal has a song called “Babymetal Death”, which is really just them introducing themselves. “Babymetal desu” becomes “Babymetal Death” when sung to heavy metal music.
What a psychotic thing to say @@ivo9202
@@ivo9202 what a strange thing to say
@@ivo9202 what an unusual statement to utter
@@ivo9202 they’re 25
Well as a group you'd rather say "The Japanese heavy metal group Babymetal haVE a song", as a group is plural.
Btw, no prob, everybody understood ;)
I was lucky enough to watch them on stage last December.
I was amazed also by the audience, with family, old hard rock looking people, very young ones as well.
BabyMetal are strange, but they are actually universal though very unique.
That advert blend was impeccable lol
I literally laughed out loud and went to like the video, but I'd already liked it.
The original advertisement in its entirety is even better. th-cam.com/video/0MUsVcYhERY/w-d-xo.htmlsi=9BSdTiJEhZHTLzxi
maybe he only ac/s/epted their /s/pon/s/or/ʃ/ip when he found the right topic, like /ð/i/s/ one!
I didn't see any advert? Oh that's right, I have SponsorBlock.
@@akkay47 Cheers! I'm going to investigate before TH-cam deletes your comment.
The more I watch Dr Lindsey’s videos, the more I become frustrated by language education. I’ve come from studying English at a young age to today living in an English-speaking country and no longer considering myself a “learner”, yet throughout the entire time, I was not told how to pronounce “clothes” or “months” and always thought it was my “th” prononciation. Anyone studying English needs to be shown Dr Lindsey’s videos at a very early stage.
I remember just struggling with those words so much even when explained how to pronounce them. Eventually I practiced them so much and heard them enough to be able to automatically pronounce them.
As a language teacher I'm frustrated by language education as well. I feel like the only place where you can study a language in-depth and go into all the nooks and crannies is a linguistic university and the department of the language in question. In any other place you are just not given enough hours for the phonetics.
Many native speakers have exactly the same problem. We're not taught how to pronounce them, we just pick them up in childhood. If your local dialect uses 'muvver' instead of 'mother', that's probably how you'll pronounce that word despite the fact you can actually produce the 'th' sound. Which is fine. 😁
But if you have a parent who constantly mispronounces certain words or sounds (through lack of education, poor reading skills, mishearing a word and then persistently mispronouncing it, etcetera) then you may well pick up those errors and keep using them (even when exposed to standard forms or corrections at school or elsewhere) and pass them on to your own children. A certain amount of that happens all the time, which can be one way language changes. But others are so glaringly erroneous (not a dialect or local idiom) as to obscure meaning, cause confusion, or lead to deleterious impressions in, for example, job interviews.
Believe me, it's not a problem confined to second language learners.
My niece still struggles a lot over her -ths endings. I'm so excited to see if this approach helps her any, because her older brothers definitely act like it's the th sound she's got wrong.
Language is so complex and inconsistent that I think it's fair enough that there are some words you just have to stumble into getting right as you go.
He is a linguist and most teachers have never studied linguistics. It's like asking a school teacher how a computer or pen works - they just use them, they don't understand the engineering. A Linguist is a language engineer.
And that is why most language learning in a classroom context is terrible, because it's taught with teaching principles, not linguistic. For Example the CELTA training has a 25%:25%:25%:25% focus on listening, speaking, reading and writing, when in reality language learning is probably more like 90% listening, 3% speaking, 7% reading and 0.1% writing.
That transition to the sponsor was a masterclass. Well done
All of those sounds in one sentence. Nice.
Good match of sponsor to topic.
my boyfriend is french, and although he has lived in america for ~16 years now, he still drops the final -s off of words!! i've always found it really interesting!
A while back, I watched a vid of a couple (Guy was from the South. Girl was from the North) that compared their drastically different way of pronouncing certain words. Maybe you also could make a vid as a couple that showcases something similar!
probably also a result of french not pronouncing the s anyway except in liaison, so "boîte" and "boîtes" are both said /bwat/
@@notwithouttext yeah i think this is the main reason!!! and he mostly does it for plurals, i think because in french there are typically other markers for when a word is plural (adjectives, articles) that he like subconsciously doesn't view the plural -s ending as being meaningful compared to other -s endings
My girlfriend is a French speaking Belgian and she has the opposite problem. She adds the S sound unnecessarily to the end of a lot of plural words that normally don't get an -S. We have been talking about sushi a lot recently and she says "suishis" instead. Although like most French speakers, her 'th-' is nonexistant and replaced with a 'd' instead, so she doesn't have the problem described in this video with the weak S and SH sounds. She is just fine with those. It's the TH she simply cannot pronounce.
I am a student of language and all the variations, regional accents, provincialisms, and the interesting way words are used and invented. I think language is more important than mathematics.
I'd be interested in Dr Lindsey speak with ventriloquists about th-s-sh and alternative ways of making them, since I imagine ventriloquists need that skill.
Oooh yeah. That would be fascinating. Ventriloquism replacement hacks overall would be a fascinating topic.
There is a famous story about Marlene Dietrich and her ‘battle’ with English ‘th’. When filming her breakout movie, Blue Angel, in 1930. Dietrich was playing a cabaret singer, and had trouble with lyric with a song that she had to sing in the movie. She just could not get her mouth around the ‘ths’ combination in the line; “Like moths around a flame”. After several failed takes, the director, Josef von Sternberg, solved the problem by having an extra in the movie call out for a waiter at the moment she sang the word ‘moths’, obscuring her voice for a spit second. ‘Blue Angel’ became a classic of European cinema, and the song, ‘Falling in Love Again (Can’t Help It)’ became a worldwide hit, and Marlene Dietrich’s signature tune. The poor woman had to wrestle with that English consonant combination for the rest of her life.
TH-fronting definitely is a thing for some non-natives. My French dad once walked into an Indian restaurant in Dublin meaning to ask for "a table for three" but instead requesting "a table for free", which the lady found hilarious.
It's even permeated french popular culture to some extent, like the 90s boys band "2Be3" was a play on "to be free".
This was probably also the case of being in Ireland, where “th” is instead pronounced as an ejective t, the opposite of th fronting.
Voiceless th turning into f is also in Austrian accents. (Voiced th by the way turns into d)
I have had Irish coworkers who call it "tree".
@@timolson4809 An ejective? While in Dublin, I've heard it more pronounced as a typical dental stop, though it probably does sometimes occur as an ejective word-finally.
As a native Polish speaker, where we have a triple contrast between "s", "sz" (english "sh") and "ś", I felt like these sounds didn't ever pose a problem for my pronunciation. Polish does not, however, have "th". This led me to coping with it for a long time by saying "dat" or "fenk you". Living in the US right now I feel I've improved at both voiced and unvoiced variants of "th", but I think I still pretty often retreat to "d" and "f" when speaking more quickly.
Your video was very helpful for my understanding why my Japanese friends would often baffle me by pronouncing "senk you" where my Polish brain would expect "f".
Fanks! You'd be OK in the UK! Most youth - not just in London (where it began) - now pronounce unvoiced th as 'f'. It is stereotyped as "lower class" speech, immigrant speech, working class speech, etc which can give the impression (prejudice, of course) that the speaker is ill-educated, lazy or a bit unintelligent. I don't like it to be honest but understand it might be difficult for people who have never been taught properly (there are a lot of bad teachers at school!) or whose parents also can't pronounce th (a lot of immigrant families, for example) . I am working-class - growing up in a poor area where English speechcraft and elocution was not the best - but I make the effort to pronounce th properly. I find it quite empowering to speak a language well. When learning Spanish I went to great lengths to ask native Spanish how exactly they articulate particular sounds in their mouths. I think good pronunciation is more important than 100% correct grammar in being understood.
As a Brit-born Pole I used to cringe when my parents and grandparents couldn't pronounce "th." It was either just a t (tank you) or d (dere). Conversely, my issue was with the triple contrast with the s/sz/ś, which to my ear was either s or sh. I'm in my 70s now...and thankfully can manage those contrasts, although not without many tears "tanks" to my mother's insistence on Polish elocution lessons!
Actually, English "sh" sound is somewhere between Polish "sz" and "ś" which is why native English speakers have great difficulty distinguishing the two. Poles, on the other hand, tend to replace "sh" with Polish "sz" in English words.
Funnily enough, I noticed that older generations of Poles pronounce the voiced "th" as "z" rather than "d" (so "zis" and "zat" not "dis" and "dat") - not sure when and why it changed, could be a fun thing to examine more deeply.
As others have explained, sz is not sh, you can quickly see in Wikipedia what the difference is.
But moving from established facts to my personal experience, there is a funny thing going on with how Polish (me) and English (Aussies) speakers hear each other's sounds. I hear English sh usually as sz. If I had not learnt better, I would too think that they are the same sounds. And ś to me sounds very different. So usually, like most Poles, I use my sz in English words that call for sh.
However, interestingly, Aussies often hear my sz as s. If I want to make sure they hear sh, I actually use ś.
@@arkadiuszfilipczyk488 I just read about the difference, that's pretty interesting. Wikipedia also states there are some regional Polish dialects that merge sz and ś into the sh sound, and the same for the voiced variants - rz and ź merge into the sound found for example in English viSIon - where I always used the "rz" sound.
Oh my goodness, 4:56 was THe Smoothest transiTIOn to an ad I've ever seen
I know. That was so sick. This should be the top comment.
/*_S_*/moo/*_TH_*/e/*_S_*/t /*_S_*/pon/*_S_*/or /*_S_*/egue
It never occurred to me that the finger to the lips when shushing someone is, intentionally or unintentionally, enhancing the potency of the shush.
I thought it was symbolic but I really like the hypothesis of it making the shhh louder
That actually works
You put your finger on your own mouth?
@@CallMeMrChainmailas opposed to, someone else's mouth? Someone else's fingers???
@@NeonBeeCat😂 who knows
You literally said “it’s just finished” (2:50) like within 3sec of my laundry finishing in the other room
_There are no accidents_ - Master Oogway
I'm the giant from Twin Peaks
@@DrGeoffLindseythank for being a Twin Peaks fan
@@DrGeoffLindsey twin peaks?
I’ve been making the “bottom lip S” this entire time, and I never noticed!
I was so confused for 80% of the video because the mouth shapes didn’t look what I was used to doing at all.
I do it the "teeth way", and I tried using the "lower lip" approach and found it really hard! I guess we get a lot of practice making speech sounds.
It now makes a lot more sense to me why some people's S sound is so... unattractive and grating to my ear. It's the lower lip S doing it and I never knew that was a thing.
As someone who was unfortunately born with a pronounced underbite and even less unfortunate losing my front teeth in my early 30's in a work place accident I have always used the bottom lip to produce S. This video was astounding and very informative.
Me too! And I tried to do the high tongue S and really struggle without pulling an absolutely insane face to accomodate
I always thought that an S was made using the teeth, but I've just tried it while moving my bottom lip. Apparently, even though my tongue is in the "teeth" position, the actual sound is due to my lip
As a French speaker of English, Japanese, and Spanish, who is hypnotized by spelling and scared of th, this video was awesome
Hello 👋How are you doing today?
@@David_Robert 무슨 말해, 친구?
I am an American from deep in the Ozarks. I pronounce “months” as “munts” and “month” as “munt”. Didn’t realize it until I moved somewhere else. Crazy.
For me it switched from Month -> /mɒ̈̃fs/ (sometimes with another n/m) in the singular... mʌ̈nθ̼ ... As f and θ̼ for me are treated as allophones as a last syllable. So I can tell the difference in first syllables, second, but not third. The nasal quality happens time to time due to stressing certain parts and a more closed mouth position.
I'm a native new yorker and I say "munfs", same for other similar th words like ninety-fird, and "maf" instead of math.
@@WolfA4 ._. For me, it just nasalized. Though Ninety-Three is much like " naindɨθɾ̥ï: " ( sometimes the N just becomes nasalized ). Typically in the possessive/plural, the vowel typically becomes more open. So an unintentional consequence of sort of needing a long vs. short system is due to vowels voicing or leniting consequences. So a soft glottal or d comes out.
Also Ozarks.Do say 'munts'(kinda awkwardly tongue-y to say months
. But we do say 'munth'. I'm frequently accused of saying "thang"! Can't do "thing" without stopping midsentence!!
@@lindickison3055 I’m from that portion of the Ozarks that kinda sounds like a hillbilly from Appalachia had a baby with somebody from the heart of Saint Louis; tal’n ‘bout “babe, whurr’s my car keys, ya say’n ’em?”
The segue to the ad was incredible. I was floored with the smoothness
Russian English learners often substitute "th" with "s" and "z". Not so much "f" and "v". Just an interesting fact.
@@ChelseyK1ngwe Slavic folks tend to pronounce "th" differently. Depending whether it is :
Soft "th" - like in: thank you.
Hard "th"- like in: then/than
Dr Lindsey, you’re worth your weight in gold. I was learning RP pronunciation, but gave up when it came to „s” sound. Even though I don’t have a lisp, I just couldn’t do the „s” sound the way the articulators were shown on the mouth cross-section image. I was thinking, either I do have a lisp, or I’m mental, or deaf, but I can’t reproduce the sound the way which is shown, even though I seem to achieve the same effect in some different way... Now it’s all clear, and I even can make the „s” closer to English way ☺️
Are you sure you are learning RP pronunciation? Basically no one speaks RP these days, and it's not really taught either.
(They are probably teaching you some contemporary prestige accent of British English, and just call it RP. See some of the other videos of Dr Lindsey for more background on RP.)
The case of RP… For us non-English, ”received pronunciation” sounds so natural, modest, time tested and uncomplicated that we don’t suspect any privilege (not to mention a fad) being involved. Promoted by public schools, you know.
@@timosalo5003 No. Listen to some actual RP. Dr Lindsey has some examples in some of his videos.
You are mixing it up with modern prestige dialects.
You were sinking? How did you get help?
@@timosalo5003 just a note that "public schools" in England refer to schools for the elites. "Public" in this case refers to the fact that they are open to students of any denomination or location, but they are not publicly funded, there are tuition fees.
My English phonetics teacher at uni told me I had a lisp, which completely shocked me. I even saw a speech therapist, who quickly gave up, saying that my front teeth are just hella weird. She made me put the tip of my tongue behind my lower front teeth, which is what all the diagrams show for Czech /s/, but I just can't produce the right sound like that. Made me realize I pronounce the English /s/ when I speak Czech. Years later, job interview at a school. The headmistress says I pronounce the English /s/ when speaking Czech, which is a problem, but that she's willing to overlook it and hire me. Made me self-conscious, so I refused and ended up with a better-paying job somewhere else.
Try positioning your tongue behind the teeth in all sorts of different ways and maybe moving the lower jaw as well, just keeping your lips open. And you'll get there.
@@tantuceThanks for the encouragement but I won't bother. The only people (to my knowledge) who have ever noticed the difference are trained phoneticians/speech therapists, everybody else was as surprised as me. So I'll just keep doing my "good enough" English /s/ in my other languages.
By the sound of it I've been using the Czech /s/ when speaking English all my life. I only found out a few years ago when learning Mandarin (same /s/ as Czech, apparently), but I learned that I can only really make a high pitched whistle when I try to do it the 'normal' English way. The words for this are 'apical' (tongue tip) and 'laminal' (tongue blade).
Also, I don't know if it has to do with how I pronounce /s/, but the apical /s/ can really bug me when it makes that whistle sound too
@tantuce clearly you mean well but the fact that she literally saw professionals makes it clear she won't just 'get there' with one youtube comment
Also, I recommended you earlier African Grey parrots, they, unlike many other parrots, can make distinction between human sounds at the level of pronounced letters (some can make up new words out of sounds) and transform them to their understanding - and it is remarkable because they don't have the generic human speech adaptation for the specific range of frequency and sequences - resulting in clearly distinct and characteristic identification and reproduction of separate sounds - in particular, "s" is reproduced as loud vowel-type high frequency sound (it appears that most of African Grey parrots who learned to identify separate sounds reproduce it in that way). It is still perceived by humans and parrots as "s", loud and clear "s".
Which raises the question: how do parrots create human speech sounds when they have neither lips nor teeth?
@@1earflapping There are a lot of studies how parrots reproduce sounds.
@@1earflapping Syrinx. It's a neat organ
there's a kid book (i think it's from the narnia's series) where the protagonist is trying to hide with another person, and they decide to speak without the "s" because they sound too loud even when you're whispering.
Yes, it was the last Narnia book, The Last Battle. One of the characters said thee instead of see, because it was quieter.
I had some tooth complications and had some teeth removed almost two years ago, and I have braces now. At first I found it really hard to make sibilant sounds without enough teeth near the front of my mouth, but discovered that I could actually use the wire bridging the gap where the teeth used to be as the air blockage point to articulate the sound. My sibilants now honestly sound better than they ever used to before, even if how they're articulated is a little unorthodox.
Hum, repeat after me, Surf shark is superb without expelling the braces..😊
A fascinating video, as always!
I'm a native speaker of American English, married to a native speaker of Venezuelan Spanish. Venezuelans seem to be particularly prone to de-emphasize or sometimes completely drop the final "S" from words in Spanish. And their Spanish is perfectly understandable the way they pronounce it. I've picked up that habit from her when I speak Spanish, while I've tried (with mixed success) to break her of the habit when she speaks English. You've clearly articulated what I knew intuitively but didn't know how to explain: Proper pronunciation of that sound is absolutely vital to carry the meanings of so many English terms.
On a related note, my wife neither hears nor articulates the difference between "n" and "m" at the end of English words. I'm frequently trying to fix her pronunciation of "gum"/"gun", "William"/"Willian", "drone"/"drome" and similar pairs, some members of which are not actual words in English. I've heard her sisters and other Venezuelan friends make the same mistakes. I suspect the distinction between those two final consonants is rarely crucial in Spanish.
I find the same with my Venezuelan students. They also seem to mix and match final /k/ and /t/.
@@Zzyzzyx The n/m thing helps to explain why Albert Pujols (American baseball player from the Dominican Republic) talks about hitting "hone runs".
Note that English words that end in M often end in N in Spanish. Jerusalem is Jerusalén in Spanish. Bethlehem is Belén. Harem is jarén.
Spanish only has one native nasal coda spelled -n and realised [n̪] ,or [ŋ] in some varieties. Coda m only appears in unadapted loanwords, from Latin very often or English, and are only contrasted with the native coda by some speakers, in higher prestige situations mostly. Same goes for coda k and t, neither appear in native words so nativised pronunciations include: nor pronouncing them, changing k to [ɣ] or [χ], depending on how that variety treats native codas , and t to [θ],[ð], or changing both to s, with all the implications that has on "s-dropping" varieties.
Final -s dropping in Spanish doesn't exist in Mexico or at least is rare enough I can't remember it, but as you go south it gets really common somewhere around Nicaragua or Honduras. Final -d and -g start to blur after that too.
Great video. So many L2 speakers say English is 'easy'. That's only because learners of English are not expected to learn the language to as high a standard as learners of other languages - it's almost a given that you don't have to bother learning the difficult pronunciations. If you actually learn English to a truly high C2 standard rather than just swapping out the bits you can't be bothered to master, it's extremely difficult
Extremely? Hmmm.
@@vaska1999 I'm talking about learning English to C2 standard. That means no pronunciation features inherited from the L1, proper native-standard use of phrasal verbs, no excessive noun usage, no lazy misuse of tenses, and so on. It's extremely rare you see an L2 English speaker really get to that level, and I think that's because lower standards are accepted than they are for learners of other languages. I'd say that makes it extremely difficult
@@villeporttila5161 The same is true for all other languages, most of which are far more complex and therefore much more difficult to master than English.
well in English- change the tense of one word and you have to change the whole paragraph of words its in. crazy when i realised other languages don't need this... I'd like a modernisation of languages
rant: also there's no need for plural when you already have 5 words before it starting its going to be a plural form... its redundant... eg ten cat, many cat- we all know theres ten or many of the cat species...
English has a flat leaning curve at the beginning, but it gets steeper and steeper. It's the other way around in many languages. Once you get over the first difficulties, things become easier.
Just finished a year in Japan as an English teacher. This video might've been helpful if I'd been able to watch it a year ago!
Yes this is typical! I’m Dutch and lived in Thailand for many years. Most Thais when they want to learn English want a ‘native’ speaker as well, not realizing that being a native speaker doesn’t make you a good teacher. Native speakers often don’t have a clue what are the particular problems of their own language. They mostly don’t understand why their students make the mistakes they make.
@@wetteefun Me learning German has, for the first time, made me think properly about how English works, and how ridiculous it is in the end compared to some other, more regular and structured languages.
Due to profound hearing loss, I can't hear frequencies over 1500 Hz. I completely rely on the cues these sibilants impress on the following vowels. Yet my brain still thinks it can "hear" them in speech. But when Dr. Lindsey pronounces them in isolation, there's only silence for me. Brains are weird 😄.
More than one of my German colleagues ends up saying "thomesing" for "something". i love what this suggests about the cognitive processes happening for them
it's more to do with muscle memory and the development of their mouth than a cognitive process.
Don’t mention the war.
9:50 - Today I learned that the 12 divisions of the year called "mumfs" are spelled "months".
I heard mumfs for the first time a couple years ago and it took me a while to understand. English isn't my first language. I'm Dutch and had never heard that variety before.
There are some awful messes of pronunciation in the south east of England. Twelve months becomes twewv mumfs . These are the bo'l o' wa'er people of internet meme fame.
I now have extra fun because my heating falls away sharply at 8kHz meaning voiceless th can disappear totally for me.
😂
@@stevecarter8810 wa'e* :D
@@vez3834 o ye' you' qui'e righ' abou' tha'
As a Dutch speaker, I usually replace th sounds with t or d, instead of a sibbilant. I believe that this is what has historically happened to the Dutch language as well, as can be seen in our definite article (English "the" vs. Dutch "de") and demonstratives (English "this" and "that" vs. Dutch "deze/dit" and "die/dat").
I hope this makes you happy. When I speak very fast, apparently my coworkers only hear my TH's as T's in the beginnings of words, but at the ends of words often switches to purely an F. Also it doesn't help regionally. Vowels are much stickier so OF +THE often slam into each other. Eachother I think of as one word due to o became /ʌ̈:/ in that context and ea -> /ʏ/ or with a glottal stop. Doesn't help when I speak, I have a tendency to shove consonants in the back of my throat or front them for sharper contrast. TR, DR, SR ( only foreign words), but using a tapped R to avoid cluttering, but use the normal back R in-between words, but over-rhotic due to a more inwards mouth position. So vowel contrast becomes more important. Though at a huge consequence with harsh R sounds following rhotic vowels. There ( daar ) almost no longer becoming a homophone of their for me. :X
i agree with carlos.
"sixths" is a fun one. So many ways to (fail to) resolve that "-ksths" consonant cluster.
So far as I can tell, I actually tend to lose the s sound from the x, but there are definitely people who lose the th (and then struggle with having two distinctly Seperate S sounds with... nothing in between, because it's obviously not just siks, but there's no vowel in there, but...)
I cannot hardly pronounce anything similar: fifth, sixth, seventh, ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth. I’m a native speaker of American English - but I’m also from where the hillbillies live. Those words come out as “fif, six, sevent, nont, tent, levent, twelf”.
i say "fith" and "twelth", and i pronounce all the sounds in "sixth", but if i were to drop a sound it would be the "th". also fun one: "asthma" has a silent th in it
Yeah, I say "sikths" for sixths.
I hear more British people say "sicth" and more Americans say "sixt" and in all honesty I (an American) find both versions kind of annoying, but my "six'ss" is probably the least clear option 🤔
I'm pretty sure I front the th in "sixths", giving something like "siksts".
Totally brilliant! Talk about learning things you didn’t even know you didn’t know.
Thank you!
I like that it seems like you found a good portion of your clips while watching videos about making TH-cam videos. Always encouraging to see people you respect working to improve their craft
My daughter has gotten over a lisp almost completely, but I was kind of confused why words like "complex" cause her lips to come together somewhat, hiding her bottom teeth, compared to how "dentally" I say it (with very open lips). Only from this video (and having her say some of these words) did I realize that she was using her bottom lip! And not only that, but Dr. Lindsey pointed out that it's even somewhat common.
So in a very practical way, thanks for the video; I feel that I need to worry less about this particularity about her speech. Linguistics is way more complicated than it seems!
My linguistics professor in grad school picked up on /sh/ for the s in street when a student spoke in class and correctly guessed her family had come from Britain. I have never forgotten that difference and now I live in the UK and I hear it every single day.
The Sh often comes when pronouncing st before r here in Australia too. You’ll hear “Aushtralia”.
@@elizabethdixon5536 6:53 안 돼! 나는 정말 무서워요! *“동물들의 사랑해 (악보)” 가 재생하기*
2:50 and even "does" or "us" as in "what's he want" and "let's do it"
S Battle Advanced
@@Nikola_M aj sij ajslij pəzəlz fæn ɑr jʉw
Like in the song " 'S Wonderful", you can even cut the "it" out of "it's" and just leave the 's.
I've noticed in a lot of online conversations I've been a part of that I and many others have started writing " 's alright" or " 's good" more often.
'S ok. Rully, I mean it, 's ok, man.
" 'Zat so?"
S'pose it is.
@@catriona_drummond not for me.
Some say the gopher from Winnie the Pooh haunts the nightmares of Dr Geoff Lindsey. And now you’re re-reading this post in the gopher’s voice, whistling each ‘s’…
I love comments I have to research to understand
I don’t recall any gophers in the Hundred Acre Wood.
@@robinharwood5044this character is not in Milne, but was added in Disney’s film adaptation
I was going to comment that I was surprised he didn’t mention the “whistled” s.
I would add the beaver from The Lady and the Tramp too
Dr. Lindsey, after watching your video, once again I am left questioning things I took for granted. I consider you a true scientist; you base your thoughts on your own tangible research instead of just echoing what is said by those who are esteemed. You inspire me to trust my own thoughts and dive deep into my own suspicions. Thank you for sharing your knowledge with the world.
Thank you! One of the best comments I've ever had.
"What are you sinking about" wahaha
I think he really asks, „What are you singing about?”
😂😅👏🤣
@@jadziajagoda6187it is supposed to be mishearing "sinking" as "thinking", there is the distinct hardness of a K in there.
In aeronautics, saying /s/ instead of /θ/ is considered best practice: 3,000 ft is pronounced "/s/ree thousand feet" instead of "/θ/ree tousand feet". This is because the /θ/ sound isn't recognisable with the traditionally bad radio quality in the noisy environment of most cockpits. The /s/ pronunciation is intended to better identify words and avoid misunderstandings.
Typical for Germans, mixing up th with s. He asked "what are You thinking about", because he misunderstood the "we are sinking" for "we are thinking"
I remember, when I was working in Germany many years back, having a conversation about this "important consonant" with my German boss.
How, as she drove us to a meeting, I was repeating words like "house" and "house", or "use" and "use", in both their noun and verb forms, giving example that we might "house the homeless" with a Z, but we "live in a house" with an S.
And, nope, she just couldn't hear it.
So I had to keep repeating it, slower and slower, in the hopes that she could distinguish the "Z" sound from the "S" sound, and understand that, no, we English speakers really are indicating the noun from the verb, if only you can quickly pick up that subtle distinction in sound as it zooms past you. And you can express the difference, if you can wrap your tongue around the variants of the "S" family.
And, yes, it's not like German education of the English language is lacking. Only second to the Russians, they arguably do it vastly better than we actual native English speakers ever did. Sadly.
But it was still a sticking point... which felt very Python-esque, as there I was saying "house, house, house" or "use, use, use" over and over in this car, in the hopes that my German boss might just catch the distinction, if I could only say it slowly and exaggerate it enough to be heard clearly.
Never really happened. We reached the destination and the topic changed.
As a speech-language pathologist, I appreciated the Peachie Speechie cameo😆 Absolutely love your videos!
I remember an ancient Benny Hill (radio!) sketch where he was playing a supposedly French character who spoke in perfect English. When challenged if he was really French he replied "It's hard enough to pronounce all the s's in English, let alone with a French accent"
I am not sure Benny was able to speak French, but when his accent when he was speaking French in his sketches was very good.
Benny Hill on the radio?? Must check that out!
@@DrGeoffLindsey Actually, it was an LP, which why thought it was the radio as a child. Issued as “Benny at the BBC” / “The World of Benny Hill” according to the interweb, not sure if it’s possible to get hold of a copy these days. The sketches may have been originally televised.
@@DrGeoffLindsey I stand corrected, it was Hugh Paddick on "Beyond our Ken" th-cam.com/video/0tL_HDn7_8E/w-d-xo.html at 16:50. Is there nothing that's not on the web these days!
@@KarlDeux Benny could actually speak French. There's a video on YT of him interviewing the actor who dubs him for French TV.
When you removed the "th" in thin, I heard "bin".
Also, to this day I can't pronounce s properly, and I'm really self-conscious about it. I was always told growing up that I'd grow out of it but I never did...
Beyond being important for grammatical purposes, the /s/ phoneme also has sociolinguistic connotations, at least in American English. Hypersibilant /s/ phonemes are associated with femininity, to the point where males who use this phoneme can be perceived as effeminate. This phoneme is made with the tip of the tongue pointing upwards. In contrast, hyposibilant /s/ phonemes are often associated with masculinity, and are pronounced with the tip of the tongue pointing downwards. AAVE is a dialect where this pronunciation is particularly common among both males and females, while other dialects have a prominent gender divide in terms of the pronunciations of that letter. This is very interesting because it also affects mouth posture and the way that some vowels are pronounced.
I often come to these videos with a strong sense of accomplishment in my L2 skills and leave with a profound insecurity that I may insufficiently pronounce something I had never questioned before. Today's video did not disappoint. Especially considering I heard the 's' that supposedly wasn't there in the clip starting at 10:46. I just thought it was retracted like the 'n' before it.
this is the first video i've ever seen from you. i'm hooked
Lucky! I recommend Hard Attack, Theme Tunes, Pink Panther, and Sbeech as my favorite videos (those aren’t their names, but they are the operative words).
there's a smorgasbord of great videos on this channel! I recommend CAN and CANT, foreign words like PASTA, and Why these English phonetic symbols are all WRONG
Was Weak Forms for me. Highly recommend that one :)
Me too! Fascinating, and I thought I’d like to teach English!
Another issue is the voiced/voiceless versions of these sounds.
The placement can almost be the same, but the sound differs greatly when the voice is employed versus when the sound is just the sibilant noise of the air rushing through.
Spanish speakers in South America do not use the /ð/, /z/, or /ʒ/ and instead use /θ/, /s/ and /ʃ/ for both, and have great difficulty switching on the voice in these cases, since in Spanish they are always voiceless, and sometimes even muted.
So, while this was a great video, we need to show those voice/voiceless distinctions, too! :D
I was thinking the same thing. Needs more voiced examples.
When you removed the "th" and it still sounded like "thin", that might have been the most important moment of my life. I'm really shocked
0:05 Reminds me of an old Victor Lewis sketch where he calls an electrical goods shop pretending to be a German customer wanting help with a TV that he accidentally poured Blue Nun ("very good, expensive wine") into and is now "very smoking". "and so I put my hand into ze back." "I would switch off the mains first before you put it out." "I do not come from Mainz, I am from Frankfurt." "Switch the electricity mains off!" "Please sir, please.. if I touch the one on the side like this..." *bang!* "Hello? Hello?" "Hello... I was thrown across the room. The television has blown, there is glass everywhere. What is the number of the ambulance, please?" "999" "Why are you saying no to me?"
Hello 👋how are you doing today??
Laughing my head off! Of course you’d have to know that “nein” in German means “no” and is pronounced “ nine”! 😂
Thank you for including that clip at the beginning! That has been my favorite ad for 15 years!!
4:03 "I can't call to mind a single process of English which deletes a final /s/ or /z/ - they're just too important." Unless I'm misunderstanding, isn't AAVE an example? Possessive 's can be deleted, so you get phrases like "my momma house."
Yeah, also, AAVE adapts the th sounds differently (d/dth instead of f/v). Maybe he just spends more time focused on British English 🤷♂️
Good call. I knew there had to be something. I think AAVE can also drop plurals, ie Fitty Cent instead of fifty cents.
Also, I think that I have heard that whenever General American can make contractions, AAVE can omit.
AAVE has a general trend of deleting final consonant, but by far "s" and "z" are more likely to be retained. Possessive 's is dropped as a grammatical change, not a phonological one.
@@AllUpOnsHere's another example: "It's wild how all animals be openin' they mouth when they hype!"
As you can see, there are two contradictions (I don't know what's the better term for this) here. "Animal" has the plural -s whereas "mouth" doesn't. Fascinating.
I'd like to thank (fank🤭) Dr. Lindsay. I'm a Brazilian linguage teacher (Portuguese and English).
Some of these videos help me a lot to produce more and better English classes to my studants.
Cheers from Brasil!
As a child I remember learning (from a Narnia book?) how to avoid being overheard when whispering. They said to consciously speak with a lisp, as the S sound is so strong that it can clearly be noticed even if you're trying to be quiet. I'm really pleased to hear the linguistics behind this explained so clearly decades later!
Fascinating. I have a gap between my upper two front teeth, and when I'm tired I can find my s's starting to slip into th's -- a particular problem when singing. While I've never had a lisp, this video has helped me work out some issues with my s mouth shape and develop some potential strategies for more effective sibilant formation. My singing teacher will be very happY!
I spent years dealing with a mild lisp unable to figure out what to do with my tongue to pronounce s properly. After several years of trying and many searches on youtube i came across a video that explained it as a breathy t which did wonders. I am glad to see the wide diversity in means of making what we perceive as an s.
That’s cool! Nowadays one can learn almost everything on TH-cam.
I have been learning English more than 50 years but nobody ever told me the essential difference in decibels between th and s! Extremely useful information, it solves my problems with that and for many Czech speakers too I think, thanks very much.
The amount of thought and work that goes into Dr Lindsey’s videos is mind-blowing, and this is no exception. The transition into the sponsor read is, as has been pointed out, nothing short of brilliant. Thank you, Surf Shark and thank you, Geoff!
I really appreciate it
Would love to see a teeth vs lip survey. Never knew lip S was a thing
I'm a native of California living in Chicago for the past 35 years. The first difference I noticed in the common Chicago accent is the "th" sound being completely left out of all speech, often replaced by a "d" sound, or when that's impractical, with a plain "t" sound, and in "going to da te-ater". The second remarkable feature of a Chicago accent is the final-s sound being lengthened, sometimes to a ridiculous degree--"dat's jusst how it issss"--and sometimes without an "s" being at the end of a word at all.
For instance, there's a well-known chain of grocery stores here called Jewel. Chicago speakers often call it Jewelss or even Jewelsess.
Related to the 'Articulation' section: a decade or so ago I got a prosthetic device to replace a front tooth that had to be removed (lateral incisor). It's a clever little thing that goes across my palate and fits in a gap on the other side of my mouth. Anyway, my point is that I basically have a false palate from this prosthetic that sits a bit lower in my mouth than my real one and it made pronouncing S really hard for a good few weeks until my tongue got used to it.
Now, whenever I take it out, it's equally difficult to pronounce S sounds without it!
I had the same problem when a dentist decided that aesthetics were more important than speech.
AAVE generally omits the possessive S.
Dr Lindsey is just brilliant. Thank you.
He is not. He presents English as if it is just a choice and the language can be whatever it wants to be. He is a complete descriptivist extremist.
I am one of those people who doesn't close their teeth. I always just thought my problem was that my tongue was a little too far forward, but putting it back only ever served to make my s's sound more like sh. Thank you for going so in detail about what's going on in my mouth! I was finally able to make a normal s sound!
Exactly. S > tongue farthest forward behind teeth, has a whistling sub-note. SH > tongue tip back a little, still having that little whistle.
Russian Sh -- one letter in Cyrillic, looks like a Roman numeral III -- carries it even farther, the tongue tip drawn to practically the middle of the mouth, producing not a whistling but a mushing sort of sound by this difference.
@@w.reidripley1968 친구, 이 소리들 사이의 발음은 다릅니다. 몰라요.
fascinating as always! i'm a native speaker of brazilian portuguese and for the first seconds of this video i thought for sure it would be a th! we also use -s for plurals and though brazilian speakers often struggle with words ending in consonants (often pronouncing "it" as "itty" or "lab" as "labby" for instance), s is not one of them. but the th seems to be a bigger struggle - so much so that i find myself willfully mispronouncing it in certain instances to avoid seeming pretentious 😅
I could never understand why so many so many English speakers pronounce 'th' as though it were an 'f'. Eg; wiff, free-two-one, I fink... etc. We regarded it as a speech impediment and always corrected our children when we heard them repeating it from TV or something. Great video with superb content! 👍🏻😎
What’s really interesting is that Old Spanish developed both forms of “s”
Classical Latin didn’t distinguish s [s] from sh [ʃ] so it only had an intermediate s [s̠]. But by 200AD, people begin palatalizing ce and ci, making a soft C sound. West of Italy, this happens [kʲ] > [c] > [ts] > [s]. In this same region, clusters like [ks̠], [kt] get a palatal squeezed out [js̠], [jt] > [ʃ], [tʃ]
So you suddenly have [s] vs [s̠] vs [ʃ] out of thin air. *captiat (“he hunts”), casa (“house”), capsa (“box”) becoming caça [kasa], casa [kas̠a], caxa [kaʃa]. This system collapsed because the sounds are too close in the mouth. Most of Spanish history has been spent trying to move them as far away from each other as possible. This sent [ʃ] even further back, all the way into the throat [x]- ahora escrito como jota. Then in the North of Spain [s] was pushed forward even further until it was [θ] but in the South [s̠] is pushed forward until it’s just [s]
I think I've read that it may be thanks to the influence of Basque, and possibly the other pre-Romance languages of the Iberian peninsula. The late Larry Trask, still the foremost specialist on the history of Basque as far as I know, reconstructed the prehistoric stage of that language as already having the distinction, and it could be an areal feature that tends to persist in that region. Also interesting is that when the 16th-century Spanish started writing Classical Nahuatl in the Latin alphabet, they almost always used or for its sibilant phoneme, not .
Ah, that explains why the manga/anime/film "Death Note" is written in Japanese as "Desu Nōto" (デスノート).
What were they gonna write it as, Dethu Noto?
@@2Cerealboxi could see a t being used rather than s if i didn't know anything about Japanese pronunciation already.
@@andyv2209 Japanese doesn't have the "tu" syllable/character.
@@2Cerealbox but it does have "to", like in "nōto", so why not also for death? "deto nōto"
@@notwithouttext "o" isn't really a neutral sound that gets dropped like "u" does. "Desu Noto" would be pronounced as "des noto" (at least by many people).
The amount of enjoyment I get from your videos is truly abnormal. Keep going!
I find this particular topic fascinating in relation to the pronunciation of Hebrew: comparing modern (always T and D), litvish (T or S, always D), galitzianer, and Yemenite (T,S,D, Th, and Dh) pronunciations, as well as the old Ashkenazi pronunciation which preserved the "th" for the unpointed thuff consonant
Fascinating topic.
The varied uses of the 's' in English to convey so much additional information means that for those who find it difficult to produce, it can do much more than give them a 'lisp' or make certain words difficult to pronounce. (I was fascinated to discover as a child that my mother wasn't able to pronounce the word anaesthetist. She can produce both sounds separately, but not together. )
If producing the sound (or certain combinations like sth) is so difficult that you mispronounce some words, they're often still recognisable, especially when it's a frequent or common usage. However, I'd never previously stopped to consider that *dropping* them because they're tricky and you think they're not important, can cause you to omit a lot of information, and even alter a communication enough to cause frustration and misunderstanding.
I am now trying to figure out how I naturally/automatically make an s sound. It might explain why I was identified as having a slight lisp in Lithuania after growing up (and not being labeled as lisping) in the US.
Woah I've always wondered why my S's whistle. When you showed the diagram at 16:45, I realized that I've always pronounced my S's with my lower jaw relaxed and my tongue resting right beneath my top row of teeth. Lo and behold, when I closed my teeth and made an S sound, the whistle disappeared.
My S's have become more whistled lately because my two front teeth have developed a small gap in recent years. My tongue is shooting that jet of air right through the gap.
@@fugithegreat You have Willem Dafoe's S sound. I like his S so much. 😆
@@fugithegreatSame. Occasionally it comes out as such a clean whistle it takes me by surprise. Happens more and more the older and gappier my teeth get.
I also find it easier to intentionally whistle with my tongue as opposed to my lips. Do you find that? I can whistle both ways but find it way less effort with my tongue. Sharper and louder though… which might not sound as pleasant I guess. 😂
I remember asking a Spanish speaking person what English sounded like as a "tune" and they made a droning sound. This made sense in comparison to their own roller coaster language sound. But now i am hearing the impact of the consonants at the end of so many words creating little halts all through the sentences. Especially listening to your British delivery.
You may be interested in Dr. Lindsay's video on the rhythm of English speech relating to the Pink Panther theme song. I love that video and re-watch it occasionally.
When I had a brace as a teenager, my "s" moved because of the new obstacle. Later, the brace was removed, and I had a lisp while I adjusted to the obstacle change.
8:20 i didn't hear "thin" here, i heard "bin" for some reason. I'll try it again later with a different pair of headphones, and some speakers I've got at home
I heard bin too!
If you've ever since the movie "My Cousin Vinny" (which if you haven't, you should, because it's one of the funniest movies every made) the Brooklyn-born Vincent "Vinny" Gambini (who took 6 tries to pass the bar) is defending his young cousin in a murder case in Alabama. The cousin and a friend are driving out to California to start college and are accused of shooting a clerk in a convenience store where they stopped. (Actually two other kids in an identical car did it right after the cousin and his friend left.) On cross, Vinny asks a witness if he saw "these two youths leaving the store" only Vinny pronounces the word "yoots." The judge stops him to ask "what's a "yoot"?" Eventually Vinny figures out that the judge can't understand his pronunciation and says sarcastically "Oh excuse me your honor!" and then hyper-over-pronounces each sound "these two you-th-ss."
If the case were in the western USA, they could be two Utes leaving the store. Especially, of course, in Utah.
@@pierreabbat6157 True -- but probably not in Alabama. :) Also the two kids are Italian (the cousin) and Jewish (the friend).
I would enjoy Dr. Lindsey crafting several creative sentences for us to submit/tag for review, while including the subject’s home town, teenage town, college town, and parent’s information as well. Map/diagram where changes are happening and the potential influences.
Also, include a few tongue-twisters for fun.
Seriously, this is an absolutely smashing and thoughtful discourse on such a crucial sound.
If I might make a correction, in the examples you chose for Japanese です (desu) and ます(masu), the speakers had strong lisps and wouldn't be considered exactly standard pronunciation. Although the sound is indeed somewhere in between the American English 'mass' and 'math' as you have indicated.
It was a bit misleading to use that sample as a seeming "representative" of the Japanese "s", but I wouldn't say the speakers "all had strong lisps". They mostly fall perfectly within the norm of what is considered "s" -- as do the many other speakers whose "s" sounds are much sharper. Which I think is really the point he's trying to make: since there's no distinction, that "unambiguously s" range is quite wide. Same phenomenon as with "r".
I remember, twenty-five years ago, reading the Hobbit to my children (before the movies came out) and reading aloud the words spoken by Gollum [oops, I originally said "Golem"] ("my preciousss") and how they got into "Gollum" speak for a while. Did enough 'S' sounds for a lifetime. Yes, the 'S' is preciousss!
This is totally a tangent but I've never understood why some people mix up "Gollum" and "golem". I say the first one like "solemn" and the second with the vowels of "totem", and I'm pretty sure etymology is on my side in both cases.
You're correct @@thatotherted3555 . The Lord of the Rings character is Gollum, GAH-Lumm. The creature from Jewish folklore is Golem, Go-Lemm.
Mea culpa. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa. I got lazy and tired and should have checked.. sorry.
@@alanscottevilExcept for Brits, and Aussies like myself, and other non-Americans it's GOLL-um, but otherwise I agree. The two are distinctly different. 😉
@@thatotherted3555 Huh, well today I learned! I'd always pronounced them both as rhyming with "solemn".
I come to pronunciation via singing, and s is a fascinating sound. It is such a piercing sound that in choir, we sometimes joke that if there is a final s (especially after a prolonged vowel), only one singer needs to pronounce the s and it will sound like we all are. (This also avoids the complication of all of our loud “s”s coming in at a slightly different time 😂)
This is very interesting to me! I'm a native English speaker who happened to have had many ear infections when I was learning to speak and therefore heard incorrectly and pronounced "W" "S" and "R" incorrectly. I was taught to bring the to of my tongue near the pallet of my front teeth. It's fun experimenting with so many other options!
eeh??? 1 minute ago??? my phonetics professor would be amazed to see me get somewhere on time
until you realise you forgot to do your homework
oh yeah 3 mins ago. yours is the only comment
@@bcp-7 no, no, I finished all this week's homework on Saturday--
Churchill certainly didn't try to avoid "s" in his speeches, did he? - "From Shtettin in the Baltic to Trieshte in the Adriatic", "Shome chicken, shome neck", "THISH wash their finesht hour!"
Stettin is pronounced Shtetin in German!
@@PaulVinonaama Indeed! However I'm quite sure Churchill wasn't attempting to pronounce it like a native. Witness his reference in his VE day broadcast to General Jodl, which he didn't pronounce "yodel", or indeed Trieste in which the final e was silent.
To me, he sounds German as it gets with doing ST's as realized SHT's
That's just as a result of his weird jaw.
I'm a voice actor and the way that Winston Churchill speaks is referred to as "Protruding jaw" and it often results in accidentally making sh sounds instead of s sounds.
@@moritamikamikara3879 I didn't know then again this accidental mistake
This was interesting, thank you for the video! I'm Finnish, and I find that here, the English th sounds tend to get simplified into a t (sometimes aspirated, sometimes not) instead of an s. But pretty much all the English sibilants can turn into an s, depending on the speaker, because the unvoiced s is really the only one of them that Finnish has or uses a lot (some loanwords can have the sh sound, but loanwords can be a little weird sometimes anyway, we also get loanwords that break the finnish vowel harmony and stuff like that)
I went through speech therapy as a child, because of my s’s. Because I have gaps between my teeth, I would get quite a prominent lisp.
Quite honestly, this video has a clearer explanation of what’s going on, and better strategies to get around the physical issue than the therapist ever did, so a big thank you!
To me, it should be required to show and describe the sounds themselves and know exactly what's going on rather than " FIX IT! "
Germans often struggle massively with this soft th to s transition. I sometimes recommend them to practice saying the word myths, with the suggestion of starting with the tongue tip between the teeth and pulling it back to form the s. The other major confusion in this area comes between sh and j. I once went to a meeting in Germany about shop jobs and literally could not tell the difference between the words, having to rely exclusively on the context for understanding. No doubt Dr Lindsey can easily explain that one too. Finally, on the s formation, I also had issues with this sound and even speech therapy as a child. In watching this video I realised that I form the s using the teeth and tongue as the constriction with no idea that this might be unusual. I can pull both lips away with no change in sound for the th, s and sh and simply move the tongue in and out to transition between them. I wonder how many others do the same thing.
I believe that is the "standard" English way of producing a loud S sound. I'm pretty sure Dr Lindsey was just exploring alternative methods that might not be as capable of producing the same volume.
Now I, a German speaker, am sitting here at six in the morning trying to figure out why shop and job sound so similar when we pronounce these words. I guess I'm doing it wrong as well 😂
My guess: We tend to shorten the o sound and skip the /d/ in the /dʒ/ sound almost entirely or replace it with a short /t/ which makes it sound more like sh.
Some dialect speakers might have less trouble. Did you speak with southern Germans back then?
@@a_kris It's possible I should have said Franconian rather than German, since Ps and Bs here are a little special but I suspect the difficulty in pronouncing the English j (closest equivalent being a German dsch- as in Dschungel) is fairly universal. Combined with the hardening of German sh at the start of a word to sch, the result, in this meeting at least, is a nebulous sound somewhere in-between (dsch- vs sch-). From a German perspective I can easily imagine the sounds are completely different, as per u and ü or final -e and -a, which in some (not all) contexts, sound to me completely identical but Germans assure me are quite distinct.
what are you þinking about
good old thorne
me when i have two mouths and one is binking but the other is pinking
what are _you_ ðinking about?
😂
I said we are SSSSSinking
I was going to watch the whole video anyway, but after reading the comments I really wanted to catch the segue. That was so smooth, I think it's the smoothest segue to an ad ever in TH-cam history.🏆🏆🏆
My mind is blown. Thank you for the great lesson, Dr. Lindsay!!
the smoothest sponsor segue I've ever seen
A couple of additional 'S' applications:
1 - I don't notice it like I did when I was a kid, but there's a geriatric 'S' where the absence of teeth can cause a whistling 'S'.
2 - There are English dialects (ex: East Tennessee mountains) and some English speakers (ex: Sean Connery) Who move an 'S' toward a 'Sh'.
This is, by far, the most effective sponsorship that I've ever encountered. I had to play it multiple times to keep pace, and so "thank you to surf shark" is going to be in my brain for an annoyingly long time. Feels like cheating, but good on them for sponsoring good work.
@DrGeoffLindsey You know, we do have a dialect where the s is frequently dropped: AAVE (African-American Vernacular English.)
For instance, a person can tell someone about a student continually attending a school:
"He go to Duke Ellington."
Or, where he lives:
"He live 'round Chesapeake St."
Or...this little magical sentence about food preferences:
"Yeah, he like crabs."
The above is an extraordinary example of both dropping an s on a routine action AND adding an s to a word that technically would not use an s to denote plurality.
The same applies to ownership:
That's Keshia's book:
"That (usually pronounced as "dat") Keshia book."
It is the coolest thing, and it's so awesome to hear how it flows...or, flow.
Not cool, just lazy speech.
@@elisaastorino2881 NO, AAVE is not lazy, and I'm not sure how you can come to such a conclusion. AAVE is a vibrant and a living language dialect, with complex rules and structures, just as you can find in any other dialect.
There is nothing "lazy" about AAVE. What is lazy, however, is making a lackluster assessment based on nothing aside from general disdain. You can dislike the dialect (why though?), but to claim that it is "lazy" despite having similar structures to other dialects and languages that are not considered "lazy," is asinine at best, and ignorance at its worst.
Even more, your sentence lacked an antecedent. Why did you leave the antecedent out? Laziness?
twelfths is a fun one to pronounce
Next time someone tells me English is easy to learn I am going to write that word on a piece of paper and show it to them. :-)
"Sixths" is even worse...
Thank you for yet another great video. And yes, guilty as charged, I spend 2.5 to 3 full 90-minute classes teaching the two dental fricatives to my Polish students but rarely the /s/ and /z/ sounds even though I realise they are somewhere between dental and alveolar in Polish, so that using them in English may lead to misunderstandings. By the way, contrary to the stereotype, Polish speakers of English usually do "th"-stopping /t/ and /d/, not /s/ or /z/.
THank you for your clarity!
7 minutes in and I'm glad to see even university research guys are just using Audacity, same as me 😂
I struggled for several months to learn how to pronounce "physician." Doing so "correctly" was not an issue until I went to college and found myself surrounded by people with PhDs, rather than MDs
Huh?
Love teaching us with your ad reads.
I heard somewhere that the word "strengths" is the English word with the highest density of consonants (difficult consonants at that!), and non-native English speakers really struggle with it, especially if they're own native language is much more "vowel buffered" like the tonal languages.
Another great video; thank you.
I would have guessed "r" is the most important consonant in English, because it's the one that has the most variation from accent to accent. In the past-tense word "cawed" no American sees that "w" as being anything like the "w" that begins "wet". We don't see a consonant. We see "aw" as a way of writing a vowel. But in words like "car" and "marred" Americans always see the "r" as being something like the beginning for the word "red". It wasn't until I started watching this channel that I realize that in some parts of the word the "ar" in "part" is in no way shape or form deemed to contain the initial consonant of "red" as "part" does in my U.S. diction. Many people see "ar" as a way of writing a vowel without a consonant, just as Americans see "aw" in "draw" as a vowel with no following consonant. "R" is the letter that's all over the place in the Anglophone world.
Later on in the video I caught what he was saying. The "s" carries a heavier workload than other letters, to convey a wide range of things.
It’s TH-cam. I wouldn’t call it clickbait in this case but even creators with academic credentials and educational content know that titles must draw attention.
Dr. Lindsey has some great videos about that British "r", which it sounds like you are familiar with already.
The question of what role the "w" plays at the end of words is interesting. I'm American, and I would say that if I over-enunciate a word like "draw", then I can hear that "w" at least a bit -- though that's more true for words ending in "ow", like "low" or "slow". And I think the "w" sound is there (lightly) when I say the word "drawing."
Edit: It just occurred to me that the "w" thing is probably affected by whether the speaker has the cot/caught vowel merger or not. I think that if the speaker has the cot/caught merger, then they would be less likely to perceive even a hint of a "w" sound at the end of words like draw, saw, claw, etc. For example, I was once listening to a podcast where the host asked a photographer about taking digital photos in "rah" format (as I perceived it). I know a little bit about cameras and image file types, and I was trying to figure out what "rah" format could be, when finally it dawned on me that he meant "raw" format. 🙂
As far as I'm concerned, "r" is English's 8th vowel letter, after "y" and "w".