CAN and CAN'T: the importance of Weak Forms
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 26 เม.ย. 2024
- Weak Forms play an ingenious role in many important contrasts of meaning, including can vs. can't
0:00 Introduction
1:33 Homographs: that & that
3:23 have & have
4:53 there & there
6:00 two & to, four & for
7:52 strong forms: citation forms etc.
9:30 off & on
10:52 strong negative, weak positive
13:34 can & can't
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As a native speaker of American English. It was a fun surprise to say "I can imagine" with a strong form and to hear my voice unambiguously saying "I can't imagine".
another W for british english ;)
It calls to mind this memorable scene from "A Fistful of Dollars" where the woman says at the 4m 45s mark in what I take to be a Mexican accent: "I can imagine, Father". th-cam.com/video/3jeJWvH0-zA/w-d-xo.html
You have to say it like “I ken imagine” for it to sound like “can” (and even then you sound like you’re defending your ability to imagine)
EDIT: Ok apparently this is just a Philly thing
You can emphasize the word "can", in e.g. a Midwest speech pattern, but you have to *really* emphasize it, very strongly. It's pretty much only ever done when the emphasis has a significant amount of emotion behind it. "You can't do that" / "Yes I *CAN* in fact do EXACTLY that." There is no halfway. You can't put just a little emphasis on it. Go big or go home.
@@turnleftaticeland th-cam.com/video/nl0fDm7HSQ0/w-d-xo.html
About a year ago, streamer Takanashi Kiara was talking to a friend, and used the phrase "One to Five". However, because she was a non-native English speaker, she pronounced it as "one two five". Her friend, confused, responded "What about three and four?". When Takanashi Kiara tried to clarify, she did it by repeatedly emphasizing the word 'to', the exact problem which caused the confusion. If she had instead used the weak form of 'to' either initially or in the clarification, there would likely have been no confusion. However, the idea that pronouncing a word more quietly could make it more clear is counterintuitive.
This is an excellent example of how weak forms communicate information.
I also thought of the same thing. lmao
As an ESL speaker, I struggled a lot with linking vowel sounds to the consonant sounds of next word or properly using weak forms instead of enunciating every single word like a dictionary.
Or can create confusion in if you're saying four to five.
I suppose you aren't saying it "more quietly" but just... different, and often for a shorter time. The difference between the strong vowels and the shwa are measurable; not just a "quieter" version of any vowel, but rather a distinct vowel of its own.
I was jokingly thinking “nobody show this series to Fauna” but I was blown away to actually see a Hololive reference here, hearted no less
It doesn't work so well when you are singing, though. I never understood why Sting was so emotional about something that didn't bother him much, when he sang "I can, I can, I can stand losing you."
Well nothing works well when you are singing, I can’t even determine the syllables in opera even in English. I just watch for the music.
Hello Mr Beige ☺
This is why U2 singing "I can live with or without you" puzzled me so much!
I see repetition as part of the problem, but then I only missed the repetitions before
I will never un hear it now! THANKS!
As a New Zealander, I've always been baffled by the American can/can't. I've often assumed one sense, then been confused by following statements that seemed to contradict it. Nice to have it explained.
Another thing to look out for is a glottal stop at the end of can't which often distinguishs them in many American accents
I think my accent (SAE) is the easiest American accent to discern since instead of it being cæn vs cæn' it's more like cən vs ceɪn'
@@Kire1120Yeah. I'm from Ireland, but I thought I was hearing the T at the end of the word every time, even when there was no actual T sound. I just automatically interpreted that glottal stop as a T, to the point where I was surprised it wasn't being pronounced in those examples.
I hope you stay baffled, I watch movies from New Zealand and I hear what they are saying and not the accent but I do appreciate your language differences.
As a kid in New York State, kids often said, “Ken” for positive and “kæn” for negative, even when stressed.
“Wait-did you say we KEN or we KÆN’?
“Whaddayoo, deaf?? I said we KEN!”
This reminds me how when I was a child I did not know of the word "can't" , as I only ever heard it as "can", and I thought the only difference between the positive meaning and the negative meaning was tone of voice and emphasis. This shows I was basically right 😂
It reminds me somewhat of the "could" sound sometimes used in American English in the phrases "could care less" or "could give a damn", which I'm assuming are intended by the speakers to mean "couldn't", but they completely neglect to annunciate the negatives at the ends
@@johnstanley3939this is a good idea, but I think it's not right. People who say "I could care less" are not even trying to say "couldn't". They are saying "could". It's become an idiomatic phrase and people don't think about the literal meaning behind it anymore. I still say "couldn't care less", personally, but it seems less and less common. With that said, the idiomatic phrase likely did originate with a weakening of the word "couldn't".
I guess I think of the 'could care less' phrase as implying a second part '...but it's hard to think of how' or some such.
@@isaacbruner65 Yes I think so.
@@johnstanley3939 Nah that's just bad English.
Holy shit, after decades of speaking English as a second language, someone _finally_ explains to me why I couldn't for the life of me distinguish American can and can't. Which seemed rather essential a distinction to me. This also explains why Americans would think I said "can't" when I _very_ clearly enunciated the "can". Who would've thought that this was the very problem!? 😄
I would!
@@DrGeoffLindsey indeed, you would! 😄 None of my English teachers had thought of telling me that though.
If you come across American Accent Training by Ann Cook, there's a chapter there (accompanied by audio) on contrasting "can do it", with "can't do it", "CAN do it", and "CAN'T do it".
The difference is quite subtle but noticeable. The emphasised CAN is longer than can't (`can't` is stressed and kind of drags the next word into the stressed portion of the sentence too) or CAN'T (more stressed) and with definitely no hint of any little t/d at the end (contrary to `can't`). `Can't` also sounds narrower to me for lack of a better word.
@@ThorX89 okay, thanks for the hint but I have to ask: did you watch the video you were commenting under?
@@unvergebeneidMost native speakers don’t even realize we do this until someone like Dr. Lindsey points it out to us.
That final example of deleted can in "you [can/could] certainly argue" blew my mind. I know exactly what she's saying, but without her saying it at all! Crazy what are minds are capable of when it comes to language.
It's more of an implied 'can' based on context and a little pause.
As a non-native English speaker, when teaching English to my students I usually warn them about how, certainly in American varieties, final Ts are often not fully expressed and it can therefore be difficult to distinguish between "can" and "can't"; I myself thought the main criterion was context, and little else..! Thank you so much Dr. Lindsey for (once again) shedding light on the language so rigorously but at the same time so clearly.
By the way, here in Italy students of English are often frustrated by how, as we say, you "eat your words" when speaking (i.e. some words are heavily reduced, sometimes to the point of disappearing); thanks to your videos about weak forms I can now explain exactly how and why the "word-eating" is taking place :)
Its even worse when some people, specially spanish, cant pronounce final t
@@David280GGwell, .. .. no, according to the comment you replied to it's better..
@@David280GG I'm Spanish and I'd say we actually do the opposite. We tend to overpronounce the final T since it's not a natural thing for us to say.
Something that I don't think gets openly appreciated enough is the way you leverage prestige speech and prestige speakers to demonstrate the prevalence and normalcy of apparently substandard linguistic features. People who are knowledgeable about linguistics aren't always skilled at arguing for the descriptive view of language in a way that makes sense to people who might disagree and I really appreciate the role you're playing by filling that gap.
There's an old saying, you can lead a horse to water but, you can't make it drink. It's so, so true. People watching this video on the whole are open minded. I know I'm always very happy to take on new ideas because it means I've grown. I don't get attached to any perceived idea of who I am. Who I am isn't the same as what I do or say, besides, who I am is nothing but an illusion. Not everyone thinks like this and they can feel very threatened by someone challenging their idea of who they are. Most of them won't change unless it's coming from someone that they admire. It's intransigence. I present ideas to people and and try not to get worried if they don't accept them. I'm not here to change the world, just myself.
I especially like the demonstrations of how upper-class British speakers - the King, even! - flap their t’s here and there.
As an ESL teacher, I once had a British colleague complain about the pronunciation I was teaching because flapping t’s was “wrong”. On the contrary, it’s a perfectly normal part of native pronunciation with different frequency depending on where you’re from, and _never_ doing it is a telltale sign of non-native speech. The only question is the distribution against glottal stops - British speakers tend to do glottal stops much more often, while on the opposite end of the spectrum, I’ve heard Australian and Kiwi speakers flap their “t”s where I’d do a glottal stop or a full “t”. (My dialect, Inland North AmE, falls in the middle, only using glottal stops within words before weak syllabic /n/ as in “written”, “button”, “mountain”).
@@saiyajedi I've noticed this informally -- and linguists have told me pointedly -- that things like glottal stops and flapping that are associated with certain dialects, also appear in others in some situations. My theory is that some sounds and grammatical constructs are part of the underlying language even if they're not in the standard dialects, so they pop up in different parts of the anglosphere and in different generations because they're there lurking under the surface.
@@saiyajedi I'm from Kansas and I never realized that we used a glottal stop for mountain and written! Very cool!
@@sluggo206I think it's less about underlying representation and more about general phonetic processes (here, it's ‘lenition’)
In the ending bit of the video, it’s insane how much I fully hear the entire word “can” at full speed only to hear just a single consonant when it’s slowed down.
For real
omg quag my man is that really you 😭 you might never see this but damn long time no see lol
@@GDZipper 👀 it is me
I think she's saying "you'd certainly argue" (you would).
One thing you can always be certain about before playing any of Dr. Lindsey's videos is that it'll leave no stone unturned. More power to your elbow, sir.
Oh man I _can't_ emphasize enough how important this video can be to non-native speakers.
This may actually be THE most important topic that gets absolutely completly omitted in any kind of course material I've ever seen.
I've picked it up intuitively over more than a decade, but I wish it was explained to me early as clearly as this video does. It would have avoided SO MUCH confusion. Fantastic work!
Hey, at least you can feel proud that you learned this the same way that we native speakers do. None of our English classes teach this, either!
As my students said after a lesson on stress in English, "will this be on the test?". I told them there would be no questions aimed at testing unstressed versus stressed syllables on the test, but that they would be included in all spoken English that they would ever see.
If you do something just for the sake of a test, you gonna forget right after you leave the exam room.
@@ilghiz That's not always true.
@@ilghiz nah, I still remember Soh-cah-toa
Ever "see"?
@@debrucey Very good point!
I’ve noticed that people often write “too” in place of “to” and thinking about it, it seems to be in places where the word is stressed rather than the weak form which makes sense phonetically.
I have a problem where I might be thinking about one word but my fingers end up typing a completely different word with vaguely similar spelling. For example, I might intend to type “finger” but write “feeling” or something along those lines. Anyway, even though I know the difference between “there” “their” and “they’re”, I often type the wrong one for this reason. Or I type “it’s” instead of “its” very frequently, even though I know the difference
@@nickpatella1525 I think frequency effects probably play a role. Speaking and writing are so rapid that they have to be more automated than we often realise. Our minds/fingers will complete a word (like predictive text) with the most likely option, even if it's wrong.
@@DrGeoffLindsey Definitely, like you try to initiate one sequence of muscle memory but initiate a different but similar one by accident
@@nickpatella1525 I've been writing more than I used to recently, and I noticed that quite often, I will write the stressed word twice instead of an unstressed word in front of a stressed one. For example, "you have think think" instead of "you have to think". Also, my theres/itses get messed up, and I notice my fingers typed them before my thoughts got to them, often, when they start a new clause I I pause a moment to form that clause in my head before typing it. And, LOL, that "I I" in the previous sentence should have been "and I"---I did NOT do that on purpose.
I notice myself doing these sorts of things and I haven't seen it from others, and it's always been very baffling to me. I'm thrilled to see that there are others like me, so thank you and the others in this thread for sharing. This felt like an epiphany.
I was reading an article about how negation evolved in French from just being ne + verb ("not + verb” in English) to ne + verb + pas (loosely “not + verb + one step” in English) to nowadays how they drop the ne in spoken french and just use pas. Just as I was thinking how funny that is that French could evolve so drastically and so recently, the article pointed out that English is doing a similar thing right now with “going to”.
"I’m GOING TO see my friend" (by travelling to their location)
"I’m gonna see my friend" (in the future, but not necessarily by travelling)
Always “I’m going to the store", but never “I’m gonna the store”. It’s like the weak form is becoming a modal verb to indicate the future tense rather than motion.
You say "gonna" is becoming a modal verb to indicate future tense, distinct from "going to", but I think the change happened decades ago. Prolly still gonna be stragglers tho, ngl
"I'm gonna the store" sounds like you're gonna rob it.
@@troyhailey Many speakers distinguish "gonna" future tense vs. location change usage by different pronunciation of the "o" vowel. "I'm gōnna see my friend" with the long "o" emphasizing that "go" is changing location, vs. "I'm gənna see my friend" where the schwa pronunciation of the "o" establishes that "gonna" is purely indicating future tense.
(yeah, I know I'm not using IPA fully here, just for the first vowel in "gonna")
@@troyhailey counterpoint: The 'to' in the infinitive is not required to be pronounced strongly just because it's part of the infinitive. E.g.,
I wanna see my friend.
Also, I'm not sure the 'to' in the second instance is a preposition. I'm not going 'to my friend's [house]', I'm going 'to see' my friend. Take "I'm going TO go TO bed. The first 'to' is definitely part of the infinitive while the second 'to' is definitely a preposition.
@@troyhailey I don't agree that counts as a preposition, but oh well.
In English, the rhythm of a sentence indicates the relative importance of different words and clauses. In Romance languages, this is done instead with stress, while Romance speakers usually speak with a very even rhythm. This is why you can tell right away if a non-native speaker's accent is from a Romance country - particularly the case with Hispanophones in America - they speak in a mono-rhythmic way, and this tends to stick around even if they speak good English otherwise, particularly if they speak Spanish in the home or with their other relatives.
I love being able to see the Daleks and Theresa May and a church choir as pronunciation examples, all in one video! :)
I feel like that sudden, extreme close-up of May should have come with a warning, though. I physically recoiled from my phone screen!
@@DavidBeddard Bit harsh on the very best of the last four prime ministers! 😂
@@timtranslates We'll remember her when the west wind moves among the fields of wheat...
@@DavidBeddard Isn't that one of the lines the Archbishop of Canterbury says on Remembrance Sunday?
Archbishop: At the going down of the sun and in the morning; When the west wind moves along the fields of wheat.
All: We will remember her.
@@timtranslates More like the Archbishop of Banterbury, methinks 😉
I'm totally in awe of the examples you give. How on earth do you manage to track them all down, from such a variety of different times and locations?
I suspect YouGlish.
@@Drabkikker THIS IS WHY I SCROLL DOWN AND READ COMMENTS! Holy moly what a killer resource that YouGlish is! I am going to show that to my ESL as soon as humanly possible.
@@JorWat25 Didn't know about YouGlish. I'm going to be using that a lot now.
I was guessing downloading transcripts and some Ctrl F
@@JorWat25 insanely good and niche resource
As a speaker of American English I think even we struggle with can/can’t sometimes. I can definitely recall being asked or asking whether someone said “can” or “can’t”.
Slightly off topic but interesting thing I thought I would share. In Singapore, the colloquial form of English, "Singlish" (Singaporean English), makes a distinction between some of these forms using tones instead of strong and weak forms, likely due to influence from Chinese. So "of" and "off" are both pronounced "ɒf", but with "of" receiving a low tone and "off" receiving a high tone. Same thing with "to" (low tone) and "too/two" (high tone), and "there (existential constructions)" (low tone) and "there (demonstrative)" (high tone). And Singlish doesn't reduce any vowels to schwa. Very interesting imo, there are many other differences I won't say here.
I don't think all Singaporeans speak like that, but I might be wrong. I'm sorry if this sounds offensive but when I first heard Singlish spoken, it sounded like a creole as a result of imperfect learning of English as a second language.
@@belle_pommeThat isn’t singlish though
I'm so glad someone brought up Singlish! The other funny thing is that "can" is a full sentence in Singlish. "Can we get the bus there?" "Can!"
So efficient!
And interestingly to the point of this video, the opposite sentence is not the contraction, it's the full 2-syllable form which Dr. Geoff correctly notes that most native English speakers don't use very often. "Can we all fit in one taxi?" "Cannot!"
Very clear and never confused with the positive form.
The other thing that I picked up when I lived in Singapore, is using "correct" as a clear, unambiguous way to agree with a negative statement. For example, if someone says "This is not going to work", then responding "yes" is ambiguous. Do you mean "yes it will work" or do you mean "yes, you're right, it won't work." I noticed that Singaporeans, if they want to agree with a negative statement, will say "correct", and it's very clear that they mean, "correct, it will not work". I've adopted it into my own speech and it's very effective.
@fmkwvejf I mean, considering no question was asked, it's a bit weird to respond with yes at all. If i were agreeing with their statement I'd probably say something like "yeah", "yup", or "yeah, it probably won't". Whereas if I wanted to contradict them I'd probably say something like "nah, it'll be fine".
Either way I'd never respond with just "yes" as a way of contradicting their statement.
@@fmkwvejf I don't think responding "yes" in that situation would ever imply "yes, it will work" that is just straight up incorrect english.
I was soooo relieved about the CAN/CAN’T issue when I heard an English native speaker ask another one but from another English-speaking country « did you say can or can’t? »
Before that I thought I was the only one (as a Frenchman) to have hearing problems
Yeah. Also when clarifying, we tend to use the citation form, so to really distinguish them, we have to emphasize the n (by lingering on it) or the t (by aspirating it)
I can't include every possible caveat in my videos or they'd never end! But of course you're right. Natives have can/'t misunderstandings too. Perhaps that caveat really should have been in the video. Pardon!
@@DrGeoffLindsey - oh well you were already very clear about American English in your video.
The confusion is shocking for a French native speaker because we are VERY clear about negative forms. « JE PEUX » cannot be mistaken for « JE NE PEUX PAS » (or in casual rapid speech « shPEU » versus « shpeuPA»)
@@sebastienh1100 on the topic of french, i saw that in casual speech french people drop the "ne" like "je peux pas" and "t'inquiète pas" (or just "t'inquiète")
@@notwithouttext - yes. But dropping the NE is a grammatical mistake and never to be written or used in good level speech. And on top of being slang, « t’inquiète » is a very very specific case (imperative, and a meaning so very narrow that nothing else would make sense than a negative). Nothing close to the can/can’t anomaly. For instance we’d say « avance PAS » instead of « n’avance pas ». But never « n’avance » because it’d be too ambiguous.
Fantastic video. I think even most native English speakers have no idea weak forms are a thing beyond informal speech. They certainly don't teach you about them in school.
I am in awe of how you’ve found all these clips to play that demonstrate your examples so clearly!
Its super easy, theres a website where you write whatever you want in the search bar and it will spit out a TH-cam video of a person saying exactly what you wrote.
OMG I didn't realise, ok much less impressed now, but thank you for the videos all the same! :D @@Albertmars32
What’s the name of the site?
Your comparison of short weak-form words with affixes rings a bell with me because, studying 18th-and 19th-century letters, I noticed that many such words were very commonly attached (run together or joined by a linking line): I_am, of_the, at_home, and_back (written: +back), be_bound etc. It is overwhelmingly such sequences as in the examples that are linked. It seems writers subconsciously saw these sequences as forming a unit and reproduced them as such in their writing.
Fascinating. Can you refer me to something online by yourself or someone else, with images? If so, geoff@englishspeechservices.com would be best. Thanks
Damn, 18th century people were already writing in snake_case before programming was even a thing lmao
I used to work-in the US in the Chicago area-with a native Chinese (possibly HK) speaker who learned UK English well as a second language, except she had a very distinct way of saying "can not", with what I now understand is the weak form of can, followed by a strongly emphasized NOT. Her way of avoiding ambiguity seems more logical than stressing the CAN, and in any case was an interesting quirk.
As a native English speaker from the US, I use this form of “can not” when I answer a question someone asks like “Can you...?” and I want to make sure my answer is unambiguous.
This is the way most native speakers pronounce _cannot_ though.
@@pidgeotroll A "no" should also work, tho
@@PghFlash Not always. "Can you see, or am I in the way?" => "No" is ambiguous, and so needs additional information.
@@PhlarxI would probably go with “yeah you’re in the way”or “nah you’re fine”
Finally I can explain why I have trouble distinguishing “can” from “can’t” with some of the non-native speakers I work with. The only explanation i could think of was them dropping the “t”, but that doesn’t check out because I also do that (often more so than them). But actually it’s because they don’t use the weak form of “can”, so it sounds identical to their “can’t”.
As a non-native speaker I have so much trouble pronouncing them differently when speaking casually that I just give up and use mostly "I'm able" or "I'm unable" instead
Do the people you work with use a rising tone when they pronounce "can"? Because theoretically you could pronounce "can" with a long _a_ and still distinguish it from "can't" by the former not having a rising tone, ie not being stressed.
Body language plays a big role in how things sound as well. I used to have trouble with Indian coworkers because they'd shake their head when agreeing and not their head when disagreeing. Say, "I CAN," with a single nod for emphasis and then the exact same thing with a single shake. Even though the sounds are the same, your mind will hear them differently. It's wonderfully strange.
@@davidp.7620 It might be worth practicing pronouncing the unstressed "can" as just the consonants in as short and weak a breath as you can and barely at that. Basically try to say, "I can do it." almost like it's two words, "Icndo it." You can even mostly drop the C. Maybe try to get almost as close as you can to just saying "I do it" without entirely erasing "can" from the sentence. Just the barest hint of the word is probably enough... though you don't have to go that far.
@@davidp.7620 which is not a bad idea. if the listener don't understand what you said, there is no point in repeating that word over and over again.
use synonyms, that's what they are for.
At 16:56, you say “I find it remarkable”, and I believe you. 😊
I love how much you seem to love this stuff. And now I do too, after watching.
18 minutes flew by.
Thank you.
Thank you!
When I was learning English in primary school in Poland, we were taught that the pronounciation of can't/can are different; "can't" is pronounced with the long/short but distinct ah sound, whereas "can" would always have the shwa sound (though to be fair back then we were taught to just pronounce it like the Polish "e", such as in the word "bet"). After watching this video it now makes so much sense!
Also I love how much examplary dialogue you can pull from the archives, Dr Lindsey :D
Thanks Geoff! I'm an ESL teacher and I struggle with this all the time. I honestly find it baffling that textbooks don't usually even mention this distinction, especially early on with the introduction of 'can'. I'm definitely sending this video to many of my students.
I'm also an ESL teacher. All my textbooks do mention this, but it is usually a tiny section at the tail end of some units, tucked in among the supplemental material that many teachers skip because they don't have time and need to move on to the next unit. Those sections also don't usually get listed in the content pages or index of the textbook. I think this is in part because teaching speech and pronunciation through the medium of a book is rather difficult. Most textbook pages are made up of reading exercises and comprehension exercises. The speaking sections just contain a few discussion points with no guidance. The textbook authors expect the teacher to provide speech training. This demotion of speech within the textbook can lead to some teachers also reducing speech practice within their lessons. In my ESL teacher training, teaching stress as well as teaching strong forms and weak forms were covered. It should be included in your lessons even if it isn't explicitly prescribed in the textbook.
For example, Side By Site 3rd Edition by Steven J Molinsky and Bill Bliss book 2 page 18, has a fifth of a page at the very end of unit 2 covering the weak form of "for" as in "Let's make a pizza for lunch" but gives no IPA to show what the weak form sounds like and has no associated audio file for the students to learn by themselves. It is just left for the teacher to know what the book is suggesting and include it in their lesson even though it is 5 pages later in the book than where "let's make ___ for ___" was taught.
best thing to teach to ESL students is to use different words if the listener does not understand what was said, and not repeat the same word again and again that the listener has trouble understanding.
so, instead of saying can't, use "can not" and instead of can, use "able to" etc.
@@davidjacobs8558 'Able to' and 'possible to' will mark them as forever foreign.
As a non native speaker I'm quite amazed how well I can understand the weak forms without even realizing it, but I've certainly had problems with can/can't.
Tbh even as a native english speaker its sometimes hard to differenciate the American can/can't! Though with enough exposure it become second nature.
I always struggled differentiating can from can’t, or leave form live. I always thought that this sutelties of strong and weak pronunciation were just accidental, not so meaningful! Thank you very much for clarifying all this.
One of the weirdest little aspects of learning another language, for me, has been actively deciding what accent/dialect you want in your second+ language. Our native language accent is mostly determined by the accents of the people we were around most as babies, but learning a second+ language you get to choose your accent / dialect to some extent, by picking teachers from certain areas or just picking dialects when your teachers explain differences between dialects - for example, deciding if you want to learn Spanish how it's spoken in Spain, Mexico, Argentina, Puerto Rico, etc. etc.
Honestly though!
It's very weird indeed. I'm from Sweden where most english teachers speak with almost an obnoxious exaggerated posh british accent. "Good morning class" was always "Good Mooowning claaws". Despite this, my view of normal "serious english" was an American non-region specific accent. However, I often jokingly imitate other accents like Cockney, Scottish, Irish and Australian and I find them much easier to pronounce than the American. Americans have such gutteral R:s that I can easily get tripped up when speaking fast, while a cockney accent works fine. However, I can't help but feel like I'm "faking" an accent when I speak anything other than American english, so I never do when I try to be serious. It's quite bizarre when you think about it, since I can't fake an accent if I was never raised with one to begin with. That's the bilingual dilemma.
That's super interesting @@Adski975 ! I wonder why you feel less like you're "faking it" with the American accent 🤔. We Americans know that we sound utterly ridiculous when imitating the Brits. However, for some reason, we usually do not notice when British actors affect American accents.
@@SmallFry900 I notice. Unless they're really good, that is. I remember reading one commenter on TH-cam congratulating Stephen Fry on his American accent and I wondered if that person was from N. America, or had ever heard one of us speak. I mean, seriously...he's not very good. Loads of others are not very good either, but they seem to think they are.
On the other hand, his best bud Hugh Laurie is so good at fake American it's jarring to hear his natural speech if you're used to him as House. House doesn't sound like where you're from but he does sound like someone from another part of the country. Maybe someone born in Indiana or another Midwest state but educated in the Northeast or the UK.
Very interesting with many relevant examples, thanks! Sometimes I find the strong form useful: Why do Americans preserve food for long periods of time in containers? Because they can.
I can't tune a piano but I can tuna fish!
@@nicholasvinen i pronounce that /kən tʉwnə fɪʃ/ but i /kən/ see it being strong, in which it's only distinguished by the glottal stop
@@notwithouttext I don't know if I hear the glottal stop so much as I hear the n shorter in the first and longer in the second.
@@ZipplyZane that too, pre-fortis clipping i think
@@notwithouttext I actually figured out after that post that I sometimes don't even actually say the [n] with "can't." I nasalize the vowel, but never quite get my tongue up to the roof of my mouth before I cut if off.
I've noticed about myself that "can" often gets shortened to something like "g'n" most of the time, as in "yeah I g'n try." It's interesting to see that phenomenon contextualized.
Alot of times it gets shortened to a very fast "kin" like "eyekin do that"
I remember learning English for the first time at age 9 and our teacher spoke with an American-ish accent. When she told us about can't, i was furious. But over the years, i unconsciously started relying on context and intonation and for years now i don't have a problem understanding. However, i think I'll be paying more attention to how my brain interprets can/can't.
It's the same with the clicking Ks - I cannot unhear it now and it's slowly driving me mad. Thanks for that, Dr Geoff!
“I know that one passed” versus “I know that one passed.” Just blew my mind.
This should be required viewing for English teachers. The topic is almost never explicitly taught and obviously critical to both "sounding native" and even communicating correctly.
I really love how you point out features that most people have no idea they are saying until they are shown, and at the same time emphasize that it's normal. In casual speech, pedantic people will point these things out in a critical way.
I have been trying to find an answer to the can/can't confusion for a couple of decades now. Most of the people I asked either never noticed the confusion this creates or thought I was a complete nutter. I finally got an answer in the comment section in one of the previous videos on this channel. I am so happy to finally know why this occurs. Thank you Dr. Lindsey and the commenter who originally answered my question
I'm a non-native speaker from France, but my accent has quite a few Americanisms. I usually pronounce "can't" with the American vowel, but that has led to confueion, so whenever it arises, I repeat myself with the British vowel, and a clearly articulated T for good measure.
This channel's videos are so well done! The clips of native speakers doing the thing in context are so effective at driving home the point. It's an approach that's sorely lacking in most linguistics videos.
Yup, my Czech students speak like androids. And recently, three middle-aged students have told me that "contractions are ONLY spoken, NEVER written down", with one saying that the use of contractions in an informal letter was a mistake. As I am not a native speaker of English, students sometimes refuse to believe that I might know more about how English works than they do. They argue that the present perfect simple does not exist (because the have "never seen it") or that "family house" is "obviously" the right term for a detached house. They are Czech and their English teacher is Czech, ergo, their level of expertise must be roughly the same, right?
What happened to respect for the teacher?
@@Moses_VIITo be fair, the comment clearly demonstrates that teachers can be wrong. IMO it's OK to disagree with teacher but then you better be able to back yourself up with a trustworthy source.
Just buy an english novel highlight all the non dialog uses of contractions.
Interestingly, I’ve heard a lot about such troubles with learning English from Czech teachers and students, and only a little from other countries. What's up with that?
Your English here is very fluid. If you had not identified yourself as non-native, I would not have noticed. Upon further inspection, there's a sort of break in the flow in the middle, some tricky iambs and vowels and s sounds all together that maybe belie you've done more writing than speaking. I think your students should acknowledge your fluency 😂
You even have short segments of examples, Their brains are shorting out on English. This is classic! Thank You Dr. Lindsey.
I CAN'T imagine the effort you put through to gather all these fantastic examples!Kudos!
Loved this video. Use of weak forms is also a way of distinguishing between native and non-native english. Speaking as somebody who grew up in London, I've also noticed that the use of weak form (and the schwa in general) is much more prevalent among white speakers when compared to native non-white speakers, of any age. Absolutely fascinating stuff. Thanks as always for the upload, Dr Geoff!
Maybe somehow related to Carribean english not having schwa?
@@frertmekyer9747 i'm sure it affects that group, but one particularly prevalent example in London is people whose parents/grandparents came from the Indian subcontinent. For example, "cup of tea" /kʌpəv tiː/ in SSB may become the strong /kʌp ɒv tiː/ in non-white english, even several generations in.
Interestingly, one might hear Rishi Sunak say "role of" in "the *role of* the teacher" as /rəʊləv/ and in comparison one might hear Priti Patel say the strong /rəʊl'ɒv/
@@frertmekyer9747 As a non-native speaker, may I ask how Carribbean dialect is connected to the speech styles of some folks in England?
@@unpiccolocuore @unpiccolocuore The wave of immigration from the Caribbean to Britain in the years following WWII had a big influence on the dialects now spoken by many ethnic minorities in the UK.
@@orlkorrect And it's called MLE.
Wonderful video! Wonderful audio examples and great job using Spanish forms to connect that the English forms are not homophones but homographs
the discussion about that and that and have and have reminded me of how "to be" in English captures all sorts of properties, whereas languages like Spanish have "estoy" and "soy" and Chinese "是" and "在", for instance.
This is wonderful and brilliantly explained. As a non native, I hadn't noticed this in my speech, or if I was using it correctly. Now I understand why in the past there was miscommunication when I talked to natives, 😅 years back. Thank you Dr. Lindsey 👍 🎉
For some American speakers, the strong form of "can" can instead be pronounced as "ken", providing a vowel contrast with "can't". I have heard this most often in speakers from the Philadelphia area and other parts of the East Coast, but this pronunciation may be far more widespread. On another note, my favorite weak form reduction of "can" is when it appears between two velar consonants (e.g. "Patrick can go with you") where "can" is pronounced something like [ʔŋ].
I can't read the phonetic alphabet but when I said the sentence it immediately became clear what the symbols represent. Very cool example
Lol can confirm re: Philly area. TIL “ken” isn’t universally American
I heard [ʔ ŋ] in" we can get... " &" You can go... ". I wasn't so sure and I needed someone to agree with what I heard. Am I correct?
I'm from Kentucky, but my accent is more broadly midwestern. I also display a vowel contrast between "can" and "can't," but it's more that I pronounce "can" as in the sentence "I can do that," as "kʔn" and "can't" as something like "kanʔ"
@@littlesnowflakepunk855 From central Canada: for me sounds in "can" and "can't" are only slightly different: the vowel itself is very slightly different but the one in "can't" is also a bit longer.
Something your video has made the think of: I've noticed as a Scotsman living in England is that the word "nae" gets missed by a fair few of the natives, for example I'd say can'nae rather than can't and it can lead to situations where the negative intent of a sentence gets lost to the listener.
As an aside, there are regions of England that do something similar. "Canna" rather than "can't" was fairly common in Shropshire in the 1960s. There was a joking expression I heard at school: "You munna say canna, it inna proper". "Canna" was pronounced with a strong vowel, not a schwa, exactly as Geoff argues in the video.
As a Scot you'll probably never proounce "for" and "four" the same.
Great point. I have to limit the content of each video, but I would have liked to mention Scots/ScotE several times. (Of course ScotE 'can' and 'can't' typically have the same vowel, like AmE.)
@@janetmackinnon3411 Good point. Can't include everything!
@@DrGeoffLindsey You make a pretty good try! Thank you.
I love the examples and the replays you do to illustrate your points.
They make things so much clearer.
Also, as a non-native speaker, I'm quite happy with myself that I'm apparently proficient enough to have been able to tell 'can' from 'can't' in all of your examples, despite the fact that I wasn't aware of how I was doing it before. I definitely remember times when that wasn't the case and things got confusing.
This has quickly become one of my absolute favorite channels on TH-cam. As a native English currently trying to learn French, I have become increasingly interested in the subtleties between spoken and written language, so thank you for shedding light on elements of my native tongue that I have never even considered before.
It's curious that native English speakers do often mix up "to" and "too" in writing, even though they apparently intuitively distinguish between them in speech.
Also, as a mostly-native American English speaker, I've definitely had in-person confusions between "can" and "can't" with other native/mostly-native speakers because one of us wasn't sure whether the other was emphasizing "can" or saying "can't". which would go on for several rounds, as one of us asked "can or can't?" and the other would repeat the same exact ambiguous sound.
I did assume that Barack Obama was saying "children CAN flourish", with emphasis, at the beginning of the video.
In a sense the clip at the start is a cheat. Without context, we naturally lean to 'can', esp. when 'children' and 'flourish' go together semantically.
@@DrGeoffLindsey So how do we distinguish "can't" from emphatic "can"?
@@ihsahnakerfeldt9280 just from context I'd imagine
@@ihsahnakerfeldt9280 “can’t” is usually appended to the beginning of the following word, while emphatic “can” never is (and has a noticeable pause after it).
The real screwy thing is distinguishing between “can’t” and unemphatic “can” pronounced with a full vowel, which usually sound the same.
@@DrGeoffLindsey Obama has little linguistic subversions like that throughout all his speeches. He loves spinning a turn of phrase to keep his audience engaged.
Good stuff. I was just saying "I like tht that TH-camr Geoff Lindsey makes good videos".
Hear hear!
Brilliantly described. I cannot think of anything missing. And those comparisons in slow motion really show the difference. Perfect!
what impresses me honestly is how MANY examples you kind find of what you aim to demonstrate. That must take so MANY hours of searching
In NYC stressed can, "Yes, I can" has historically had a different vowel that "can't" whereas even 20 miles west in NJ, they're the same. But that's disappearing. However, there's still a difference because in NYC we preserve the glottal stop in 'can't' pretty categorically, whereas in NJ they don't, we distinguish the two. It's happened more than a few times, I've been confused about whether someone from west of NYC is saying strong "can" or "can't." However, that never happens with New Yorkers.
So many details that I can't get into one video. Accent differences in this area are worth another video.
@@DrGeoffLindsey totally, but that's based on my anecdotal observations. NJ is remarkably unstudied dialectologically.
Which vowels do you use for stressed can and can't? That's very fascinating to me. Do you know the IPA?
I absolutely love your lessons about pronunciation, weak from and the like! It also helps me understanding English better (as a German).
Great work! I really appreciated you taking the time to put this together and share your insights. Keep up the great work!
AMAZING content. I’ve never seen this covered in any sort of English learning material before, yet it’s one of the most crucial aspects of reaching that native-level pronunciation. Will definitely check out your other videos. Thank you!
I am native speaker from England and i usually can't tell the difference in american pronounced "can" and "can't" and i often have to ask friends, which speak with an american accent, to repeat themselves because of this
Thanks a lot for confirming that I am not hearing impaired as a Frenchman ❤ when doing the same mistake
Even we Americans don't understand each other sometimes, and have to ask which one was meant.
@@artugert It's true, should've made this point in the video.
I can attest to the fact that understanding whether or not one American understands another’s can or can’t is very hit or miss. For me I have to listen to the vowel to tell, and even then I’m not always right.
This is the sort of video that makes me wish that I enjoyed talking to people enough to have gone into linguistics. Well done, informative, and entertaining.
FINALLY someone makes a comprehensive and detailed video about this phenomemon, kudos sir!!
It's really difficult with english as a second or third language to reach a level when "that that, do do, of off, can can't" just flows naturally when speaking but it's SO important for sounding natural. Thanks again Geoff :)
This is mind blowing knowledge. Thank you for putting the rules so plainly.
Excellent video!
I think "on" is never reduced to /ən/ to preserve contrast with "in" as well.
If reduced, "it's on my car" would be nearly indistinguishable from "it's in my car".
Even "in" remains strong; although it's similar to /ən/, the difference is clear enough to distinguish them.
Compare "The dog in the car" to "The dog and the car" for example
To my CanE native ear it would also sound ambiguous with -in(g)
As an American, I think the /t/ in "can't" is more often pronounced as a glottal stop instead of being dropped, which is also often an important part of distinguishing them. That /nt/ coalescence mainly happens intervocalically, like t-voicing/flapping, and I think I myself would actually prefer "[kẽə̯̃ʔ] imagine" to "[kẽə̯̃n̆] imagine," though that may be because I also often use a glottal stop instead of a flap across word boundaries in general. On Youglish, I think that, of the first 22 instances of "can't", more of the preconsonantal ones sound like [kẽə̯̃(n)ʔ] that [kẽə̯̃n]. That said, word-stress is probably a bigger factor, and it's one I've never thought about, so thank you for making this video!
Just wanted to pop in and say that this is just about how I would transcribe how I say "can't" (native Eng speaker from California) and it was amusing to spot another person with similar thinking/pronunciation
The problem with the "can't imagine" example is that if you opt for the glottal stop as a realization of the "n't," you end up with two glottal stops colliding because the first syllable of "imagine" would then also contain a glottal stop which is a bit exhausting to pronounce and flows unnaturally. I bet most people would go for the second variation.
@@ihsahnakerfeldt9280Imagine starts with an /ɪm/ thouɡh not a ɡlottal stop
@@ihsahnakerfeldt9280 [kẽə̯̃ʔ. ni magine] is no?
Absolutely brilliant video. Your explanation on off/on always being strong because of of /and having weakly pronounced vowels just left me totally in awe.
Thank you! A lot of people are very resistant to my explanation
Haven't commented before but these videos are always so fascinating and informative! Great channel to learn about the English language and I always recommend it to non-native English speakers I meet as a fun and informative learning source!
Loved you getting John McEnroe to explain English pronunciation.
I loved that clip too!
crazy to learn that I've almost never said the word "can't" in my life even though I mean it all the time. This was one of my favorite videos yet.
It's always interesting to hear about these things that I clearly incorporated into my speech through lots of exposure and practice but never been explicitly taught. Feels like this probably should have been mentioned in the years of English classes I had in school.
Thank you for such an eye opening, thorough video. It's rare to feel that sense of detailed understanding in such a short amount of time. This was incredibly concise for how much was covered!
In some of the " n't " forms, the American difference between "nn" and "nt" between two vowels is that "nt" is a nasal flap, which British people do not have. For instance, when a British person says "wanna", it sounds like it would if the word were actually spelled that way.
I can think of two minimal or near-minimal pairs: between "inner national" and "international", or between "Antarctic" and "AN Arctic", with the "an" emphasized and so not weakened.
every time i hear an american say antarctica, they simply skip the first "c" and say antartica, which is so weird to me that i can't focus on what they are saying anymore.
@@tru7hhimself I'm British, and I think I was well into adulthood before I even realised that that _c_ was there. (No spell-checkers were built into our writing technology in those days.) Everyone I knew said it the way you complain that Americans do. Perhaps it was because I eventually learned that "arctic" (and of course "antarctic") came from "arctos" (meaning bear) that I started putting the _c_ into my writing and speech. But even now, pronouncing it feels as if it might count as slightly pedantic.
@@kgbgb3663 so then it might be a general feature of english instead of "sloppy" pronunciation in america. do you have a rhotic accent? i figured the "k" might be difficult to pronounce between "r" and "t" for english speakers, but that shouldn't be an issue for non-rhotic speakers.
I've been trying to figure out what IPA to use for my nt sounds. there's some sort of stop there that I've been sloppily labeling a glottal stop but I think there may be some nasalisation as well. I've not heard of the nasal flap before so that's something for me to look into
I always love your videos and this one was no exception! Something I (native American English speaker from the Midwest) have never thought about before but now that you mentioned it I'm sure I'll notice it all the time.
I thought of this sentence to think about this stuff:
"Do this to two to four for emphasis."
Not a great sentence but I can't come up with natural ideas.
I love that even the two "to"s are different (depending on the speaker).
Having watched the first videos on weak forms, this is what really makes it click for me. It seems to be such a subtle detail but I can almost guarantee that this will change my accent so much. I've been learning English for 12 years now, but it's only recently that I've been trying to sound more native. Your videos are a great help, thank you so much!
Extremely useful as always. Thank you!
world class video-you're quite the next level, sir! incorporating this valuable knowledge some twenty-odd years ago when I learned English as a second language would've helped me like a ton!
This is actually a masterclass on weak forms! Thanks so much for sharing, sir!
Great video, as always I am amazed by the level of work that gets put into finding real life examples of these observations
Really happy about your progress on the platform! You've developed your own style and it's only getting better. Keep it up! 🙂
I have an unrelated question about the pronunciation of a word (for anyone to answer). American-Danish actor Viggo Mortensen, in the Fellowship of the Ring (2001), pronounces "other" in "... it has no other master" almost like "ether" or "aether". I chalked it up to him being born Danish (after all that's hardly his fault) until I learned that he's half-American - born and raised in NY.
I didn't think much of it until I heard famous streamer Ludwig pronouncing the word like Aragorn time after time. I haven't asked Ludwig why he pronounces it with an e/æ/ä sound or if he's even aware of it. He grew up in New Hampshire, as far as I know. I haven't found any useful information searching the internet, and asking my American friends hasn't been fruitful either.
This viewerbase seems quite knowledgeable, so it seems reasonable to ask here.
Hopefully we get some answers!
the strong e-like sound in new yorker accents stems from it being the only place in the USA colonised by an other country than Britland. The Dutch vowels stuck quite strongly through everything and I would guess that that's why
I’ve heard a front realization of the “other” vowel before - something like [ɛ̈ðɚ], I think from Southerners. I think it may related to a larger phenomenon of STRUT vowel centralization, but in this word, the vowel has for some reason overshot schwa and neared the DRESS vowel.
The scene initially strikes me as just a fronted pronunciation of the STRUT vowel in "other". However, after listening to some interviews of Viggo Mortensen, it seems that his accent is influenced primarily by the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, which makes sense given the formative years he spent in Upstate New York (Watertown). Despite this, he seems to use a variety of pronunciations for the STRUT vowel, ranging from a more expected back vowel to a more unexpected front vowel. In the video titled "Viggo Mortensen talks about Tolkien & filming experience on LOTR", you can hear him use a similar front pronunciation for the word "son" at the beginning. Overall I would probably chalk this up to his unique background, spending time in many different countries.
James and John were taking an english test and were asked to write a sentence about a man who was sick.
James wrote, "The man had had a cold." John wrote, "The man had a cold."
James passed the test and John failed.
In other words, "James, while John had had, 'had', had had, 'had had'; 'had had' had had a better effect than 'had' had on the teacher.
James, while John həd had "had", həd had "had had"; "had had" həd had a better effect than "had" həd had on the teacher.
citation form!
"James, while John _d had, 'had', _d had, '_d had'; '_d had' _d had a better effect than 'had' had on the teacher. '_d' being the weak auxiliary verb (as haber in Spanish) and 'had' being the possessive verb (as tener in Spanish).
@@J7Handle you got one part wrong, in citation form _d had becomes had had. so
_d had "_d had"
should become
_d had "had had"
@@notwithouttext I would argue not use citation form there since you're not citing the word, you're citing the phrase. And the phrase is '_d had'. Though I'm pretty sure there's no actual standard for this, since you'd only hear it in speech, not see it in writing. If I were saying that sentence myself, I would say '_d had', so in my accent, at least, that's what it is.
@@J7Handle oh interesting! to me, "had had" has a contrast with the original "had", so the first word is emphasized (it distinguishes the simple past with the past perfect.)
This is insanely valuable. Thank you Dr Lindsey.
After decades of exposure to anglophone world's strange mumblings I c'now finally get the distinction between can and can't! Thank you!
Impeccable as always. By far my favourite linguist 👏👏👏👏👏👏
I just mainly want to thank you for the subtitles! They were extremely well done. And you removed them during the example-videos. I know it's like "duh, big deal" - but as someone slightly hard of hearing and preferring to watch absolutely everything with subtitles, so I can catch every word and focus better (helps with ADHD too) - this is unfortunately not as common as it should be for people like me. It's like a gift from God whenever we see subtitles like this, I don't need to rewind 15 times to try and figure out what someone said, only to still not hear it and having to move on. I can absorb everything.
The worst thing is when a creator has disabled CC for a video, I will never understand why they do that, or why it's even an option? It's so unnecessary that it often infuriates me when I can't hear the funny parts of a video, for example. What infuriates me is not understanding why. It literally makes no good difference to ban the CC in a video whatsoever. I hate it a lot.
Edit: Definitely subscribed. There are sooo many, countless times I've wondered about where exactly we hear the different in can/can't when it's without a clearly audible T. So today, this wondering finally ends. I think I would have wondered about this for the rest of my life. Lol. Thank you for the video.
I love all these clips you’re taking from everywhere.
It's interesting to note that one way we can often tell that speech is being generated synthetically (at least in English) is the inappropriate minimization of prepositions at the end of clauses as in "What is it for? Even synthetic speech that is really good in other respects of inflection, pacing, tonality, will often nearly drop the "for" at the end of the previous question.
Also, I can think of an exception to the there/there strong/weak pairing. "There's no such thing." You certainly could minimize the "there" but especially for emphasis, I certainly would not. I might if I were speaking in someone else's voice; people do drop it.
This was interesting, thank you. Your video that used the Pink Panther to talk about rhythim got referred to my university poetry professor as a teaching tool. She loved it.
i absolutely adore your videos. I teach english to spanish speakers (as a language exchange, so im not officially a teacher), and i always find myself sending them your videos so they can understand the language better.
ive recently graduated from medical school, but i'm thinking that i'll have a career change one day and teach english with proper credentials. i just find languages so fascinating and your videos certainly inspired me to learn more about the way we speak!
Okey, so I'm a non native speaker, and I would sometimes get this right, and sometimes I'd get this wrong, but you, Sir, just gave me the key to understanding what I was doing wrong.
It's very common for other people in my country to not be able to understand me when I use weak forms while I had full on conversations with native speakers no problem.
This is one of my favourite videos that you’ve put out - clear and enlightening!
Thank you so much Dr. Geoff! This video is so informative!
this video is bloody excellent Dr. Lindsey. I am showing this to my advanced students of phonetics tomorrow! Going over word stress in the English rhythm has been quite difficult especially going over weak forms and homograph heterophones. This video is just what I needed. Thank you!!!
Hope it works!
In the "that" example, I realized I often pronounce them both strongly quite often. The larger difference is in the intonation/stress/rhythm of how I say it, which is probably aided a little bit by context from the particular conversation.
In "I know [that one passed]", the stress is on the "that" (and I might even add a weak "conjunction that" before it to further emphasize it - edit: you pointed that out right afterward!). But in "[I know] that [one passed]", there is more stress on "know" and "one"
(American English is my native)
What a well produced gem of instruction! I especially enjoyed the (original) Star Trek clip. "I ... was ... not ... human"
never realized 'til now that I could intuitively hear the difference between can and can't even when the t isn't pronounced, huh, that's neat
Even though I'm not a native I've picked up most of this stuff without even noticing it.
Vader: Th'r IS no conflict.
Non-native Vader: There is NO conflict.
I love your videos Dr Lindsey! One learns more here than in years (!) of various language courses!
This may be your best video yet! Very good explanation!
I ADORE your choice of speech examples, it somehow covers almost the whole range of my youtube favs😂 as russian i can't overestimate your work, one simple concept gives +100500 to high speech recognition, pain free😅also copying accents mindfully goes faster❤love english😭