And I don’t think the distinction is consistent for any one person–I think it’s more a question of the speed of any given utterance, and other factors like emphasis, because the tongue must come back no matter how you (think you) pronounce it.
Okay, but the /t/ is a component of what we usually write as “ch” ([ʧ]) anyway.
Interesting, but not so surprising to for me.
Yes, but I don’t think this allophone has complementary distribution. I think the same person might pronounce it either way, depending on other factors. I think the real issue is that when many people see in print the “chruck” spelling, they immediately think, “Well, I’d certainly never say such an outlandish thing!” even though they could very well be doing it at least some of the time.
I hear truhbee, but there’s a small blur between the u and the first p where the r in purpose left a shadow. It comes closer to rhyming with puppy than with herpe (chirpy) or yippee (trippy.) But it doesn’t really rhyme with any of those words.
As for the mystery word, I hear it the same as the others: some variant of pray.
Thanks for putting that together Indistinguishable.
Whether it sounds like “chirpy” or “truppy” to you guys, do you at least think that, if you heard it and were told "this guy is saying ‘chirpy,’ you’d find nothing at all remiss about the first consonant in the clip?
The word as a whole may not sound like “chirpy” to you, but the first consonant does sound like the right one for “chirpy,” doesn’t it?
As for my own perception of the chimera, it is highly dependent on the prompting I go into it with. As Frylock says, if I think of it as meant to be “chirpy”, then it sounds like a plausible “chirpy” to me. At other times, listening to it differently, it sounds, as others have said, like /trʊpi/. If I tell myself to hear it as different things, I’m very good at hearing it as different things. It’s far too late for me to volunteer an unbiased opinion on what it “actually” is, of course. But my intentions in creating it were not hitched to any particular wagon beyond “let’s see what happens”.
Something related to it, at least, but I think it might actually be closer to “dsh” than to “tsh”. My tongue touches the roof of my mouth further back for “ch” than it does for “t”.
Even aside from that, the t or d sound is part of “ch”, but it’s not the entirety of it. The big question is whether there’s a sibilant in it.
For those who think the link in the OP is saying “truck”, can you post a link to some audio of someone saying “chruck”, so we can see how different it is from the link in the OP?
It seems to me that, barring some foreigners who say t-r-uck (e.g. Italians using a rolling ‘r’), no native speaker of English can say ‘truck’ without it sounding like ‘chruck’
If you disagree, can you record yourself or post a link to someone else saying both ‘truck’ and 'chruck"?
I’m bilingual - English or Hebrew - so it depends on what language I’m speaking.
For instance, take the word “tractor”, which is identical in both languages. When speaking in English, I’ll pronounce it “CHRactor”; but when speaking in Hebrew, I’ll pronounce it “TRactor”, with a guttural R.
And suppose they sounded the same to you? Why is that necessarily a statement about the pronunciation, rather than your perception of the pronunciation?
Well, if there were two sounds, and some of us said they sounded exactly the same, and some of us said they sounded different, that would be an interesting observation in itself. Not saying that one group or the other is wrong.
I’m seriously trying to picture someone saying ‘truck’ that is materially different from ‘chruck’, so if you could record those two words, since they sound different to you, I’d like to hear how they sound.
The group that said they sounded the same would have to be wrong, from an objective viewpoint.
It’s like the HFCS versus sugar sodas, to pluck a non-linguistic example. Some people can’t taste any difference. Other people consistently can. The only logical conclusion is that there is a difference, but some people aren’t sensitive to it.
That’s not a criticism, BTW. As I said in the other thread, my working assumption is that everybody is insensitive to certain details of pronunciation (or flavor); it just varies which details those are.
Not necessarily. If the first group thought they were hearing two sounds when in fact they were hearing a single sound, they would be wrong.
The only way to conclusively determine this would be to run a randomized test where people would be given two sample sounds which would fall under three categories:
[ul] li both are sound A[/li]li both are sound B[/li]li one is sound A and one is sound B[/li][/ul]
(where sound A is someone pronouncing ‘truck’ and sound B is someone pronouncing ‘chruck’)
If the people who claim they could distinguish ‘truck’ from ‘chruck’ are able to blindly identify which of the three scenarios from above they were given, with some statistical significance, then, yes, I would agree that there are in fact two sounds.
It’s possible that this is the case. To demonstrate it, can you record yourself, or find a recording of someone else, saying both ‘truck’ and ‘chruck’?
That way we can have samples of the ‘HFCS’ and the ‘sugar’ version, and we’ll see who is sensitive to their difference, if any.
Have several people read words from a list. One of those words is “truck.” The words shouldn’t have anything in common.
Now get a large number of other people together. Tell these people that some of the first group were told to pronounce a word spelled ‘truck,’ and others were told to pronounce a made up word spelled ‘chruck.’ (This is a lie, to be clear.)
For each individual in the second group, play recordings of each of the people in the first group saying ‘truck.’ Ask the individual whether they think the recorded person was in the ‘truck’ group or the ‘chruck’ group.
My hypothesis: There won’t be any significant difference in the frequency with which individuals in the first group are assigned to the ‘truck’ or ‘chruck’ categories by people in the second group. In other words, people in the second group, even if they think they can hear a difference, won’t actually be able to reliably make the distinction.
Rather than “truck,” in fact, I think I’d have the first group read a short list of made-up words, one of which is spelled ‘trop’. Then the second group is decieved into thinking some of the first group were told to say a word spelled ‘trop’ and others in the first group were told to say a word spelled ‘chrop’.
I think an experiment like this, adding in the various details needed to make it rigorous etc., would settle the matter objectively.
Mr. Polerius, excuse my non-cite here but I’ve been playing with my tongue for a while and want to talk about it. But I’m not a speech therapist or linguist so it will probably be bullshit.
First off, are there any words beginning with TR that you feel are commonly pronounced with a TR sound?
Second off, it seems to me that pronouncing truck with an actual *TR *sound requires an instant of tight contact between the hard palate and much of the tongue. Could it be that the shape of some people’s mouths and tongues prevents them from making the required contact?
Making a basic “Tee” sound is a simpler exercise doesn’t need the same amount of contact at the front of the mouth. It can be done with just the tip of the tongue touching the upper palate or teeth, whereas the TR sound needs contact on three sides (…I think.)
I can’t speak for Polerius specifically, but I can say that this is very likely to be true for some people. Peter Ladefoged’s book * Sound of the World’s Languages *mentions several times, regarding various sounds, that this is often a factor. Each of us tries to reproduce, as best we can and in our own way, the sounds we hear others saying – and by “sounds”, I mean “for any one phone, produce something – sometimes something rather different than at other times – but something within the range of sounds which other speakers of my language will still understand” – in other words, something from among a set of allophones.
(“Allophones” in the broadest sense – to include, say, a complete lisping to “th” of the “s” sound, which is not an allophone per se of “s” in most contexts of spoken English, but which will almost never be misunderstood by the hearer, and so if that’s the “best” that a particular speaker can produce, they’ll get through life just fine.)
The OP noticed that in English, speakers often insert a “sh” sound between the “t” and “r” sounds at the beginning of words that start with “tr” consonant cluster.
As a native English speaker born & living in the US (Eastern half) I can hear the difference (it’s a matter of, as Chronos said, whether there’s a sibilant) but they seem like the same phoneme (the difference amounts to a slight accent, not a different word). A small amount of sibilant sounds the closest to how I say it, so I suppose I’m splitting the difference.
No words in English start with “chr” pronounced like “tshr” so it seems irrelevant
English has a variety of accents and dialects. I know native speakers of Indian English, who always clearly say [tr], not [ʧr].
I know that I can tell the difference, because, as I said, I know speakers who clearly say [tr] and I know speakers who clearly say [ʧr]. Not everyone who’s listening has biased perception on this issue.
No good, if we’re talking humans making the sounds. Even if the initial sound is the same, there will be some random variation between the two utterances of the word, which the listener could pick up on. Better would be to have each speaker say each version of the word multiple times, and pick different instances of the same word for the “they’re the same” trial. Probably better than that would be to ask the listeners not just if they can tell a difference, but in the cases where they can, which one is which.
The only time I say “chruck” is when it is preceded by “dump.” Something about the combination of the p then the t sounds makes it come out chruck. Otherwise, I’m careful to pronounce it “truck.” I used to have a speech impediment, so I’m careful and picky about pronunciations.
