In Hawaiian creole dialect (pidgin) it happens, but there are so many other odd things about pidgin that it’s almost not worth noticing.
How about ten bucks?
Who says “tem bucks”?
Or english muffin
I end up saying “engli shmuffin”
Originally posted by
capybara
"In Hawaiian creole dialect (pidgin) it happens, but there are so many other odd things about pidgin that it’s almost not worth noticing. "
Folks from Hawaii who no longer speak pidgin or don’t speak it in official situations usually still pronounce street or stream as shtreet or shtream.
Until I read this thread I didn’t know there were other places where it was pronounced this way.
Jon
It is common in India for someone who did not grow up speaking English to pronounce it as “shtreet”. Those who grew up speaking English pronounce it as “street”.
White female mid-20s middle-class Milwaukeean, and I say schreet. (Also, as people have observed above, schring, chree, and akchual. And *drink *is jrink.)
Perfectly normal dialectical variation.
I went through 12 years of compulsory education with a girl whose last name was Streeter and who pronounced it Shtreeter.
I had never noticed anyone (except Sean Connery I guess) who says shtreet, and I certainly don’t.
However, I thought that everyone pronounces “train” and “tree” as chrain and chree. Are there people who actually say it without the ch- sound (as part of their dialect and not an affectation)?
It seems very odd to me to change the pronunciation of a cluster of letters to something not at all represented by those letters. I realize that no accent or dialect is wrong, but to me, it’s like pronouncing the word “dog” as “log”. But as I posted in the OP, I grew up thinking it was a speech impediment, like me not being able to roll my r’s. I had a friend in grade school who literally could not pronounce str, so she used shr instead. I guess I am being enlightened.
Certainly. I don’t think I know anyone who doesn’t.
Are you guys serious? I thought everyone says “train” and “tree” without any “ch” in it, just the “tr” sound. I say “train” and “tree” without any “ch”, and so do at least a billion Indians. I’m going to ask people tomorrow to pronounce “train” and “tree” for me.
If you want to learn something truly fascinating, check out this post I made sometime last month:
I was saying the same thing you are. I’ve not heard it pronounced with the “ch”.
I guess the double negatchive tchripped one of us up. Tchanks for the clarificatchion 
For anybody who’s really baffled by the chrain/chree thing: these are approximations. When I say tree, it doesn’t actually sound like chree; but the initial consonant cluster gets a lot more aspirated that a straight-up tr.
Go take a course in linguistics. Written language is an artificial, learned construct. Spoken language preceeds written language and determines its forms. Pronunciation drives spelling, not the other way around. The problem is that it’s much easier to set and maintain one standard in written langauge than in spoken language, and spoken language shifts much faster than written language does.
Really? So “train” sounds kind of like a single-syllable “terrain”?
As for the “different kinds of t’s” discussion:
I don’t know about modern Urdu, Hindi, Arabic, etc., but in Sanskrit, you have a lot of consonants that are distinguished between dental (pronounced with the tongue up against the teeth) and retroflex (pronounced with the tongue back past the alveolar ridge). In English, the same consonants are pronounced sort of in the middle, on the alveolar ridge. So a dental t would be the “hard t” and a retroflex t would be the “soft t.”
FWIW, Howard Stern always pronounces "sphincter’ as “shfinkter”.
Yep. I’m originally from a little town near Houston, TX. I don’t have any appreciable accent, though. I attribute it to spending time in lots of different regions of the country when I was growing up.
I do this, as well. I never thought about it, but I think it would sound odd to really *hit *that “T” sound at the beginning. I’m going to make my students say tree today at the beginning of class.
Yeah, when I pronounce “train” and “chrain,” I don’t think there’s much of a difference in the sound, although it seems the “tr” has lighter “ch” sound than “chrain.” The position of my tongue for the “r” doesn’t allow any sort of smooth way to clearly enunciate both “t” and “r” and they blend into something like “chr.” In other languages, with trilled or flap "r"s (like Polish and Hungarian), I make a definite distinction between “tr” and “chr”-type sounds.
Found an article here on Google Books explaining the “tr-” situation.
Also, listen to the pronunciation of “train” on Merriam Webster’s site. That sounds pretty much exactly like “chrain” to me.
Yup, that sounds like my “train.”
Already have.
Okay, after saying “tree” and “train” all morning, I am noticing this. Gotta get someone near me to say it so I can listen.