Then I guess you didn’t pay very much attention, if you’re baffled by why the pronunciation of a consonant cluster might not “match” the spelling, for any given dialect. 
Then why is the fact that there isn’t necessarily a 1:1 correlation between the sounds a cluster of letters make individually vs. together different seem strange? Letters change sounds all the time depending on context. Or am I misunderstanding your objection?
edit: Damn, beaten by a hair!
Maybe beaten by a hair, but you managed to respond without being condescending, which probably took a little longer. So I’ll answer you.
I thought I had explained my objection, though I wouldn’t actually call it an objection. My first line in that post was, “It seems very odd to me to change the pronunciation of a cluster of letters to something not at all represented by those letters.” To explain: Until a few days ago, I thought SHTR was a speech impediment. Therefore, to my ears, it doesn’t sound “right” yet. It sounds like an error, and, additionally, it’s not spelled that way, so it seems off to my ear. In my world, S-T-R is STR. As it would seem wrong to me if one day I noticed people en masse pronouncing the word “dog” as “log” – I’d say to myself, “where the heck do they get an ‘L’ out of ‘D’? Oh, now I remember, it must be the language shifting again, just as Shot from Guns so helpfully reminded me it does!” Just like “aks” is wrong to me simply because it’s not spelled that way. Of course I know that sounds shift, even consonant clusters. Now that I know that SHTR is not a speed impediment but a common variation, it might slowly work its way into my brain and eventually sound like a normal pronunciation to me. Like, “did joo eat?”, only more extreme. I mean, ekshtream.
In her speech, Michelle Obama also does it across words, though to a lesser extent, in “parents trying to feed their children.”
BTW, pulykamell, my best friend in high school was from a Polish family in the NW Chicago suburbs, and none of them pronounced it shtr, nor did anyone else I ever heard in the north or northwest 'burbs apart from my solitary STR-impaired classmate. Here on the west coast, I hear it only rarely.
I do the ‘shtr’ pronunciation, and I literally cannot say ‘str’. I’m white, grew up in affluent suburbs of central NJ.
From the sociolinguistic literature, it does not appear to be dialectal, it’s true. And in some cases, it can cross word boundaries, but I think that’s pretty rare.
I read an articulatory phonetics paper on it (which I can dig up if anyone’s interested), which didn’t have any good conclusions as to why some people did it and others didn’t. It might have something to do with the kind of /r/ you make, either retroflex (with your tongue tip up and pointing backwards) or bunched (with your tongue kinda scrunched up). Or it might be because of anticipatory lip rounding (you round your lips with you make the sound ‘sh’ and ‘r’, but not ‘s’). But that doesn’t really explain why it doesn’t happen in words that start with /skr/ like ‘scratch.’ What was interesting about the paper, to me, is that the ‘s’ and ‘sh’ of different speakers were accoustically similar but perceptually different.
Another thing that’s interesting is that English does not have initial /sr/ clusters, except in a few borrowed words like ‘Sri Lanka’ which most American English speakers, I believe, pronounce ‘shri’. I think there’s just weirdness with ‘s’ and ‘r’ in the beginning of a word.
Don’t know about most, but to me, “sri” is the usual way to say it, without the “h” sound.
What about “species”? I often hear it said as “speshies” but I don’t put an “h” there either.
Well, it’s all over the place here in the city, but I’d say it’s definitely more concentrated in the urban or more working-class suburban areas, where accents tend to be stronger than in the north or NW suburbs.
Oh, we’re well beyond the simple softening of “did joo eat?” It’s more like “jeet?” or “juh eat?” around here (and some other urban areas.)
CurtC - the first pronunciation listed for “species” in all the dictionary.com entries for the word is “SPEE-sheez.” “SPEE-see” sounds British to me.
White, middle-aged, upper middle-class Milwaukeean, and I’ve never heard any of those except akchual, which according to Merriam-Webster is the standard pronunciation ('ak CH oōel).
Are you from the South Side?
I grew up in the Jackson Park neighborhood, if you know where that is. So yeah, pretty much. I now live right on the border between East Town and the East Side.
I’m sure I’ll forget, but I’m going to try to remember to record and upload some sample words when I get home. I can’t help but wonder if people are talking about or conceiving of different things here.
I only pronounce “st-” that way if I’m speaking German. I never heard of this pronunciation in a natural English dialect until reading this thread; you learn something new every day.
Out here in California, I’ve noticed it’s a kind of urban and ethnic thing. Aside from East Coast visitors, I hear it more from Mexicans or African Americans. But, when I lived in Hawai’i, it was common to hear “shtreet” and things like “frushtrated” nearly across the board. The exception would be malihini and haole (visitors and white folks).
Labiodental /t/, as opposed to front-palatal /t/ – there’s some sort of diacritic on one of those, IIRC.
American English /v/ is labiodental, as opposed to /b/ which is bilabial. Spanish /b/ and /v/ are both bilabial, and most easily rendered by English speakers as a somewhat soft /b/: ‘Bebe un vaso de vino’, “he drinks a glass of wine,” has virtually identical sounds beginning three of the five words.
I may be wrong on this (and am certain I’ll get corrected if so), but I’ve for years been under the impression that Streeters are of German rather than English descent, so /shtreeter/ would be the ‘correct’ (non-Anglicized) pronunciation.
Indian English tends to be closely tied to spelling, that’s why Xash and most other Indians clearly pronounce the individual letters in “tree” or “train.” Many of them even trill the “r.”
Foreign speakers of all languages seem to do this. Non-natives want to learn “the rules” of pronunciation, but tend to stop at the point where it allows them to be understood. And even amongst those that don’t, the slight variations are often small enough to escape their notice. A common way to identify fake accents is to notice certain consonant clusters that get pronounced differently.
BTW, I want to clear up my other post: the people that sound like they have lisps are the people who do not change the pronunciation of /t/ before /r/. In words like street, it sounds like they are using a different part of their tongue to make the /s/ sound. It doesn’t quite sound like [θ] (th as in thin), but it does sound like it has been partially dentalized.
I’m curious if those of you who do not change the sound also do not change for other letter combinations. Other consonant* clusters off the top of my head include dr as in drive, ti as in creation, du as in education, and tu as in actually. By me, these are said as if they were spelled jr(ive), (crea)sh(on), ed(ju)cashon, and ac(chw)ally, respectively.
*I’m considering the /j/ (y as in yawn) in some uses of /i/ and /u/ to be a consonant.
No, but I do the “drive a truck” -> “jrive a chruck” thing. Most people I’ve listened to seem to do that though.
As for street vs. shtreet, I think I say street. I’m not really sure, and because I’m thinking about it right now I might be consciously trying to say street instead of shtreet.
As for train vs. chrain, I say train. Chrain doesn’t sound odd to me though, so I guess there are people around me who use that pronunciation.
But how about this? Do you pronounce route as root or raut? I actually pronounce it both ways, depending on the circumstance. If I’m talking about a road, I usually say root. So I would say root 66. But if I’m talking about a path, I usually say raut. For example, lets take that raut.
I think it’s because my mom pronounces it one way, and my dad pronounces it the other. Somehow I associated one pronunciation with roads, and the other with paths.
What’s your experience?
I’m the same way with route as phi2dao. As I can only learn how to pronounce words by hearing them, my pronunciation is eclectic. I’m one of the people who says “jigawatt” or “jigabyte” for gigawatt and gigabyte. because “Back to the Future” is where I first heard that pre-fix. On a side note, it extends to my spelling and I’ll find myself using British spellings unless I catch myself because I learned the words first that way from reading.
73 and grew up in Philly. Not only don’t I say “shtreet” or “schreet”, but I never noticed anyone saying it. So it must be a phonemic variant so common I was unaware of it (just as I don’t notice, unless I am listening for it, to whether the plural of “house” is “houses”–normal in Philly–or “housez”–normal in most of the US).
I do know one person who pronounces all her "t"s as “t”. But her native language is Italian, although she has been speaking English since the age of 12 and has no obvious accent. The other quirk in her speech is that all "l"s are lateral. (In all American dialects I am aware of the first “l” in “lateral” is lateral and the second one isn’t.)
I’ll only add the nitpick that by this point, Indian English isn’t a “foreign language” in India anymore. It’s an Indian language. Of course, the phenomenon you describe probably influenced the development of the variety.
Exactly as it is in London accents (I mean Cockney and South London, not the posh people) and the Estuaries.
All that is again like it is in in London and the Estuaries. ‘Spee-sees’ is only overarticulated RP or the really posh Scots.
I can hear a clear difference between my ‘train’ and ‘chrain’ (if there were such a word) but maybe others couldn’t. But again, London and estauries? It’s Chrain. With the ‘n’ being a French ‘ng’ ending.
It’s funny that most of us probably grew up thinking that those extreme shortenings, like ‘did you eat?’ to ‘jeet?’ are uncommon when they’re probably pretty normal. Pulykammel, is ‘what did you eat?’ ‘Wodjeet?’ for your area too?
‘Mi dad pykd upan mi mum bot a ta. then we got on th chray.’ - A sentence I remember a boy of about 8 (who was behind with his writing) putting down. (My Dad puked up and my Mum bought a towel. Then we got on the train.)