Exactly! (See post #15 
)
Likewise I will not believe you without a link showing that 99.5% of Americans pronounce the word as “Chruck.” I’m sure I unconsciously slur many words, but am having trouble pronouncing chruck in such as way that it doesn’t require more effort to say than truck.
As a good Chicagoan, of course I have a fronchroom. But I’m pretty sure those are trucks going by outside. 
Same here, but we’re in the same dialect.
I, too, say truck as something that could probably be better rendered as “chruck.”
I’m on it. (Sent out emails to a few linguists asking how best to demonstrate this online.)
After further review by the judges, I must amend my former claim:
I *do *say “chruck” if the word “delivery” is in front of it, it seems. Garbage truck, moving truck, ice cream truck, trucks and cars…delivery chruck. :smack:
Here’s one good discussion of the issue. I agree with you that it’s not cut and dried, but you are way off with your “99.5%” figure. More along the lines of 50%, at most.
While the above link refesr to teh specific issue of affricate (“ch”) pronunciation of initial “t” before “r”, the general issue we’re discussing here is:
(that’s from here)
Chruck? Chruck? Do you say Chrain for train? Chree for tree?
I said chruck about ten times, then truck, and chruck just sounds wrong to me.
I’m a central Indiana native.
Yes, and so do you, probably. (In un-self-aware, everyday speech).
Yes, again.
Once again…that’s almost surely because you are, in this instance, self-consciously pronouncing it, and therefore unconsciously trying to make it to conform closer to how you write it.
Forget chtrucks, I just realized that I actually say “Chrebek”!
This is messing with my mother-chrucking mind.
Sorry…I should have included a paragraph from the link I posted, so people don’t have to go to the link if they don’t want to:
– posted by linguist Neal Whitman, in post entitled “Chricky Affrication”
But you said it’s only pronounced chruck 50% at most- and you haven’t heard me.
Pronounced as **“t” **“50% at most”, I wrote, to contrast to Baal Houtham’s assertion of “99.5%” – sorry of that wasn’t clear. Eh, I was just giving him/her the benefit of the doubt, until I (or one of Frylock’s friends) came up with a well-researched figure. I really don’t know what the percentage is, but based on the commentary I did find from Neil Whitman and others in the know, I’d guess it’s a very low figure (though perhaps not the 0% which Frylock attested.)
You’re right, you may be one of the exceptions. No worries!
I’ve been saying it quickly and slowly and in different positions in sentences, and it’s truck, not chruck. Same with tree.
*
Go climb the tree.* Absolutely tree and not chree.
I just discovered that I say chruck. I am gobsmacked. And fascinated.
Or, when such people get up in front of others to make some kind of a “proper” speech, they affect their speech unnaturally to say it the way they think it “should” be said. (And they sound kind of foolish for doing so.)
For the sake of discussion, I would describe the coda we’re talking about in the North American Standard English word cent as an unreleased glottal stop, which is realized as released when in medial positions followed by unstressed vowels, in words such as bottle–although there’s some disagreement about that. Here’s a paper from Santa Cruz discussing that disagreement. (pdf):
[QUOTE=Jeremy O’Brien, UC Santa Cruz]
There appears to be a large amount of variation when it comes to English t-glottalization. The use of this process can vary by geographical region, social factors, and by phonological position|moreover, the phonological positions vary depending on these other factors.
[/quote]
Trippy trees tricked a tragic truck for trusting tracks to trigger.
Whisper that several times in a row and see what it sounds like.
Okay, California jobcase and John Mace, I believe you guys. The linguist I quoted surmised that it might have to do with different ways that different people pronounce “r” – “bunched” vs. “retroflex”, as he put it.
I’m not an expert on this. I do think we have at least established that the “chruck” pronunciation is a lot more common than some people assume, while the “truck” pronunciation is at least somewhat more common than Frylock and I assumed.
And, to get back to the OP, we have established (I hope) that “adolescence” and “adolescents” really are homonyms. Essentially everyone, in both cases, has the tongue in a dental position, but without pronouncing a full “T” sound, just before the “s”. For those that doubted this but now see that it is so, a classic lesson in not letting the written version of a word lead you astray.
(I recently came across this same overall concept when discussing with someone — a teacher of English as a second language – whether *idli *(also spelled iddly), a kind of South Asian bread, is pronounced just like Italy by most speakers of English. That is, no one pronounces the “t” in Italy as a “t”, but rather as a “d”; and, no one can pronounce a word like “idli” without inserting a schwa sound between the “d” and the “l”.)
I’ll tell you one I’ve never bought though:
I’ve seen blog entries by multiple linguists insisting that the vowel sound in “sing” is the same as the one in “sin.”
To which I say:
No. Effing. Way..
But maybe this is my “truck.”
I’m still thinking it’s very close to zero. I didn’t read the whole link–does the linguist attest to “t-truck” (as opposed to “ch-truck”) being observed in natural conversational English?