Setting aside his hesitant gait down the ramp at West Point for a moment, Trump has also been mocked for how he said “MacArthur.”
That seems like a stretch to me. Couldn’t it just be a regionalism? Like the way some people say “Long Guy-land” for Long Island?
As for me, I’m a New Englander who apparently has a funny pronunciation of words like “Clinton” or “Newton.” (My Indonesian language teacher found it hilarious - he’d urge me, “Say Clinton again! Again!” and then laugh himself silly.) I don’t know the technical term for it, but when I say words like those the T is very soft - more like a glottal stop - and second syllable comes out sort of like when you drop the G from ing words - imagine someone drawling the sentence “The government is mintin’ coins.” My “Clinton” rhymes with that “mintin’.”
I don’t think my pronunciation is a sign of faltering mental capacity, it’s just a reflection of where I’m from.
Couldn’t “MacGarthur” be the same sort of thing? Or is that sort of thing unique to Trump, and/or a documented sign of decreasing fine motor skills?
I mean this as a very GQ type of question, but I’m not even going to try to put it there; I know the temptation to politicize it is too strong to resist.
I think it is just a pronunciation quirk. I can talk much shit about Trump and his brain, but I’ll give him a pass on this.
People make fun of the way I say certain words too. Like, I remember one day I had a coworker cracking up laughing over the way I pronounce “chimpanzee”. I say “CHIM-pansy”. The non-monstro way of saying it is “chim-PAN-ZEE”. I don’t know why I say it the way I do. All I know is I have to think really hard not to say it the chim-pansy way.
Recently I asked a coworker if she’d ever watched the movie “Tremors”. She was like “Naw!” So I started telling her about the plot. She stopped me once I started talking about the giant worms and said, “Wait! Do you mean ‘TREMORS’??” That’s when I discovered that I don’t pronounce “tremors” the normal way. When I say it, it sounds similar to “trimmer”. Apparently everyone else pronounces it like “treh-mer.”
G and K are very similar sounds to begin with, and become even more so when there’s a vowel before and after them. There’s a difference, but is there really any dialect where the difference is noticeable?
I avoid using the word “participate”, because it requires nine internal shifts between voiced and voiceless phonemes. Without switching the consonants to voiceless, it w0uld come out “bardizibade”. Which is what MaGarthur speakers are doing.
It could be a regionalism, or even a personal dialect quirk. You can check the former by seeing if others with his accent speak the same way, and you could check the latter by listening to clips when he was younger.
I’ve not checked, but supposedly his pronunciation of “China” is not a regionalism and is not how he previously said the word.
That said, it seems unlikely to be a mental capacity issue, even if it is new. It could be some very mild muscle or nerve deterioration where he can’t quite control his vocal cords as well as he used to. Heck, it could even be some slight damage to the cords from the way he speaks.
The walking is a little worse, but not hugely so–it’s mostly only bad because he tries to paint himself as so strong, while it’s fine if he’s developed some slight balance issues–it’s very common at his age, and not necessarily an indication of any mental decline–it could have more to do with blood pressure or calcification in the inner ear.
Voicing or devoicing consonants is not an uncommon linguistic shift. Note how something like “capicola” becomes “gabagool” in East Coast Italian-American dialects, for instance (note how the “k” sounds become “g” sounds – unvoiced “k” becomes voiced “g.” It’s created in the same manner, just a matter of whether it is voiced or unvoiced.)
So I assume it’s just a dialectal variation. It’s not something I would notice when listening to someone speak.
I’m not sure I understand the question. Sure, English. “Bagger” vs “backer.” “Logger” vs “locker” (if you’re in a cot-caught merged dialect). “Noogie” vs “nookie.” (slang.) “Singer” vs “sinker.”
“Bagger” and “backer”, and “logger” and “locker” differ in their initial vowel. And “singer” and “sinker” do, in fact, sound very similar, enough so that I doubt I’d notice if they were swapped in an appropriate context.
Where are you from? This reminds me of a story a friend (from Louisiana) tells about people not understanding him when he said “umbrella” - he says UM-brella. I think I do too usually. And here in Texas we say IN-surance.
I once asked a woman at my office if I could borrow a pen. She looked a little confused, but started getting her purse out. I pointed out that there were a couple of pens on her desk right there in front of her. Then she said - “oh - do you mean a pen, or a pin?” That’s when I first learned that some people pronounce those words differently. Not in my Texas dialect though.
A few months after my aunt moved to Texas she asked a neighbor for a recipe - the woman told her to start by “balling” some water. Turns out she meant “boil”
A friend, that while not a native, adopted Indiana as his cultural shangri-la. Very big on IN-surance and UM-brella, and expressed the first syllables not only more heavily accented, but louder. Normally I’d let it go as a Ta-MAY-toe Tom-MAH-toe kind of thing, but he was most haughtily adamant as to those pronunciations correctness. I liked to break his horns and ask him if IN-surance was the opposite of out-surance, or ask him “what other kind of 'brellas are there?”
I was raised in the South, but by a couple of Hoosiers! So maybe that’s why I say UM-brella and IN-surance, to the horror of everyone around me.
CurtC, I got the lecture on “pen” and “pin” when I was graduate school. Prior to that, I hadn’t know that that was a difference between the two. Like “chim-pan-zee”, I have to really think hard to say “pin” the right way.
Going from memory here, I think voiced consonants are essentially lacking in some languages, such as Finnish and Hawaiiian, which do not use B, D, G or Z in their spelling. But voiced consonants may still be distinguished, colored by adjacent vowels.