Yeah, I think you’re right. I was trying to get my point across without making other posters scramble madly for the nearest dictionary.
Same here. I never thought anyone mispronounced it until reading this thread.
Really? When you say “that,” you use the same sound as in “thin” or “thick,” rather than the sound in “though” or “thy”?
It’s not so much mispronunciation as it is a feature of a number of urban accents. I’m really surprised so many people have not heard the “t” or “d” for “th” substitution – it’s one of the major features of the Chicago accent (think “da Bears”) , and I hear it all around the Great Lakes/Inland American North region, as well as certain New York City accents.
All of us pronounce some words differently from how we think we pronounce them.
In cases like this I find it helpful to think of sets of similar words that differ only by the possibly omitted or altered sounds. Do people pronounce “tenths” differently from “tense”? How about “tents”?
I think I do make a “th” sound, though it’s weakened.
Really? Or is that just the politically correct version of things now?
I guess when ebonics plays into it, boaf is perfectly acceptable because it’s a dialect. OK, if you say so.
By the way, this isn’t a racial issue (at least not all the time). If you ever watch Everybody Loves Raymond, Ray often pronounces “ask” as “axe”. I’m sure that’s part local dialect, part lazyness. I say this because he says “ask” often, also, leading me to believe that if he paid attention, he’d say the word “correctly”
Personally, I think it is lazy speech. If you don’t dat’s fine wid me.
On further review, this is a damn good question, and I deserve to be taken to task for that answer. I guess there is no ***correct ***way to say a word, but rather the ***accepted ***way a word is spoken or understood in a given population. With that said, there is a dictionary spelling and pronunciation guide after the word in question. So, I think from this information we can deduce that at one time, the word months was pronounced “months”, and not munts. (the pronunciation guide for months - [muhnths])
Ah, what the hell do I know? I think I can acknowledge that
- at one time, the words put in the dictionary by Webster and the folks that followed him were put in there with a spelling accepted by at least Webster. 2) How he defined its pronunciation was also part of the original entry. Over time, that pronunciation may have changed, but the spelling rarely (if ever) changed to match the new pronunciation by the hicks that decided to butcher the english language.
The good news is, if you say munts to me, I’ll probably know what you mean. But if you write it in a research paper, I’m going to circle it in red pen, and nail you for a spelling error.
SFP
There’s never been such a time. You’re assuming, I guess, that English was once a language that was spoken the same way it was written. There wasn’t. It’s always been a mess.
It’s also not the case that our pronounciations are lazier than they used to be. (Or easier; after all, do you really want to pronounce “knights” the way it’s spelled?) For what reason I (and probably nobody) really knows, our pronounciations get lazier for some words and in others will actually grow more true to the spelling.
But seriously, you seem to think lazy speech is bad; how do you pronounce “knights”?
No it isn’t. I say “months” - it’s a quick TH, but it’s there - and to be honest this “munts” thing is a total surprise to me, as it seems to be to others. I’ve never heard “munts.” Maybe it’s a regionalism.
I’m an ESL teacher and I teach my students that it’s ok to pronounce it “munce”. In Canada, most people pronounce it this way when they are speaking at a normal pace. Pronouncing the n, then the th and then the s all together feels a bit tricky to me and I’m a native English speaker. Incidentally, I also tell them that “clothes” can be pronounced “cloze”.
Wow, I say “munths.”
Oh, yeah, “clothes” is definitely “close” around here. I want to say I know very few people who say the “th,” but I’ve never really paid close attention to it. (Apparently, looking online through various American English dictionaries, “close” is the more common pronunciation.)
Does no one else do this? I can describe it a little better now that I’m back on my good computer.
I say the mon as mun, but the n is made with the middle of my tongue, while the tip of my tongue goes up over my teeth, preparing for the th. But, instead of pronouncing the th, I stop, and reposition the middle of my tongue to pronounce the s. I start up the s, but it’s blocked by the tongue on the teeth. I release the th on the right side, and the “ths” sound I described above comes out before I can move my tongue to pronounce the th.
The resulting sound sounds between th+s and t+s. If you’ll permit me to use IPA, it looks like this: [mʌnt̪͡s].
No, it’s what linguist will tell you. Linguists. The people who actually study the subject.
In this forum, where we seek factual answers to questions, whatever you think “personally” is of no import. The term “lazy speech”, in this context, is factually incorrect.
Are you going to tell me I’m “lazy” when I say “gonna” instead of “going to”? There is a natural tendency to simply language, to merge sounds together when they are easier to pronounce. This has nothing to do with being “lazy” and everything to do with being efficient.
Yes. I say each of those just how they are spelled.
Yes, I pronounce all three differently.
NM
If the ‘months’ is emphasized, I’ll pronounce the ‘th’. Otherwise it probably sounds like ‘muntz’.
That’s probably because the sounds generally either assimilate or elide when these words are used together. I’m willing to bet it’s elision here for you, if you recorded what you said and played it back, you’d probably hear that the voiced ‘th’ in ‘that’ is being omitted to allow the words to connect easier. If you carefully pronounce ‘that’ it should have voiced dental fricative, or it would sound more like the beginning of ‘thatch’.
You can have the opinion that certain ways of saying things are ‘lazy’, but such opinions aren’t helpful in a discussion on the subject of pronunciation. It’s more useful to consider the actual purpose of language, which is to communicate. If we are communicating effectively, and meaning is not ambiguous or obscured by our methods of pronunciation, then it ‘good’ language. Blindly sticking to rules and wagging a finger at those who don’t isn’t helpful, and you won’t find that going on at any university. There you are taught to objectively observe language. Prescriptivism is frowned upon.
[QUOTE=SoulFrost]
“Soft” is a poor description, after all. I pronounce it (in casual speech) more like–but not exactly like–the “th” in “the” or “they”. In third grade, the teacher called that a “soft th”, as opposed to the “hard th” of “thing”. I guess we had different teachers.
[/QUOTE]
Ahh, I was never taught ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ as descriptions of English phonemes, which is probably why I was confused by your explanation.
Read the word castle aloud. Did you pronounce the t? If no, were you being lazy? If yes, what planet are you from?
When residents of Worcester pronounces the name of the town as /wʊstə/, are they being lazy?
Do you pronounce the initial letters in gnome and knife? For that matter, do you pronounce initial as /ɪˈnɪʃ(ə)l/ or as /ɪˈnɪtal/ ?
Similarly, if the OP has a bit of a voiced fricative in “month”, it’s probably a carry over of the voice letter preceding “th”, namely “n”.
Can I assume that you meant to direct that part toward someone else?