REDUCED SPEECH

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selimhilmi

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hello everyone, nowadays, i m interested in learning reduced speech.

Because we know that in daily conversations this kind of kind of english is used.

for example i heard in a movie instead of ''let me tell you something''(full version) he said ''me tell u some.'' did i hear right?

can we add this sort of reduced speech on this topic ?
 

Barb_D

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Welcome to Using English.

Please remember that capital letters are an important part of proper English.

The level of reduction you cited sounds VERY unnatural to me. Of course I can't say, without hearing that clip from the movie myself whether you heard it correctly, but I suspect not.
 

Tdol

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Lemme is a more natural reduction to me.
 

Tdol

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In BrE, some people say /sʌmət/ for something, so it could have been something like that, which is closer to what you heard, and there may be an AmE or other variant form similar..
 

Barb_D

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It can sound a bit like "sumtin" but the T is glided over... it can almost sound like some-en.

I'm sorry, I cant write in IPA.
 

raindoctor

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Check some of these sites and find material about others.

1. Authentic communication: Whyzit importan' ta teach reduced forms?

2. Phonology: features of connected speech

3. Aspects of Connected Speech Index

4. Urban dictionary, a great place for reductions if you know what to search for.

5. Google for misspelled words. When you hear sko, skoda, just search for them. Surprisingly, they are reductions for "lets go; lets go to the store". If you are from counties where spelling and grammar is of paramount importance, get out of that mode, since that knowledge perverts and/or impairs your perception. Now you know why you see many native speakers misspell words. It is not because they are dumber than those Indians and Chinese, who scored 100 percentile on their TOEFL and GRE verbal, but because their speech drives how they spell when they don't have sufficient knowledge of English spelling system. That's another reason you see Indian kids on spelling bees contests, since parents of these kids are so bent on spelling, grammar. Phonetic and voice oriented parents can drive their kids to more lucrative areas where these kids can master various accents based on how foreigners syllabize and map sounds.

6. Sound patterns of spoken English by Linda Shockey

7. Simplification of constant clusters across word boundaries. In some sense, this is the major part of connected speech.

8. Resyllabification, a phenomenon linguists call, deals with syllabification across word boundaries.

9. http://blaoism.blogspot.com/2012/01/some-reduced-forms.html

10. If you are aiming for AmE, it is a time to figure out your articulations of alveolars, r and l, since many clusters involve these constants. A bunched r with laminal t/d is a long way to master American Accent.
 
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5jj

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