it's going to be a little longer

[svetlana14]

Does he actually say it's going to be a little longer?

0:30-035

Even when I slow the audio down, I can barely make out what he's saying — particularly the word 'little'.

 

[BobK]

Does he actually say it's going to be a little longer? ...

Even when I slow the audio down, I can barely make out what he's saying — particularly the word 'little'.

Yes he does. But don 't beat yourself up; I can barely make out what he says, and it's my language (that's not a proprietrorial my - I know it's not my dialect )

 

[jutfrank]

It seems like you have made out what he's saying, despite his speaking very fast at that point. Well done.

 

[güey]

I think "Does he actually say it's going to be a little longer?" implied: Did he actually said what is shown in the auto-captions?

He says: It's gonna be a l' longer .... (or lllllonger)
It was actually not that difficult for Youtube's AI or a native speaker to restore the slurred word.

 

[jutfrank]

I think he does say 'a little', yes.

He says: It's gonna be a l' longer .... (or lllllonger)

Yes, right. The words 'a' and 'little' are (almost?) completely unarticulated but they're still fully 'there' in the language. As you show well, the linger on the /l/ sound is where most of the meaning comes from. It's interesting that this /l/ phoneme effectively works to represent both the intial sound of 'little' and the initial sound of 'longer'. The schwa of 'a' is surely completely undetectable to any human given the speed at which he's speaking. Perhaps a spectrogram analysis might pick it up.

There's an important point raised here which concerns what we mean when we say that somebody 'says' something. It's very important to understand the difference between saying in the sense of making sounds with your mouth parts and saying in the sense of generating meaningful language. We should be careful to make this distinction. He doesn't articulate the phrase 'a little' but he still 'says' it.

 

[BobK]

He doesn't articulate the phrase 'a little' but he still 'says' it.

Bravo