Annals of intervocalic coronal reduction
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What word do you hear in this clip?
If you heard "prison", you agree with me, and with Google's speech-to-text algorithm.
But in fact the word is "president". The context is this passage from a 2015 speech, in which Donald Trump talks about a man who felt compelled to buy excavation equipment from Komatsu rather than Caterpillar — and in context, I bet you hear the word as "president":
I said why did you do that? He said because
Japan just cut their currency so low Donald
that I had no choice I had to do it
I feel so guilty
he said but I owe it to my wife and my family and my employees
and the company that I built
they couldn't compete with it
and I said isn't that sad
I said do you mind if I use that story?
He said use it what do you mean use it for what?
I said I'm gonna run for president
that's a good story for me to be honest
but that's happening and it's happening even worse with China
The YouTube transcript continues to hear "prison":
Also seen in the the subtitles:
What's going on here? Well, there's a totally normal lenition-unto-deletion of the intervocal /d/ between the last two syllables of "president", with merger of the last two vowels into a nasalized schwa-ish sound, and production of the word-final /t/ as an unreleased glottalization that might as well just be the expected silence. Result: "prison".
Another audio clip, with phrasal context:
Yet another example of the regrettable failure of linguists to document how people actually talk…
Here's the YouTube video, starting a little earlier in the speech:
How did this come to my attention? A journalist asked me for comments on changes in Donald Trump's speech over the years, and so I took a look at some of his rally speeches from the last three presidential campaigns.
Philip Taylor said,
July 27, 2024 @ 2:34 am
I hear "present" (/ˈprez ənᵗ/).
Philip Anderson said,
July 27, 2024 @ 5:14 am
I hear “prison” in both, although there’s just a hint of a final ‘t’, so in context I could take it as “present”.
Peter Taylor said,
July 27, 2024 @ 5:37 am
I hear the vowels of present, but no hint of the final t.
Keith Ivey said,
July 27, 2024 @ 10:05 am
Are you going to analyze the Brian Kilmeade "colored"/"college" controversy?
David Marjanović said,
July 27, 2024 @ 10:15 am
Definitely [ɪ] or [e] in the first syllable, not [ɛ], even when I get to hear the context. Definitely no hint of a /t/, however unreleased or glottalized or whatever.
I don't think anything intervocalic is going on. I have long noticed that everybody in US politics pronounces the very common, very long phrase president of the United States (nine syllables!) as "prezn unie states" (five syllables), with total loss of -ide- (and -ted) and consequently a syllabic n. I think what Trump did there was to start from this prezn, reduce the first vowel even further, and avoid the syllabic consonant by inserting another vowel (in the place, as it happens, of the lost -ide-.).
By the way:
Why not "that I had no choice! I had to do it!"? I think you could transcribe a lot more intonation without having to pretend that spontaneous speech consists entirely of whole sentences.
David Marjanović said,
July 27, 2024 @ 10:16 am
…I should elaborate: I think it goes president > prezdnt > prezn – loss of the vowels first, reduction of the consonant cluster later.
Cervantes said,
July 27, 2024 @ 10:49 am
As David says. Geraldine Ferraro (remember her) said "Prezneh Unahy Stay," in my transliteration, so the second T in states is also missing. So do a few people, actually. And yes, the words "of the" are also missing.
Philip Taylor said,
July 27, 2024 @ 11:41 am
Interesting (to me) that two Britons believe that they can hear a vestige of a final /t/, while others cannot. And I was not primed to hear it, in that I played the audio from Mark's e-mail (below) which gives no hint of either the context or of the speaker —
Philip Anderson said,
July 27, 2024 @ 2:30 pm
The word-final ‘t’ may be “an unreleased glottalization”, but for me that does stop the preceding ‘n’ so that it sounds different from a word-final ‘n’; the clip above is not the same for me as the pronunciation of prison here:
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/prison
But the first vowel is definitely the prison vowel, not the present one.
Viseguy said,
July 27, 2024 @ 4:58 pm
I heard "I'm running from prison". I could be wrong.
Xtifr said,
July 27, 2024 @ 6:27 pm
I'm with Philip Anderson: something about the way it cuts off at the end made me think a 't' may have been intended. I wouldn't have been surprised if it had been "prison", but my first thought was actually "president".