Present prison president
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In last Friday's post ("Annals of intervocalic coronal reduction"), I presented a case from 2015 where Donald Trump pronounced "president" as if it were "prison". This provoked a lot of interesting commentary about the nature and prevalence of various reduced pronunciations of that word, and so I thought I'd add a bit more evidence to the discussion. As I noted a few months ago ("'There's no T in Scranton'", 3/10/2024)
Shuang Li's INTERVIEW: NPR Media Dialog Transcripts dataset […] contains 3,199,859 transcribed turns from 105,817 NPR podcasts, comprising more than 10,648 hours. That dataset is just the transcripts, but some years ago, Jiahong Yuan and I downloaded the audio and aligned it with the texts. And I wrote a simple search script […]
Running that script to search for the word string "president of the united states" turns up 2,443 phrasal clips, from which I selected 12 (literally) at random.
[I chose a consistent context because the often-extreme across-word co-articulation in spontaneous speech means that the last syllable or two of "president" may overlap with what follows, wherefore I've included "…of the united" in the audio clips…]
Listen and see what you think — you can also download the audio and examine it with your favorite acoustic analysis programs.
| (1) | |
| (2) | |
| (3) | |
| (4) | |
| (5) | |
| (6) | |
| (7) | |
| (8) | |
| (9) | |
| (10) | |
| (11) | |
| (12) |
This is yet another example of a problem documented in multiple earlier posts (see below), and discussed more formally in my 2018 book chapter "Towards Progress in Theories of Language Sound Structure". Speech production maps discrete symbolic phonology onto continuous articulatory and acoustic signals, in a way that depends on language and dialect as well as linguistic and communicative context — and a lot of that process can't be coherently described by traditional symbolic allophony.
"On beyond the (International Phonetic) Alphabet", 4/19/2018
"Farther on beyond the IPA", 1/18/2020
"What IPA means now", 9/28/2022
"Pronunciation evolution", 4/15/2022
"More post-IPA astronauts", 4/16/2022
"'There's no T in Scranton'", 3/10/2024
Cervantes said,
July 28, 2024 @ 2:48 pm
I think most of those speakers are elocutionists — this is from NPR and some of those people may be reporters. They may also be people giving orations. Most of those are much more precise diction than the norm, I think. There might have been one or two in which "of the" was seriously reduced. For whatever reason "states" is cut off so we don't get to hear whether the second "t" is pronounced. Anyway, I don't think this is at all representative.
Victor Mair said,
July 28, 2024 @ 5:43 pm
precedent
Luke said,
July 29, 2024 @ 7:05 am
Oddly enough I’ve been noticing this lately too, in the style of number 8 above but even more aggressively compressed, to the point that I’ve heard the phrase rendered something like [,pɹzjʌ̃’s(t)e̞ts] with the t of st sometimes barely being audible (please forgive my lousy IPA rendering, hopefully it gets the point across)
Rodger C said,
July 29, 2024 @ 12:08 pm
In a story of mine, I wrote some years ago about a character who says what I wrote as "Prezza Y'nigh Stace."
Jaap said,
July 30, 2024 @ 11:15 am
#11 is clearly a BrE speaker, possibly in the UK House of Commons, so maybe that one should be excluded.
I think #9 is Biden, and maybe #10 is GWBush.
Philip Anderson said,
July 30, 2024 @ 12:46 pm
@Cervantes
I don’t think most of these have particularly clear diction, except that they sound the final ‘’t’ in “president” (excluding 8-9).
I can’t hear “of the” in 2-4 or 7-9, and 9 sounds like “presen unite” to me.
I agree that 11 is probably an English MP.