Annals of lenition
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What do you hear?
…or here?
The context is a clip from the British TV series Taskmaster, presented in "'Your mum's just like…' or 'Your mum's a slag'?", r/TASKMASTER 10/25/2024:
The source appears to be episode 172, aired 9/12/2024.
The speaker is Babátúndé Aléshé, and what he's saying (in conventional orthography) is
You're sitting at home, right,
and now your mom's just like
would you like some dessert?
Here's an aligned spectrogram of the first clip:
And the ambiguous audio:
An explanation of the ambiguity would be a good intro phonetics exercise.
And as usual, translation into IPA is not an especially helpful part of the story.
[h/t Daniel Sterman]
Update — some more context here.
Chris Button said,
October 16, 2024 @ 7:38 am
This made me chuckle.
There's nothing remarkable in his pronunciation at all though. Again, i don't see why IPA can't handle it.
In addition to the part selected for the "ambiguous audio", it's probably worth noting the standard lack of voicing that would occur in the voiced "g" of "slag" if it were actually being said–hence the confusion.