Soooooooooooooooo, people at /r/EnglishLearning will at least once a week

[conuly]

ask a detailed question about phonology, such as "Do you really pronounce 'tr' as 'chr'?" (Yes, yes we do. We all do. It's almost impossible not to due to the physiology of those phonemes.)

And this will generate a burst of absolutely, frustratingly useless nonsense, because people just do not know how they talk. They don't know how they talk, they can't analyze their phonetics on the fly, and they are staggeringly unaware of these facts.

I keep telling these people to go to /r/linguistics instead, but thus far, nobody has taken my advice. Which is a pity, because I do give excellent advice, especially in this case.

But seriously - nobody knows how they talk. It's like trying to explain the biomechanics of walking. Sure, you've been doing it since you were a toddler (probably?), but that doesn't mean you have any understanding at all of what the hell you're doing as you propel yourself from place to place. I bet you can't even explain how you adjust for your varying center of balance!

Comments

[angelofthenorth]

I pronounce tr in a different place in my mouth from chr....

[spiralsheep]

English English speaker (three native dialects) checking in and, yes, "chr" is from towards the back of my tongue while "tr" is from the front. I do think many USians (NYC at least) have a more interchangable chr/tr sound though (and most English learners seem to prefer that dialect of world English).

[mtbc]

Yeah, me too, grew up in England (Manchester and Cornwall). "tr" from the front, "chr" from the back.

[profiterole_reads]

What?! I'm French, but I've had classes in English phonetics and in linguistics, and I have no idea what you're talking about. You guys don't pronounce 'tr' the same way we do, but the 'r' is different, not the 't'.

[conuly]

Can I ask you a question? Can you just, real quick, write out the IPA for the English phoneme "ch", as in the words "chew" and "chicken"?

[profiterole_reads]

ch: [tʃ], okay, but you originally wrote chr: [kɹ]

[conuly]

Indeed I did! And I didn't put // outside it, which indicates that I was using their ad hoc transcription rather than, ugh, trying to find the IPA to copy and paste the damn long s yet again.

[profiterole_reads]

If you're using their apocryphal system, I think you can write it 'ch-r' to make it a little clearer. XD

[conuly]

Well, I would, but that's also how (many) small children write it before they learn better.

No

[cactuswatcher]

I've obviously never heard you speak. But I do have a good deal of training in linguistics, specifically phonology. I don't know what context you are saying "tr" so that it sounds like "chr." While some may, generally, not every English speaker pronounces "tr" sounding as "chr." If /r/linguistics is telling you we all do, I'd be very leery of quoting them. Personally having learned a few languages, I can pronounce "tr" three very distinct ways all sounding a bit different, and none of them sounds much like "chr." There is a puff of air when most speak "tr" in the English fashion, but saying that sounds like "chr" is a little overstated to say the least. I can pronounce a distinct "chr" from all those positions of the tip of the tongue, yes, but *not same position of the bulk of the tongue.* I would be surprised if most English-only speakers can actually pronounce "chr" (not "kr" as in Christmas) without some practice.

Yes I do often pronounce "Did you eat yet" as "Dih juh eat yet," so perhaps there is a context in which I might sound like "chr" trying to say "tr."

Re: No

[conuly]

I'm surprised to hear you sound so surprised. The physiology seems obvious - your tongue starts behind the teeth to make the t, then moves backwards to the alveolar ridge to make the r. How're you gonna do that without passing through sh?

But I hadn't realized I do this until I first heard about it from my linguistics professor. And I know what you're thinking, linguistics professors, textbooks, they might say *anything*, and you're not wrong - except that since then I've spent a lot of time on homeschooling and parenting forums. (Note: People might say anything in surveys as well, but it's better than nothing. I do wish this information came from recordings of natural speech rather than surveys of perceived speech. People really can't tell how they talk.)

Here's an interesting fact: When children learn to read and write, they don't know how to read and write. And every single year - you can confirm this yourself pretty easily - a large percentage of them will bring home pictures labeled "chruk" or "chree", which causes their parents to think they have some sort of previously unheard speech impediment. I don't know how you can have a speech impediment that nobody can hear, but at any rate, these children don't. They spell the words the way they say them, the way everybody around them says those words. They haven't yet internalized that "if it sounds like chr, you write tr". And within a few months they do learn that, and then they stop doing it and, as near as I can tell, mostly forget they ever did it in the first place. And then they forget that this is how the word sounds. This person has much more knowledge of early childhood education than I do and backs that up.

Not every child does this - some of them have more knowledge of the conventions of English spelling coming in, and others just learn this rule faster - but speaking to teachers, it's fairly ubiquitous in the first year of learning to read. The first two years if some of them start school a year before the others (say, in areas where children start learning to read in kindergarten, but they're not required to attend school until the first grade).

Re: No

[melannen]

I just sat here and mumbled for myself for awhile, as you do, and as a mostly-standard American I seem to have both? If I say "train" without thinking about it or quickly in a sentence, it's definitely a "chrain" but I also have a more t- sounding version, where my tongue moves straight down for the T and then the R comes mostly from the sides of my tongue, that I say when I'm thinking about it or articulating carefully. It probably depends a lot on your R which varies wildly in English and my R also depends heavily on the following vowel? In particular if I try to say just "tr" it always seems to come out as the non-ch version (which also makes sense). I can absolutely see where people with my English are reading that, going 'no, can't be', doing a carefully-articulated "terr" and deciding you're wrong.

Re: No

[conuly]

I can absolutely see where people with my English are reading that, going 'no, can't be', doing a carefully-articulated "terr" and deciding you're wrong.

Yeah, that's the other reason you can't analyze your own speech. You need natural recordings, at the very least.

Re: No

[cactuswatcher]

Whoa! Then you aren't pronouncing "t" like many Americans! Understand, it may be perfectly normal for your dialect, but it's not in all American dialects. Touching the top teeth or tongue between the teeth is common in other languages, like Russian or Spanish. My "t" starts touching the ridge behind my top teeth, not particularly near the teeth themselves and the tip goes straight down, not back. "Tr" makes it go slightly back, but apparently not as far as you do it. There is nothing in common with my various languages' "ch's" except in Polish where one form of "ch does sound slightly like a t+ch mix, and that's not articulated as you describe. It's more of a retroflex t as in some Indian subcontinent languages. Again the only language I know with a form of "sh" articulated with the tongue tip starting as high as I articulate "t" is Polish, and you would never confuse the two.

If we were standing together I could easily demonstrate that I'm not articulating as your professor said you were. Your professor was probably very perceptive about the students he/she was teaching, but you did get the wrong idea about English in general. Written "chrunk" and "chree" may be again be an artifact of your specific Eastern dialect. I suspect it would have been unfairly judged a speech defect, where I went to grade school.

And yes, I had more than one linguistics professor.

Re: No

[conuly]

Written "chrunk" and "chree" may be again be an artifact of your specific Eastern dialect. I suspect it would have been unfairly judged a speech defect, where I went to grade school.

No. This is a universal complaint from Anglophone parents across the Anglosphere, in all parts of North America, the UK, and elsewhere. This isn't something I specifically heard from New Yorkers, this is something I saw repeated over and over again from parents all over the English-speaking world in homeschool and parenting forums - and occasionally, for variety, in teacher forums where I popped in to prove the point to the various homeschoolers and non-homeschooling parents that their children were totally normal.

Those people came from all over the world. Their kids spoke all sorts of varieties of English. And this spelling is ubiquitous in introductory literacy classes.

Did you watch the video? Or at least read the transcript? I'm not thrilled with the data being a *survey* instead of *recordings*, but those responses came from *all over the English speaking world*. And the results are pretty consistent, too.

Re: No

[cactuswatcher]

With x-ray recordings of both of us you could see for yourself you're not pronouncing "t" the same way I do. You'd see my tongue doesn't move the way yours does. My English t's would never go to ch's. You ought to be aware from the comments you've gotten so far, that there is something amiss with the idea that it is universal. It doesn't matter whether that was in a video or a published academic paper... Is it ubiquitous where you grew up? Probably. Was there a kid or more than one in my grade school pronouncing "t" like you do? Certainly not impossible. Is it a *commonly seen* educational "problem" for some elsewhere? Sure. Even a "problem" around the world? Sure, some places a bigger problem than others. Hence the reason it would be treated as a speech defect some places. But universal? No. People replying to you are neither stupid nor lying to you. Believe us!

Re: No

[conuly]

Oof, I gotta go to work.

Listen, I believe that all those people are accurately and honestly reporting what they think they say.

However, I also believe that people cannot analyze their own phonetics, and certainly not on the fly without at least a few recordings and knowledge of what they're doing.

There's somebody else in the comments on that reddit thread going up and down with videos of various people saying "tr-" words, and the people who are adamant that they don't say "chr" (no IPA, I'm in a rush) are also adamant that they've never heard it and don't hear it in those videos. But other people, including the person posting the videos (who claims to be a linguist and an English teacher, but I don't know them) do hear it.

Obviously they're not all right. Some of them are wrong. It's either there or it isn't, this isn't a cat. But pretty much none of those people, except maybe the video poster, is able to analyze what sounds other people are actually producing on the fly. I certainly can't, unless they overenunciate, and then all I know is that they're not speaking naturally and the results are nonsense.

Re: No

[cactuswatcher]

Those of us with training know analyzing one's own speech can be tricky. But in this case, I think going up and down through the tr-words, is a fair test. Granted this doesn't work for every possible syllable and the changes of vowels.

Consonant sounds can change with context, as I suggested in my original reply. But in person, I would likely challenge that English teacher/linguist, as to what they are hearing and what they were expecting to hear. And I would admit I would not expect to hear "ch" in tree. It's not like when I was teasing my girlfriend from Long Island about saying "Oi" to pronounce the written word "I." The difference between the sound of your "t's" and mine in most contexts wouldn't be noticeable for me. But if you pronounced "tree" anything like "chree" in front of me I would probably notice it. (Though I wouldn't tease you about it, unless we knew each other much better.) I majored in psychology as an undergraduate, and if one is definitely expecting to hear someone say "four" and they say "forty" or even "five" they can be misunderstood. If you *want* to hear "chr" from everyone to prove a point, it would be even more likely to hear it.

Re: No

[conuly]

But you know what? Is this the sort of thing that can be answered with lots of videos and spectrograms? (Which has got to be better than a self-reply survey, even without spectrograms.)

It can't be that hard to pull up a ton of videos on Youtube wherein people talk about trucks and trees and Tripoli, and then take a look at what pops up when we visualize their speech properly. I mean, if you know how to do that, which I absolutely don't, but I have faith in the people who do.

Re: No

[andrewducker]

For me, "train" starts with the tip of my tongue pressed against the hard palate just above my two front teeth. "Chrain" starts with the bit of my tongue about a cm back pressed against the same point. It sounds subtly different to me, but not quite the same.

(I've now been saying this to myself in front of my computer for long enough that the children came to ask what I was doing)

Re: No

[conuly]

Somebody linked me here - a blog post by a Brit who teaches phonetics:

Consider someone who transcribes train as tʃreɪn, drink as dʒrɪŋk etc (which is by no means unusual).

They presumably know what is and isn't unusual in their own UK classroom.

Re: No

[spiralsheep]

I'd be interested in who he's teaching phonetics to, but isn't he saying the opposite of what you said though?

"It may be relevant to consider the pair century – sentry. Obviously, century is basically ˈsentʃəri and distinct from sentry ˈsentri. However, like other words with this phonetic structure, it is subject to optional compression in the form of the loss of the schwa, leaving ˈsentʃri. Is this still distinct from sentry?

If the answer is no, they are not distinct, it confirms our diagnosis of phonological neutralization. If it is yes, they are distinct (which it tends to be), then we ask whether ther initial affricate of train is like the -tʃr- of compressed century or like the -tr- of sentry. It is like the latter, and we transcribe accordingly."

Re: No

[conuly]

The long s is right there. It represents the "sh" sound, and combined with t, t + sh = "ch".

Re: No

[spiralsheep]

Again: "like the -tr- of sentry. It is like the latter, and we transcribe accordingly" i.e. not senchry. I mean, I'm just quoting the source you gave.

[Deleted my other comment to put the content here as a note:]
John Wells appears to be from London and the only dialect he mentions is Estuary English which, yes, does tend towards choo-choo "chrains", but despite what the media might have people believe not everyone in the UK is speaking either RP or EE (not even in the south east, and not even in London).

Re: No

[conuly]

Right, except in a few limited situations you don’t do a strictly phonetic approach, you treat allophones of the same phoneme the same.

[minoanmiss]

Ugh, I hear you. I have attempted more than one discussion that was pointless unless we all went and memorized the IPA chart and came back.

[conuly]

It doesn't do any good, because they don't want to learn how to describe how they speak better than "It's a sharper sound".

[chazzbanner]

I need an example of an English lang 'tr' that sounds 'chr'.

This is typical for me. I used to work with linguists, still have friends who are linguists, but it's still "don't say it's a mid-back vowel, give me an example!"

[conuly]

Do you know any kindergarten or first grade teachers? (Or the equivalent in your country - first two years of learning to read and write.) Go ask them how many of their students, in any given year, will label pictures as "chruk" or "chree" instead of "truck" and "tree".

[low_delta]

Interesting that we don't pay attention to this. So let me investigate.

For the T sound, my tongue is pointier where it touches the part of my hard palate just above my teeth (does that have a name?), and the air coming off of it is more abrupt. For the CH sound, my tongue is wider where it contacts, and the air coming past it is "shooshier." Also, my teeth are closer together.

Now let me add the R sound. Along with the T, my lips are more "pointed" as it uses more the middle of my lips (it reminds of my lip shape when I'm whistling). With the CH, my lips curl together in a similar fashion, of course, but but more of them are used. It's kind of a wider shape.

The physiology is similar, but not the same. Much like P and B are similar. They sound different and feel different.

[conuly]

> For the T sound, my tongue is pointier where it touches the part of my hard palate just above my teeth (does that have a name?)

Yes, it has a name, it's the alveolar ridge.

> For the CH sound, my tongue is wider where it contacts, and the air coming past it is "shooshier."

Gotta love these technical terms.

"CH" is an affricated stop - you make the stop (/t/) and then you make the fricative, which I'm just going to write as "sh" because I don't want to go to the IPA yet again to copy and paste the long s.

When you make a stop, you briefly stop the airflow entirely before releasing it. That's why they're called stops. (They're also called plosives, but who needs that?) When you make a fricative, such as f, s, or sh, you don't stop the airflow, you just impede it a bit. Not even very much, honestly. So, yeah, first you stop and then, because you're saying ch instead of t, you release the air in your, sigh, "shooshier" way.

[low_delta]

alveolar ridge Not surprised you knew that. :-)

I went back and forth between tree and chree, and I noticed my teeth touch for chree.

This seems like a sort of regional difference (even though it happens everywhere). In Scottish pronunciation guides, particularly words that come from Gaelic, they advise to pronounce the T like CH. Here in the Midwest, my sister is sometimes called Anjrea. I feel it's just kinda sloppy. I don't mean to pass judgement on the people who say it like that, I just feel that the letters are meant to be pronounced a certain way (differently from each other) so I pronounce them the way I feel they should be pronounced.

[conuly]

Words aren't made up of letters. They're made up of sounds. Writing is just a way of encoding speech into text, but always, always, always the *sounds* come *first*.

[low_delta]

Absolutely. And to me, the sounds encoded into the letters TR are different than the sounds encoded into the letters CHR. I pronounce them differently, but not everyone does, and that's OK. But also, I learned long there's a threshold for detection, that may not be evident to the listener. So while those sounds feel different to me, the distinction may not be important to others.

This has nothing to do with your point about phonology, or with English phonotactics.

[pauamma]

It's like trying to explain the biomechanics of walking.

Back in my backpacking days, I (at the time carrying a full backpack, with tent, clothing, bedding, and food, so about 40 to 50lbs) once reached a rural bus stop where someone heavily pregnant was already waiting, who turned out to be a biomechanics student. We spent a pleasant half-hour or so discussing and comparing balancing, path-planning, and collision-avoidance techniques, until the bus arrived and we parted company.

Re: This has nothing to do with your point about phonology, or with English phonotactics.

[conuly]

Full confession: Sometimes I forget that you're not literally a crab.

Re: This has nothing to do with your point about phonology, or with English phonotactics.

[pauamma]

Well, I wasn't one then, but who's to say I'm not one now?

[james]

This reminds me of my complaint about people saying, after the first Avengers movie, that clearly Natasha was super good at math because look at how she calculates the angles before leaping off and landing on the flying alien! And I was like no, she didn't calculate any math, she just looked and knew from doing this sort of thing a thousand hundred times before, she knows she can do it she doesn't have to know the math to explain how she does it.

[conuly]

Geez, she's jumping, she's not snipering. A squirrel could do it!

[librarygeek]

I hear it, as I babbled train 🚂, terrain, and Hebrew chrain at myself for a while! But the Hebrew ch is more like the Scottish ch in loch.

No, I don't know the phonology coding, my biggest problem across my multiple languages is pronouncing vowels ie like fiery and proprietor.

I'm learning how to write Hebrew STAM script right now, so I'm trying not to distract myself with new other language character sets.

[steorra]

Former linguistics grad student here, and I don't remember how I became aware of the affrication in tr and dr clusters but I have been aware of it for a long time. It features halfway down this post, in the part where I'm talking about how "dramatic" and "Germanic" are surprisingly soundalike words.

[pangolin20]

I think that I might genuinely have true "tr" and "dr" clusters; the affricated variants sound decidely weird for me to say, at least. Then again, my speech isn't usual for English in any way, so that's not much evidence of anything.

(Yes, yes we do. We all do. It's almost impossible not to due to the physiology of those phonemes.)

Hmmm, if I try to get an affricate in my own speech (and it seems that I was using the "bunched" r, rather than the usual one, which I suppose illustrates your point), I do get a sibilant... but it doesn't quite have the sound or tongue shape of [ʃ] or [ʒ]. Still, it's close enough to them that I can see the sound get analysed that way, which would look like an affricate.