Sunday, September 11, 2011

Who doesn’t use relaxed pronunciation now?

The following is taken largely from “The Hot Word” Blog site and is about the relaxed usage of some English words to the point that they almost become a spelling of their own. Thus”
“Didja ever think that there are ways of speaking that feel perfectly comfortable that would seem wrong if you wrote them down? Sorta like the way this sentence is written. Lemme tell you ‘bout this very phenomenon, relaxed pronunciation.
Pronunciation is defined as “the conventional patterns of treatment of the sound and stress patterns of a syllable or word.” Relaxed pronunciation, also called word slurring or condensed pronunciation, happens when those syllables are phonetically melded together to create a shortened form of a word or phrase.
Yes, this is similar to a contraction. The difference is, contractions such as “could’ve” and “should’ve” are considered part of informal written and spoken language; relaxed pronunciation such as “coulda” and “shoulda,” while part of informal speech, has no standard written form.
Common trends of relaxed pronunciation include replacing “you” with “ya” or “ja” as in “d’ya” (did you) and “wouldja” (would you). Another common practice is to substitute “of,” “to”, and “have” with a schwa, a mid-central vowel sound that occurs from an unstressed syllable, as in “kinda,” “outta,” and “sorta.”
The writer William Burroughs famously called language “a virus.” One way to understand his pronouncement is that, as people use a language, it evolves. Some uses of English that are considered correct today were once frowned upon. Who knows what usage will be acceptable in 100 years? Do you think relaxed pronunciation is ever an acceptable form of speech?”
I found the above interesting especially as how we now see texting taking off and text talk often coming into other written forms too. What are some other relaxed pronunciations that you know and use, and are relaxed enough about, to share with us here?

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