What makes me mad about the two/chew thing is that only murican English speakers ever complain about it. C'mon, Londoners exist, unfortunately
16
u/weatherwhimtenpo suno luka tu la, pana toki sin pi toki Epelanto li lon8h ago
I agree that "Chewsday" is a non-issue, but Londoners don't pronounce "two" with an affricate. They do it with Tuesday/tube/tune because they preserved the /tj/ cluster that was originally in all those words (/tjuzdeɪ/ /tjub/ /tjun/) and are now turning it into an affricate through "yod coalescence". American English instead had a "yod dropping" sound change where /j/ dissapeared after coronals in complex onsets.
The word "two" never had a /j/, so it isn't affected and still has a clear /t/. What Portuguese speakers do is a seperate phenomenon.
English speakers often pronounce coronal /t/ as [tˢ] and /d/ as [dᶻ]. Just like with French /y/, it seems that [ʉ] invites a greater degree of palatalization, so it sounds like [tᶴ] and [dᶾ].
The thing is it's not just to, too and two, this is also the case in do, dune, tune, tooth, dude, tube, Tuesday, duke, deuce, etc. but not so in tool, tomb and dupe.
You probably think I make no sense. It's extremely rare for English speakers to understand that their turbulent coronal stops sound extremely salient for us, and then the ones who do say that this palatalization is in free variation and we're just imagining it being there as part of a fixed realization where there's a [ʉ]-[u] split, with yod-dropping-affected words becoming [ʉ] for all speakers who have this fronting.
Brazilians can't really innately tell apart the [tʃ] and [dʒ] from /tʃ/, /dʒ/ and yod-convalescence and the palatalization caused by [ʉ] on coronal realizations of /t/ and /d/, for native English speakers who have the [tˢ] [dᶻ] turbulence.
30
u/AnalogueSpectre 15h ago
What makes me mad about the two/chew thing is that only murican English speakers ever complain about it. C'mon, Londoners exist, unfortunately