Assimilation and Deletion

Hello!

Today we started looking at two things that happen in fast, native-speaker English: assimilation and deletion.

First we talked about what assimilation means. Florin told us that it means when someone who is different starts to fit in and change to be more like the environment. This happens with newcomers to Canada, and it also happens to sounds in languages!

For example, it can happen across word boundaries. When we say "nice shoes," we don't hear a clear /s/ at the end of "nice" before the "sh" sound. It's more like one slightly longer "sh" sound.

We also looked at deletion or elision. This is when a native speaker, when speaking at a normal to quick conversational speed, doesn't pronounce certain letters. Examples are the second "t" in Toronto, the "d" in Windsor, the "t" in plenty and twenty, etc.

We looked at a passage about someone who found an apartment to rent on Erie Street. We found all the linking, assimilation and deletions. One thing that came up while we were taking up the exercise was whether we can drop the final -s (plural marker). We cannot drop that. When a sound makes a difference in grammar, we have to say that sound. I notice that almost all LINC students have trouble remembering to say the past tense markers /t/, /d/ and /Id/ and the plural markers /s/, /z/, and /Iz/.

I apologize for taking you through today's exercises too quickly. Tomorrow I will slow down and we will have more opportunities to use what we learned in conversation.

Have a nice evening (two syllables in evening)!