It's Three Real Estate
Jun. 23rd, 2019 05:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brin_bellway[might qualify as embarrassment squick?]
I wonder if I should deliberately adopt a th-stopped pronunciation of "three". People get confused sometimes as to whether I'm saying "it's free" or "it's three [of whatever currency units are implied by context]", and trees would probably be easier to contextually distinguish.
(Dad: "How many cents a minute is it for U.S. calls?"
Me, failing to fully consider the implications of the fact that Dad can't see the textual layer my thought passed through on its way to my mouth: "It's free for incoming, four outgoing."
Dad: "They make me pay three cents a minute even to *receive* calls?!"
Me: "What--no, no, it's...*struggles for alternate wording* it's *no* cents a minute incoming, four outgoing.")
---
I don't know, I kind of doubt that the decrease in ambiguity would really be worth the increase in effort, trying to forcibly reconfigure a process whose details I don't generally have *that* much control over. And I'd probably have to th-stop *in general*, because if somebody notices that I front other thorns they're going to have a high weighting on the possibility that I just said "three" rather than "free". And--not *very* often because I get most vocabulary from text, but every once in a while--sometimes I *don't know* whether a phoneme is supposed to be thorn or eff, and so I wouldn't know whether to stop it. (As opposed to my current method of pronouncing the new word in approximately the way I perceived it and having the listener sort it out.)
---
This post brought to you by listening to my manager--who has a th-stopping accent--talk about prices, and thinking 'I bet *he* doesn't have this problem'.
(I mean, my manager and I do often have a hard time understanding each other, but he wouldn't have *that particular* problem.)
I wonder if I should deliberately adopt a th-stopped pronunciation of "three". People get confused sometimes as to whether I'm saying "it's free" or "it's three [of whatever currency units are implied by context]", and trees would probably be easier to contextually distinguish.
(Dad: "How many cents a minute is it for U.S. calls?"
Me, failing to fully consider the implications of the fact that Dad can't see the textual layer my thought passed through on its way to my mouth: "It's free for incoming, four outgoing."
Dad: "They make me pay three cents a minute even to *receive* calls?!"
Me: "What--no, no, it's...*struggles for alternate wording* it's *no* cents a minute incoming, four outgoing.")
---
I don't know, I kind of doubt that the decrease in ambiguity would really be worth the increase in effort, trying to forcibly reconfigure a process whose details I don't generally have *that* much control over. And I'd probably have to th-stop *in general*, because if somebody notices that I front other thorns they're going to have a high weighting on the possibility that I just said "three" rather than "free". And--not *very* often because I get most vocabulary from text, but every once in a while--sometimes I *don't know* whether a phoneme is supposed to be thorn or eff, and so I wouldn't know whether to stop it. (As opposed to my current method of pronouncing the new word in approximately the way I perceived it and having the listener sort it out.)
---
This post brought to you by listening to my manager--who has a th-stopping accent--talk about prices, and thinking 'I bet *he* doesn't have this problem'.
(I mean, my manager and I do often have a hard time understanding each other, but he wouldn't have *that particular* problem.)
