In Contractions^x, Pronunciation^x

Dear Howard Leigh Ph.D., If we are going to get into silly mudslinging battles over the word "often" and claiming illigitimacy of posts due to lack of name, qualifications, and misspellings then I suggest that you start with the very word misspelling which contains two of the...

Hi Cool Breeze, How's and house are different in that how's is a contraction of how and is, two words, and the rule applies at least in theory in such cases. This is exactly the rule I had in mind! What you offered previously simply was not clear enough to the reader. The only pronunciation...

Anonymous wrote:How's is pronounced . Traditionally, the RP pronunciation has been /haʊsIz/, although I suppose some speakers equate the vowel sound with that of 'beat' (half-long) these days. I was trying to be brief and therefore didn't go into details. How's and house are different in that...

Dear Mister Micawber My teacher said other examples too For example Low and order is pronounced in this way that we pronunce an extra r between low and and and pronounce and in this way: (Shwa) ən I want to know this action in pronunciation is called again orthographic representations of...

Back!Ok, looks like M-W needs someone to sue them again...I found those examples (...with question marks and pronunciation) very interesting. What sounds good is probably what you've heard most often or what you usually say, as a contraction. I really didn't know "does" could sometimes become...

While 'was' and 'does' may be used in contractions, it seems to me they're used mostly (maybe exclusively) with 'when' and 'what' and not very frequently at that. Using, "How's dinner?" to mean, "How was dinner?" would sound like sloppy pronunciation if spoken that way. Written, it would be...

CalifJim wrote:...Only continued contact with the new language seemed to help. ... Yeah, so we have to do listening and speaking exercises as much as possible. Yankee wrote: ...... It turned out to be a contraction of "Guten abend" (Good evening). That's interesting Kooyeen...

Maple wrote:I guess the more difficult part of contraction for us is the listening. When you native speakers' speech speed is normal, some sounds are omitted, some are swallowed and some are combined, the sentences are a mess to my ears. I used to think the same. I always said: "They...

The same thing happened to me in Germany. A lot of what I heard "on the street" was not the same as what I'd heard in any German class I'd ever taken. For example, it took me about 6 months to figure out one utterance that I heard on a fairly regular basis. It sounded to me as though people...

I agree that it's useless to add apostrophe-s to indicate is when the word ends in a sibilant (i.e., would take -es to form a plural). In these cases the apostrophe-s looks very strange, and nothing is gained where pronunciation is concerned. But in all other cases (regardless of whether...