Experiences in non-intelligiblity in your native language

[anteallach]

Every time I say "countable nouns" [ˈkʰæɔ̯nəbʊ ˈnæɔ̯nz], some of my colleagues hear it as "cannibal nouns" [ˈkʰænəbʊ ˈnæɔ̯nz].

Once I was talking to a linguistics grad student (from a few hours north of me - had the /æ/-/eə/ contrast) about the syllabification of words in <ow(e)l> and she thought I had a "Hal-howl merger". But MOUTH is [æə̯] here.

I almost have that merger. /æl/ and /aʊl/ are very similar. I'm not quite sure how to transcribe them. Having very velarised /l/s (in all positions) and tending towards vocalising them makes the offglide of /aʊ/ less noticeable I think.

I'm also close to losing that distinction, but my MOUTH vowel is weird (see below).

(I think the primary phonetic contrast between TRAP and MOUTH is that TRAP has some kind of +ARGH, although I don't know what this +ARGH is. Not the same +ARGH as Nuosu.)

I just recorded mass and mouse in citation form, and the spectrogram is not what you might expect. In fact both seem to be monophthongal, with the main differences being:
- TRAP is further back (sic), with F2 around 1350Hz as opposed to more like 1650Hz for MOUTH.
- TRAP is slightly more open.
- MOUTH has a stronger (or perhaps just more concentrated) and slightly lower third formant.

Perhaps the last of these is -ARGH.

(I knew my accent had a reduced glide in MOUTH compared to most English accents, but I'm a little surprised that even in citation form I can't see one at all.)

[bradrn]

(I think the primary phonetic contrast between TRAP and MOUTH is that TRAP has some kind of +ARGH, although I don't know what this +ARGH is. Not the same +ARGH as Nuosu.)

I am so lost here.

I think we can consider "+ARGH" (and presumably "-ARGH") as a Nortaneous-ism, like his wonderful glosses.

Yes, for quite some time he’s been using ±ARGH as a label for weird Sino–Tibetic vowel features like in Nuosu (where according to Wikipedia it’s been called ‘loose’ vs ‘tight throat’, though both descriptor and realisation changes between languages; I think others have uvularisation, pharyngealisation or the so-called ‘strident voice’). Haven’t noticed anything unusual about his glosses though; they seem normal to me.

[Qwynegold]

One time in a class at college, someone raised his hand and said something to the teacher. He had to repeat that two more times before she understood him. (I still had no clue what he said after the third time.) He spoke Scanian dialect, and at one point he asked if it was because of his dialect. She admitted that it was, but I think the problem was that he was speaking extremely unclearly, even for a Scanian. I could barely distinguish a handful of words in his speech.