• Rhaedas@fedia.io
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    18 days ago

    “That that” spoken are two different sounding words so it makes sense. When it goes from verbal to written and I see it, I will almost always try to rephrase things to avoid that combo. It just jumps out as totally wrong.

      • ornery_chemist@mander.xyz
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        18 days ago

        In fluent speech, the conjunction (the first “that”) is unstressed, and as a result some speakers reduce the vowel a bit toward schwa. However, if you told those speakers to carefully pronounce each word, I bet they would pronounce the conjunction and the pronoun the exact same same. A more common example of this kind of reduction is the word “to”, which is almost always reduced to /tə/ ([tə] ~ [tʊ] ~ [ɾə] depending on dialect and surrounding words) in everyday speech when unstressed.

        Fun fact, you can reduce just about every unstressed vowel in English to schwa (if it’s not already a schwa) and still be largely understood.