This is one of those times when even having it explained doesn’t make things any more comprehensible.

Let’s not forget that EVs are heavier than their ICE equivalent classes of vehicle, meaning they use more energy. Which is a problem because a) they store ever so much less energy, and b) they’re ever so much less energy-efficient. So you need more energy to move them, and charging inefficiency mounts on top of that, but hey, at least you have shorter range!

EVs are not what is going to save the environment. Indeed depending on your source of electricity (most of the world still uses fossil fuels to generate electricity, recall!) you could well be making things worse by switching to an EV.

You know what will save the environment? Ending personal automobile ownership and instead beefing up public transportation.

Personally I’ll embrace the technology by putting tire puncturing strips all over the place.

I need to work out a quad-lingual joke sometime: English, German, French, and Mandarin.

I hate you. So much.

All these high-quality puns in response are leaving me kinda blue.

I’ll leave that to the expert.

Surely you mean “Trahnah”?

You’re skewing the results by a bad test.

Don’t “ask your partner” to say a particular word or phrase. The very act of asking that will have changed results. (This is experiment design 101 stuff here!) Ask her to read a lot of stuff that has “hot potato” in it in various places. (We tend to use sandhi in flowing streams of speech, not isolated clips.) Or, ideally, engage her in conversation and get her to say “hot potato” naturally as an organic outgrowth of the conversation.

But … make sure you record what she says. Your own brain, as a listener, fills in stuff that’s not there while removing stuff that is. You have to play it back, concentrating on only the sounds, not the words, and do it repeatedly, ideally isolating this one phoneme at a time.

Really, sandhi is a thing, and it’s a thing that literally every native speaker of every language in the world uses. There is variance by dialect, naturally (entire phones vanish or come out of nothing from dialect to dialect), but some elements of sandhi (like consonant assimilation) happen no matter what your dialect unless you’re specifically concentrating on having it not happen.

Yes. You a special snowflake who is the only human being on planet Earth who doesn’t do sandhi. You should go to the nearest university’s linguistics department and show off your linguistically unique trait. You could probably make a decent living as a guest speaker at linguistics conventions too.

🙄

RP drives me crazy with its bizarre pronunciation rules. Like never pronouncing ‘R’ unless it’s not there.

“Law and order” under RP approximates “lo ran doh duh” where literally every ‘R’ in the phrase is not spoken, but they jam one in place of the ‘W’.

ARGH! THE SPIDERS ARE EATING MY EYEBALLS FROM THE INSIDE!

If you’re eating a potato it’s going to be hot.

Potato salad has entered the chat.

Pseudo-intellectual. A clear communicator uses the simplest, precise word that has the precise meaning they intend, reaching most commonly for the Germanic vocabulary unless they need the subtler shades of meaning from the Latinate. A pseudo-intellectual uses Latinate vocabulary to conceal what they’re actually saying or to intimidate people who aren’t as comfortable on the Latinate side of the fence. It’s a form of intellectual bullying that, to my mind, makes the person using it look insecure (not to mention likely dishonest).

A good communicator’s motto should be “eschew gratuitous obfuscation (see what I mean?)”.

I was scolded by a boss for using words that to me were perfectly ordinary everyday words. Words like “cognate” or “cognizant”, say, but to him they sounded like I was showing off and making people feel bad.

Oops.

That’s a different issue from sandhi. Vocabulary and dialect are another area of active study (often paired with yet another realm: sociolinguistics: the language you speak changes according to your social environment) that is a real rabbit hole.

👏Perfect choice.

Sandhi is an amazing area of study. It’s doubly fun in tonal languages: all the confusion of atonal languages with an added layer of shitfuckery.

Sandhi is a real thing. (Source: I had to study this shit to teach pronunciation classes.)

It took me WEEKS to recognize that what I thought I was saying and what noises I was actually making are completely and utterly different. There’s often no relationship (like “coodja” for “could you” or “chrain” for “train”) between the intended sound and the actual sound … but since everybody does it you don’t notice until its forced into your face. The only time you make distinct sounds as per the “official” description (and even then not as often as you think: I submit “train” once again as evidence) is when you’re deliberately speaking slowly and distinctly. Which is almost never (and comes across as condescending in actual interaction).

Weeks, I say again. WEEKS. And this was under constant training that included the playback of what we’d actually said showing us what we were doing. The denial is embedded deeply in our psyche.

If you’re a native-level speaker, no you don’t. You think you do. Assimilation is a real thing and is a huge part of all native language. NOBODY pronounces the way they think (and often loudly claim) that they do.

Just like the people who claim they don’t have a “j” sound in “could you”.

I’m confused. You say it’s non-political for left and right, then you name two right-wing parties.