I am working on my accent and pronunciation. I use American Accent Training and it says that in spoken English, speakers usually run words together.
For example, "Run them all together" turns into "Runnemalld'gether." I have two questions here.
- Is there any rule when we can reduce th sound?
- Is it acceptable in business meeting and academic speaking to reduce th and running word together?
Best Answer
In actual speech situations, with native English speakers, Fast Speech Rules are unavoidable.
These rules describe normal pronunciations. There are no spaces between words in language,
only in writing, which is not language and does not have anything to do with how we speak.
(After all, most people in the world are illiterate, but they still speak.)
To take just one example, the fraction "5/6" is written five-sixths, and we are taught it's
sposta be pronounced /fayvsɪksθs/.
That's a pretty chewy consonant cluster there at the end:
Phonologically, all are voiceless sounds, and the last three are fricatives.
This makes them hard to pronounce together fast, because the tongue has to go
from the position for the /s/ (touching the top sides of the mouth)
to the position for the /θ/ (touching the bottom of the upper incisor teeth)
and back again to the position for /s/. Very fast, in a cluster.
Such clusters are hard to pronounce and normally get simplified, usually by deletion.
In practice, what people actually do is drop the /v/, and the /θ/, and just say a long /s:/, i.e,
Pious instructions to "enunciate more clearly" do nothing to improve comprehension.
If you are interacting with native speakers, pay careful attention to the way they speak.
They're the ones you want to communicate with.