Friday 22 July 2011

horse's hoe


Mind-boggling title of this post, innit?
My students have to take their oral exams in Spoken English (aka Phonetics) this week; they have to show how well they're able to pronounce an English text and a couple of sentences.
This is one of the test sentences:
- The so-called horseshoe crab is used to test the effectiveness of drugs.
The sentence is about linking, final obstruent devoicing, pre-fortis clipping, e-æ, etc.

What a few students came up with was /ðə səʊkɔːld hɔːsəz həʊ kræb …/.


Should any of these students read this post, let me tell them they shouldn't worry too much. Having pronounced it wrongly is a floccinaucity.

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