Arnold Zwicky's Blog

The One Big Happy from May 15th:

Months, Muntz, let’s call the whole thing off.

Phonemically, months /mʌnθs/ vs. Muntz /mʌnts/, phonetically with dental allophones of /n/ and /s/ in months (to go along with (inter)dental /θ/), but alveolar allophones in Muntz (to go along with alveolar /t/). In casual speech, in fact, many speakers have a dental stop allophone of /θ/ in months (rather than an interdental or dental fricative), so that the distinction between months and Muntz is subtle — and, for some speakers some of the time, the distinction is lost, with alveolar clusters [(n)ts] in both words. (In any case, the oral stop portion of the cluster is quite short, and the /n/ is likely to show up phonetically only as nasalization of the preceding vowel; the names Muntz and Munce are often phonetically identical.)

So it’s not at all silly for Ruthie to treat months and Muntz as equivalent.

This entry was posted on June 11, 2018 at 10:07 pm and is filed under Linguistics in the comics, Phonetics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.