KotDB: I'm sorry it took me so long to reply. But here it is anyway:

But I'm not entirely comfortable with generalizations such as "Americans say /inkrejeles/ and Brits say /inkredyeles/". Such patterns may hold in many cases, but certainly not in all.

Well, I personally have never been to the U.S. nor to the U.K. . I haven't seen a native speaker of English, be them from America or England or Australia or wherever else that they speak English in, in my whole life either. So the only thing left to do for people like me, if they want to check on things like that is to consult dictionaries. My favorite one is Oxford Advanced Learners. It does directly say that /inkredyeles/ (Where are my phonetic symbols Fencer?) is a word said in British English while /inkrejeles/ is an American English word. Just like car is a British word if said /ka:(r)/ and an American one if said /ka:r/. In fact I have noticed some very great differences between American English and British English by watching BBC prime and comparing it with VOA. Oh yes Walter, we do have satellite T.V. here in Iran!


It's not uncommon to have four consecutive consonantal sounds. Think of words like explain, exclaim, and extract. Or perhaps backstroke. Now that we're thinking about swimming we mustn't forget the breaststroke, which has a string of five consonants. I can get six if you let me use a two-word phrase such as next spring.

Wow. Thank you for the examples. But I think I haven't been clear enough in asking my question. In fact, now that I'm reading it once more, I'm sure I haven't been clear enough.

In English there's a specific syllabic pattern. It is:

CCCVCCCC

C stands for consonant and V, for vowel. Of course by consonant I mean consonantal sounds. So if a word supposedly starts with an X which is pronounced /ks/ it counts as two consonants.

As you can see, an English syllable cannot start with more than three consonants and cannot end in more than four consonants.

The examples I can provide are:

Street

Prompts

All the above mentioned, we get back to your example: breaststrok.

Firstly, in all my dictionaries I found it only with a hyphen and written breast-stroke instead of breaststroke, which supports my little theory. Secondly, even if it is written whithout a hyphen, it is syllablized as breast.stroke which again supports me. Those consonantal sounds are not located in a single syllable so technically speaking, when you are saying the word, after the first part -breast- a new chain of speech starts for saying the latter part -stroke.

Therefore, all the consonantal sounds are not actually said exactly after one another.

In other words, you cannot have the bold part in breaststroke at the end of a word such as Meststr!

So you don't say them exactly consecutively. I hope I am clear enough now.

But to look at it just in its written form, an dif it can be written without a hyphen, it's a very nice example of so many consonants exactly after one another. Thank you.


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Lamby: Wow, a six-letter word that has only vowels in it. How do they read it then? It looks to me like it's the abbreviated form of six seperate words, rather than a single word. If that's the case, then it doesn't count!


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Walter: I liked this example Sequoia. I had already heard its name in Farsi. However, the ponunciation is different in Farsi. Whenever we come across a word to which we hav eno equivalent in our kanguage, we just try to read it as it is writen in the source language. So we read that word /seku:ya:/ in Farsi.

I liked facetious too. I may assign it as a research project to my students. "Find an English word in which all vowels appear in the exact same order they appear in the English alphabet."

But about this part:

That ten bird stuff further down sounds ridiculous. They're all pronounced the same. Ten is ten. A real tongue twister can make you talk funny.

I have to slightly disagree with you. If ten is ten, then I take it did is did, and didn't, didn't. But even if you don't say them differently sometimes, I'm sure you have seen people who do. Take the following examples:


Did he meet you at the party?

Did you meet him at the party?

Did, in the first example is simply pronounced /did/ but in the other one, it's rather pronounced /dij/ with a /j/ sound as in jam, than /did/.

The reason is that it is followed by a /y/ sound which affects the way it is pronounced.

Now take these other examples:

Didn't he meet you at the party?

Didn't you meet him at the party?

In the first example, Didn't is simply said didn't, with a /t/ sound at the end. But in the second one, it is rather /didnch/ with a /ch/ sound as in Chair, than /didnt/.

Here, it is because /t/ is followed by /y/. Reading the following sentences, I think you'll se that whenever a /t/ sound is followed by /y/, it gets some changes, even if they are minor changes, in pronunciation:

Watch what you say!
I saw that he kicked you.
Aren't you gonna stay a little longer?
Put your hands in the air!
He cursed you.
.
.
.


Sometimes, this process which is called assimilation, changes the pronunciation of a word forever. take the word soldier for instance. Have you ever given it some thought why it's spelled with a D but you don't here any /d/ sounds when it is pronounced?

If you look up that word in a dictionary and look for it's history, you'll see that it sometime in the history has been indeed pronounced with a /d/ sound. Something like /soldyer/. But as time passes, because of the /d/ and /y/ that are consecutive, the pronunciation has changed to this that we hav etoday, with a /j/ sound.

It's just like ....Did you .... that I previously mentioned. The difference is that assimilation in 'did you' is occasional and dependent on the situation and context, but in 'soldier' is is a fixed and permanent one.

Assimilation exists in Farsi too. We write Shanbe but we read /shambe/ due to /n/ and /b/ coming together.

I bet you use assimilation in almost every sentence you say without sometimes even realizing it.

By the way, the alternate spelling you gave for Sequoia, Sequoyah, looks a lot more similar to how we read the word in Farsi: Se-Ku-'Ya.