Experiences in non-intelligiblity in your native language

[Travis B.]

Today I had an interesting interchange with a coworker, who to all appearances was a native or at least fluent English-speaker, where I tried saying "I'm done with the scanner", which came out as [m̩ːˈd̥ʌ̃ːˌwɘt̪ːəˈskɛ̃ːɾ̃ʁ̩ˤ], which my coworker didn't understand at all even after repeating myself three times (at one point he said "don't use the scanner?"). Only finally, when I restated myself with a slowed down, exaggerated [ˈãːẽ̯mˈd̥ʌ̃ːːnˌwɘθːəˈskɛ̃ːnʁ̩ˤ], did he understand me. While I am somewhat used to having issues being understood by non-native English-speakers, and on rare occasions have needed to repeat myself at all with native English-speakers, this went above and beyond all of that as sheer non-intelligibility goes. Furthermore, nothing about my pronunciation was really all that out of the ordinary as natively-spoken NAE goes - if you can understand Inland North varieties, which you should if you work at my job, and it should be noted that Inland North varieties really are not that far from General American, you ought to have been able to understand what I was saying.

So that raises my question, which is have any of you similarly encountered markedly lacking crossintelligilibity when communicating with native speakers of your native language?

[Linguoboy]

Probably at least once a month, somebody will say something that just doesn't parse at all. Sometimes the entire statement is unintelligible, sometimes every word is perfectly understandable but my brain fails on the task in extracting meaning from the resulting utterance.

Just today I had a breakdown at my local build-your-own pizza place. They make two different kinds of pesto, one they use primarily as a base and the other which they use primarily as a drizzle. I prefer the "finishing" sauce as my base, which is an odd enough order that employees generally remember it. So what happen today is that one employee started to build my pizza and another recognised me, grabbed the correct sauce, and placed it next to her. She didn't apparently didn't notice and the first time I said "pesto", she didn't understand me. I repeated myself and said, "The pesto in the squeeze bottle." This time she only understood "pesto" and started reaching into the steam table pan for wrong kind, so I said, "No, in the squeeze bottle right by your elbow!" She just looked at me, annoyed, and the other employee asked if she's rather he made my pizza.

So I'm not sure in this case how much the breakdown was due to her not understanding individual words and how much was due to her not having the context to make sense of them. (It took me a while to figure out the right wording that would get newly-hired employees to grab the squeeze bottle with a minimum of explanation and it doesn't work every time.)

[zompist]

A few years ago, when we had a house, I bought a bunch of material at Menard's. The clerk asked if I wanted [də lo:ŋgo]. I was confused-- what's a DeLongo? After a bit I realized he was asking if I wanted "the Load 'n Go", their rental truck.

[Raphael]

Can't think of any examples right now, but perhaps I could if I'd think about it for a moment longer.

Only finally, when I restated myself with a slowed down, exaggerated [ˈãːẽ̯mˈd̥ʌ̃ːːnˌwɘθːəˈskɛ̃ːnʁ̩ˤ], did he understand me.

I guess stuff like that is the reason why, when people don't get understood, their first reaction is often to instinctively switch to speaking slowly and carefully, even if the problem is that they're speaking Finnish and the person they're talking to only understands French, so speaking slowly and carefully won't solve the problem at all.

[xxx]

the different accents and the elision habits make certain differences which are not always understood...

in French, between the north and the south, it is sometimes difficult to understand everything...

fortunately the language is most of the time used as a mimic that carries little meaning in itself, the tone is mostly sufficient with the context...

"Hello asshole" said a little quickly with the tone of every day will call more certainly a "how are you" than a fist in the face...
(with a wife who is a little dyslexic I have experienced this...)

[Travis B.]

Can't think of any examples right now, but perhaps I could if I'd think about it for a moment longer.

Only finally, when I restated myself with a slowed down, exaggerated [ˈãːẽ̯mˈd̥ʌ̃ːːnˌwɘθːəˈskɛ̃ːnʁ̩ˤ], did he understand me.

I guess stuff like that is the reason why, when people don't get understood, their first reaction is often to instinctively switch to speaking slowly and carefully, even if the problem is that they're speaking Finnish and the person they're talking to only understands French, so speaking slowly and carefully won't solve the problem at all.

I find when having trouble speaking with other English-speakers, especially non-native ones, a suitable strategy is to lose as many distinctive features of my dialect as I can and speak as close to GA as is practically feasible for me. Of course, I do tend to combine that with speaking extra-slow and carefully as well.

[Torco]

truly is english the chilean spanish of the germanic languages

there are peruvians whose accent I struggle with, the guys from the sierra and the jungle. Lima people I understand well enough. sometimes bolivians give me trouble as well, and honestly, the thing they speak in spanish guinea is not spanish, or the thing I speak is not spanish, una de dos. But other than across dialect lines, I don't think this happens to me very often. of course, this happens to other people when I talk, so perhaps i'm the fast-speaker amongst fast-speakers.

I guess stuff like that is the reason why, when people don't get understood, their first reaction is often to instinctively switch to speaking slowly and carefully, even if the problem is that they're speaking Finnish and the person they're talking to only understands French, so speaking slowly and carefully won't solve the problem at all.

You'd be surprised how much it helps to speak slow and carefully, if both interloqutors are clever, imaginative and patient, and languages are vaguely related. I remember this czech guy and I on a train had an interaction where between his german, my english, his czech, my spanish and his russian and who knows which fractional bits of language knowledge we levied, we ended up having quite a pleasant and efffective conversation for like an hour, even if none of us spoke any language the other spake. I suppose this is how pidgins come about. My mother fondly remembers, during her exile in portugal, that though portuguese and spanish be different languages, speaking slowly and carefully really worked for her too.

granted, relatively unrelated languages like finnish and french probably dont have this effect as much, but it doesn't hurt to try.

[hwhatting]

I can't remember a case with Gernan where a whole phrase wouldn't be understood; I could imagine something like that in heavily dialect-influenced speech or if someone spoke a regional variety like Swiss or Austrian German to me.

So I'm not sure in this case how much the breakdown was due to her not understanding individual words and how much was due to her not having the context to make sense of them. (It took me a while to figure out the right wording that would get newly-hired employees to grab the squeeze bottle with a minimum of explanation and it doesn't work every time.)

This looks rather like a combination of lacking context plus "not the routine I learnt" to me. That's something that happens rather frequently, in my experience

[Linguoboy]

This looks rather like a combination of lacking context plus "not the routine I learnt" to me. That's something that happens rather frequently, in my experience

Yeah, it's surprising to me how sometimes the smallest deviations from someone's accustomed routine can cause near-breakdowns in these sorts of situations. I have an intolerance of fresh tomatoes (they make me gag). It's not an actual allergy--I can remove the tomatoes from something and still eat it--but I hate wasting food so I always say "no tomatoes" when ordering any kind of sandwich or salad. But that's often not enough and, if there's a visible assembly line, I'll have to watch like a hawk and remind folks two or even three times not to add tomatoes like they normally would.

There's also the problem of nerdview. Sometimes it's quite easy to have someone accommodate a request if you simply know the right way to ask for it. But if you haven't worked at a particular establishment, it's not obvious what the approved jargon is. I had this problem at the same pizza place. They had a tendency to overcook the pizzas until the crust is nearly burnt. So I started asking up front for them not to do this. Some employees would understand right away and others needed a frustrating amount of explanation. Finally, I discovered that the in the lingo of this establishment a pizza cooked properly Neapolitan style has a "soft bottom" and, if I said these words, I got the right result almost every time.

[Moose-tache]

There's also the fact that the training in fast food restaurants is often designed to squelch the kind of critical thinking and situational judgment you're asking for. When I worked retail in college I started saying "compu'ah says no" to every special request, no matter how reasonable, once I discovered that the punishment for deciding incorrectly is not matched by any reward for deciding correctly. The hyper-Taylorized environment of a restaurant is probably even worse.

[Raphael]

There's also the fact that the training in fast food restaurants is often designed to squelch the kind of critical thinking and situational judgment you're asking for. When I worked retail in college I started saying "compu'ah says no" to every special request, no matter how reasonable, once I discovered that the punishment for deciding incorrectly is not matched by any reward for deciding correctly. The hyper-Taylorized environment of a restaurant is probably even worse.

Now you've brought back memories from 2019 for me:

So my family wants to get some bulky waste from our weekend hut picked up. (For those of you from countries where people don't usually use the term "bulky waste", here's the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulky_waste) The hut itself is on a thing-vaguely-resembling-a-road that is unpaved, pretty uneven, often close to trees with relatively low branches protruding over it, and has no opportunities to turn around large vehicles, so the bulky waste collection trucks obviously can't reach the hut directly. So we'll move the bulky waste to the nearest spot those trucks can reach, which is traditionally the designated bulky waste pickup spot for the area. It's a spot some distance from the nearest postal address.

So my Mom calls the bulky waste collection company and tells them that there will be some bulky waste in that spot on the next collection day. Or at least she tries to tell them. Because, you see, as soon as she gets to describing the pickup spot, the company's employee says "I can't write that". It takes a fair amount of back-and-forth to convince the employee to, grudgingly, accept the directions to the pickup spot.

Now, I don't really know what happened for sure, so this is just speculation. But based on my experiences with the wonderful world of the 21st century, my guess is that it might have been like this: the employee probably had to enter information on where to pick up bulky waste into a form provided by some software user interface, which only had fields for the standard elements of regular postal addresses, like street, house number, zip code, and place name. So she had no idea how to enter directions to a place that's some distance from the nearest regular postal address.

[Kuchigakatai]

There is definitely some idiolectal variation in how "clearly" people articulate sounds, just as there is variation in how fast they speak. My brother is a bit of a lazy (Spanish) speaker and he sometimes slurs words enough that I can't understand something he's said. Yes, my own brother, who I've talked with for nearly 30 years...

[xxx]

a sort of language style...

[zompist]

There is definitely some idiolectal variation in how "clearly" people articulate sounds, just as there is variation in how fast they speak. My brother is a bit of a lazy (Spanish) speaker and he sometimes slurs words enough that I can't understand something he's said. Yes, my own brother, who I've talked with for nearly 30 years...

I asked my wife (native speaker of Peruvian Spanish) about what people she finds harder to understand. She find Mexican Spanish harder, due to vocabulary issues; also people from Cuba and Puerto Rico (she says they speak very quickly). European Spanish is by contrast easy.

FWIW, the slurring you mention bedevils me when listening to my wife's brothers. By contrast my wife is easy to understand; so were her parents and an aunt we stayed with.

[Travis B.]

There is definitely some idiolectal variation in how "clearly" people articulate sounds, just as there is variation in how fast they speak. My brother is a bit of a lazy (Spanish) speaker and he sometimes slurs words enough that I can't understand something he's said. Yes, my own brother, who I've talked with for nearly 30 years...

The big idiolectal variation I notice in the English here is the frequency of elision and assimilation, whereas some people such as myself aggressively elide and assimilate when not speaking carefully, while some people barely elide or assimilate at all, and then there is quite a continuum between those two extremes. After that the main variation I hear is variation in palatalization and affrication and variation in the degree and expression of the NCVS (e.g. I have a rounded THOUGHT while my mother, from Kenosha, has an unrounded THOUGHT, and I normally do not diphthongize TRAP most of the time while very many people reliably diphthongize it before nasals, and people from Illinois tend to reliably diphthongize it across the board).

[xxx]

There is definitely some idiolectal variation in how "clearly" people articulate sounds, just as there is variation in how fast they speak. My brother is a bit of a lazy (Spanish) speaker and he sometimes slurs words enough that I can't understand something he's said. Yes, my own brother, who I've talked with for nearly 30 years...

I asked my wife (native speaker of Peruvian Spanish) about what people she finds harder to understand. She find Mexican Spanish harder, due to vocabulary issues; also people from Cuba and Puerto Rico (she says they speak very quickly). European Spanish is by contrast easy.

FWIW, the slurring you mention bedevils me when listening to my wife's brothers. By contrast my wife is easy to understand; so were her parents and an aunt we stayed with.

I like to watch movies in their original version, in Spanish, I don't have much difficulty with South American accents (a little with the vocabulary sometimes)...
but in Spanish from Spain some speakers are totally hermetic to me between their very low tone the speed of elocution and the contraction of words...

[Imralu]

Every time I say "countable nouns" [ˈkʰæɔ̯nəbʊ ˈnæɔ̯nz], some of my colleagues hear it as "cannibal nouns" [ˈkʰænəbʊ ˈnæɔ̯nz].

[Nortaneous]

Every time I say "countable nouns" [ˈkʰæɔ̯nəbʊ ˈnæɔ̯nz], some of my colleagues hear it as "cannibal nouns" [ˈkʰænəbʊ ˈnæɔ̯nz].

Once I was talking to a linguistics grad student (from a few hours north of me - had the /æ/-/eə/ contrast) about the syllabification of words in <ow(e)l> and she thought I had a "Hal-howl merger". But MOUTH is [æə̯] here.

(I think the primary phonetic contrast between TRAP and MOUTH is that TRAP has some kind of +ARGH, although I don't know what this +ARGH is. Not the same +ARGH as Nuosu.)

[Imralu]

Every time I say "countable nouns" [ˈkʰæɔ̯nəbʊ ˈnæɔ̯nz], some of my colleagues hear it as "cannibal nouns" [ˈkʰænəbʊ ˈnæɔ̯nz].

Once I was talking to a linguistics grad student (from a few hours north of me - had the /æ/-/eə/ contrast) about the syllabification of words in <ow(e)l> and she thought I had a "Hal-howl merger". But MOUTH is [æə̯] here.

I almost have that merger. /æl/ and /aʊl/ are very similar. I'm not quite sure how to transcribe them. Having very velarised /l/s (in all positions) and tending towards vocalising them makes the offglide of /aʊ/ less noticeable I think.

(I think the primary phonetic contrast between TRAP and MOUTH is that TRAP has some kind of +ARGH, although I don't know what this +ARGH is. Not the same +ARGH as Nuosu.)

I am so lost here.

[Travis B.]

Every time I say "countable nouns" [ˈkʰæɔ̯nəbʊ ˈnæɔ̯nz], some of my colleagues hear it as "cannibal nouns" [ˈkʰænəbʊ ˈnæɔ̯nz].

Once I was talking to a linguistics grad student (from a few hours north of me - had the /æ/-/eə/ contrast) about the syllabification of words in <ow(e)l> and she thought I had a "Hal-howl merger". But MOUTH is [æə̯] here.

I almost have that merger. /æl/ and /aʊl/ are very similar. I'm not quite sure how to transcribe them. Having very velarised /l/s (in all positions) and tending towards vocalising them makes the offglide of /aʊ/ less noticeable I think.

I myself have a contrast between [ɛɤ̯] and [ɑɤ̯] for /æl/ versus /aʊl/, but mind you my /aʊ/ has a back starting point, as [ɑɔ̯]~[ʌo̯].

(I think the primary phonetic contrast between TRAP and MOUTH is that TRAP has some kind of +ARGH, although I don't know what this +ARGH is. Not the same +ARGH as Nuosu.)

I am so lost here.

I think we can consider "+ARGH" (and presumably "-ARGH") as a Nortaneous-ism, like his wonderful glosses.