Pronunciation Lessons

Center for Language Education HKUST

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Lesson 12 - More ways of linking words together

Listening for links

Listen to these phrases and listen carefully to what happens between the words.

Sometimes a 'w' is inserted , sometimes a 'y', and sometimes the words are just contracted to make them run together .

e.g., No(w)end of people are coming to the party.

Do it again!	At the end
I will talk about it often!	She is an angel!
Give me a break!	Go over there!
No other girl is good enough!	I'm going to go.

Linking words with "long vowels" followed by a voiceless consonant

We learned about the different quality of final /-p, -t, -k/ in English and Cantonese. In English they are aspirated, e.g., /-p/.

If the preceding vowel is long, Cantonese speakers tend to shorten it (as would happen in Cantonese) and then they might not be understood as so many English words are distinguished by similar short and long vowels,

e.g., hurt/hut; cart/cat; caught/cot.

Practice

Say these examples aloud. They are words containing long vowels followed by a voiceless consonant:

sort	hurt	bought	talk
caught	half	cart	work

Let’s review linking such 'long vowel' words to words beginning with a vowel:

sort_it_out	half_of_it	work_at_it
park_it_outside	talk_about_astronomy	bought_it_up
caught_it_again