Intonation and pronunciation 4

 

I'm going to buy some clothes.

 

Now pretty much all the entries I have for TEE are based on what Polish students tell me, but this entry is also a common mistake made by German students. It's all down to how we pronounce the word 'clothes'.

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From what I understand from English native speakers in Germany, pronunciation of this word seems to be one of the problematic.

 

The word itself only contains the one syllable (A syllable is a part of a word that contains a single vowel sound or a diphthong, e.g., play has one syllable, pronoun has two, and pronunciation has five syllables. Source: Not4GrammarBores). 

 

But Germans (and Polish students) have a habit of breaking the word up into two syllables and then putting stress on the second half of the word.

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So instead of clothes as in /kloʊðz/ - or 'close' with a slight 'th' at the end before the final 's' sound (or phoneme) - they say clo-thes. 

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One theory suggested - thanks Shelley Pascual (shelley.pascual@thelocal.com) - is that there aren't any silent letters in German and every letter seems to be succinctly pronounced in German-language words, so native speakers take the same approach with the word clothes.

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Shelley also claims that this is one of the most annoying language mistakes in Germany as it is something that requires breaking a habit when it comes to German pronunciation.

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