Funny Speech Quirks and More!

[Solarius]

My roommate has [θɪŋɚ] for <finger>.

[Inkcube-Revolver]

Another interesting tick, which would happen to me very often, was that this guy who was once a really good friend of mine would switch the beginning consonants of two words, especially if they were compounds and proper names, like some sort of strange metathesis.

This is known as Spoonerism, and I enjoy doing it a lot, too.

Of COURSE it has a name as silly as the phenomenon!

[Axiem]

I have a bad habit, especially when trying to enunciate, to pronounce "in" as /ɪnd/. I figure this is mostly hypercorrection because I have to be careful not to pronounce "and" as /n̩/, and my tongue gets in the habit of following /n/ with /d/.

[jimydog000]

I swear there are 2 other sandhi rules in (...at least) non-rhotic english:
∅ > w / {ʊ, əʉ}_V "do it"-Emperor Palpatine
ð > z /C[+alveolar]_ "how's that a problem?"

[Zythros Jubi]

Well, I'm also somewhere on the spectrum, I believe; a teacher described me as having "Asperger's syndrome", however these groups still receive little attention in PRC. I remember saying 澳大利 (àodàlì "Australy") and 意大利亚 (yìdàlìyà "Italia") when I was in elementary school; the latter, by coincidence, is identical to its endonym, which I apparently didn't know then.
Anyway, mainland China's translation of country names and foreign placenames are sometimes confusing and I have no idea where it comes from, such as 克罗地亚 kèluódìyà (Croatia), 爱沙尼亚 àishāníyà (Estonia) and 列支敦士登 lièzhīdūnshìdēng (Liechtenstein); the last one is apparently a spelling pronunciation as if it were English. More specially, 塞尔维亚 sàiěrwéiyà (Serbia) comes from Servia, the former name transliterated from Greek. The name for Lithuania (立陶宛 lìtáowǎn) is exceptional since it drops the ending -ia and I'm unsure which language it comes from.

BTW is there anyone who can explain the origin of the names for Croatia and Estonia? In Taiwan Mandarin the former is 克羅埃西亞 kèluóāixīyà, apparently directly from English; I don't know what the words for Lichtenstein and Estonia are.

@k123456780y maybe he knows the answer.

[GrandPiano]

If I had to guess, I'd say that 克罗地亚 Kèluódìyà has the same origin as what you said for the Mandarin name for Liechtenstein; if you read Croatia as if it were pronounced /ˈkɹoʊtiə/, then Kèluódìyà makes sense as a phonetic transcription in Mandarin. As for 爱沙尼亚 Àishāníyà for Estonia, I'm not entirely sure why the /t/ was left out and /ʂ/ was used in place of /s/, but I'm guessing /aɪ̯/ was chosen for /ɛ/ because that's the closest you can get to /ɛ/ in Mandarin without a /j/ initial.

For whatever reason, Mandarin seems to have a tendency to substitute /ʂ/ for /s/ in loanwords (cf. 沙发 shāfā for "sofa", 艾莎 Àishā for Elsa in Disney's Frozen; but, 三明治 sānmíngzhì for "sandwich" (which is puzzling in other ways)). This could be because of a tendency in many dialects to not distinguish between the retroflex sibilants /ʈ͡ʂ ʈ͡ʂʰ ʂ/ and the dental sibilants /t͡s t͡sʰ s/, or perhaps because of the fact that many commonly spoken Sinitic languages other than Mandarin do not distinguish the equivalent initials at all anymore in the first place.

[Lao Kou]

三明治 sānmíngzhì for "sandwich" (which is puzzling in other ways)

Think Rachel Ray "sammies" or the pronunciation of some children, "sammiches".

[All4Ɇn]

The name for Lithuania (立陶宛 lìtáowǎn) is exceptional since it drops the ending -ia and I'm unsure which language it comes from.

Looks like it came from German "Litauen" to me.

As for Croatia maybe it has something to with Russian Хорватия? Especially considering the <о> is pronounced closer to a schwa than [o]

[mira]

Another interesting tick, which would happen to me very often, was that this guy who was once a really good friend of mine would switch the beginning consonants of two words, especially if they were compounds and proper names, like some sort of strange metathesis.

This is known as Spoonerism, and I enjoy doing it a lot, too.

Of COURSE it has a name as silly as the phenomenon!

Roonerspisms!

[GrandPiano]

三明治 sānmíngzhì for "sandwich" (which is puzzling in other ways)

Think Rachel Ray "sammies" or the pronunciation of some children, "sammiches".

Sure, but that still doesn't explain why the final nasal in the second syllable.

[mira]

I'm not sure if this is a quirk or just a result of my combined accents what with me having a father that grew up in Ireland before moving to London, a mother that has always lived in Essex, and myself spending the first 5 years of my life in London before moving to the North bit of the South West, but my speech differs quite a bit from those around me.

Most of the people where I live seem to drop a hell of a lot of consonants, or at least turn a lot of them into glottal stops - particularly word-final plosives. I don't really drop any consonants, but instead just remove the release on them. I however kill off loads of my vowels. Here's a few examples:
Word — People around me — Me
factory — /ˈfæk̚ʔt͡ʃɹi/ — /ˈfækt̚tʰɹɪ/
military — /ˈmɪləʔt͡ʃɹi/ — /ˈmɪlət̚tʰɹi/
compartment — /ˌkɘmˈpɑːʔ̆mənˑ/ — /ˌkəmˈpɑt̚mn̩t/
little — /ˈlɪʔəɫ/ — /ˈlɪt͡ɬɫ/
court — /ˈkɔːʔ/ — /kɔːt/

The missing vowels are seen in "little" and "compartment", where the schwa is dropped and either the /n/ becomes syllabic, or I have the /t͡ɬ/ affricate - which I love the sound of.

[jimydog000]

Lastly I think I use [p͡f] in "something" and accidentally in words such as "from".

Probably no one cares, but I've been trying to think of words that do this without [m] before it.
Unhelpful is one.

[Angen]

I have trouble pronouncing R sounds at the end of syllables. Because of this, I've been asked several times if I'm British.

[KaiTheHomoSapien]

I don't have too many quirks that I know of. I speak with a heavy California accent (so I've been told), so that /u/ is completely unrounded and also fronted for me (the way I say "dude" is quite funny), /ʌ/ tends toward /ɛ/, /ɛ/ tends toward /æ/, etc. But that's common around here.

One suspected quirk of mine is that I often can't tell the difference between the schwa, /ɐ/ and /ʌ/. I often pronounce the schwa as /ʌ/ too, such as in the word "pizza" (which I say as /'pitsʌ/ for the most part).

Another suspected quirk of mine is that the diphthong /aɪ/ is pronounced /ʌɪ/ before unvoiced consonants (within word or compound boundaries). So I say "high" as /haɪ/ and "hide" as /haɪd/, but "high school" as /'hʌɪskul/ and "height" as /hʌɪt/. No dictionary I know ever makes a distinction between these, but I do, so it must be a quirk, though I suspect it's not unique to me. But "high school" only works because it's a unit/compound, "high" will otherwise be pronounced /haɪ/ in combination with other words that begin with a voiceless sound. My name, for example, is always /kaɪ/, no matter what follows it.

I have trouble pronouncing R sounds at the end of syllables. Because of this, I've been asked several times if I'm British.

I pronounced /ɹ/ as /w/ until I was almost 8, way later than most kids who have trouble with that sound. Needless to say I got picked on a bit for it

I think it's a well-established fact that vowels in English tend to be lengthened before voiced consonants. Could that be what you're noticing?

This certainly happens to me with monosyllabic words. I always pronounce the vowel long in the final-voiced counterpart: face vs. phase, pick vs. pig, set vs. said. It's strange how involuntary it is.

[Angen]

I pronounced /ɹ/ as /w/ until I was almost 8, way later than most kids who have trouble with that sound. Needless to say I got picked on a bit for it

I had several speech problems as a kid too. I pronounced R as W, Y as L, TH as D or F depending on whether the sound was voiced or unvoiced. I did get teased a bit for it.

[mira]

TH as D or F

Almost half of the people where I live have that. I'm guessing it's dialectical, but it's not the nicest thing to listen to, as you say: It's a thing that children normally have, so listening to adults with it is a little weird - even after living here for over a decade now.

[All4Ɇn]

I had several speech problems as a kid too. I pronounced R as W, Y as L, TH as D or F depending on whether the sound was voiced or unvoiced. I did get teased a bit for it.

I used to pronounce non-initial R very similar to a Boston accent despite never living outside of the South. I actually had to go through speech therapy in my elementary school for awhile because of it.

[Angen]

I actually had to go through speech therapy in my elementary school for awhile because of it.

So did I.

[Sumelic]

I don't have too many quirks that I know of. I speak with a heavy California accent (so I've been told), so that /u/ is completely unrounded and also fronted for me (the way I say "dude" is quite funny), /ʌ/ tends toward /ɛ/, /ɛ/ tends toward /æ/, etc. But that's common around here.

One suspected quirk of mine is that I often can't tell the difference between the schwa, /ɐ/ and /ʌ/. I often pronounce the schwa as /ʌ/ too, such as in the word "pizza" (which I say as /'pitsʌ/ for the most part).

I (also from California) also identify the "commA" vowel with /ʌ/ [ɐ] rather than with schwa, and I think this is fairly common in American English in general.
I know of a paper that describes the different phonetic realizations of the two types of schwa:The phonetics of schwa vowels (Edward Flemming 2007).

Another suspected quirk of mine is that the diphthong /aɪ/ is pronounced /ʌɪ/ before unvoiced consonants (within word or compound boundaries). So I say "high" as /haɪ/ and "hide" as /haɪd/, but "high school" as /'hʌɪskul/ and "height" as /hʌɪt/. No dictionary I know ever makes a distinction between these, but I do, so it must be a quirk, though I suspect it's not unique to me. But "high school" only works because it's a unit/compound, "high" will otherwise be pronounced /haɪ/ in combination with other words that begin with a voiceless sound. My name, for example, is always /kaɪ/, no matter what follows it.

This is often called "Canadian raising" in the literature (although it is by no means confined to Canada). Interestingly, some people even have raising before flaps/taps that were originally /d/ in certain words, such as "spider" (pronounced like "spiter"). I don't really notice it in my speech, although probably I have some gradient length/height differences in transparently morphologically divisible words like "writer" vs. "rider". My pronunciation of the set phrase "high school" is clearly different from "high" "school" but I think it's partly or mainly a matter of prosody, not vowel height.

[KaiTheHomoSapien]

^Just looked at the Wikipedia article for "Canadian raising". Glad to know it has a name; that is exactly what I was thinking of. Interestingly my parents don't seem to have it to the extent that I do (my mom also does not have the cot-caught merger, but my dad does; both are California-raised).