Benedict Cumberbatch and the art of distance assimilation

Podcasts

Inside Language | In the first in a new podcast series, linguist Kate Burridge talks to Peter Clarke about how we merge and lose sounds in spoken language – and how they sometimes reappear

Kate Burridge & Peter Clarke 7 January 2016 66 words

Distance harmoniser: Benedict Cumberbatch. Sam/Flickr

Benedict Cumberbatch set off a small storm when he unconsciously pronounced penguin as “pengwing” in a recent wildlife documentary. For linguist Kate Burridge, it was another case of “distance assimilation,” one of the ways we tend to harmonise the elements of difficult words as we speak. In the first of of a new series, Inside Language, she talks to Peter Clarke.

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Duration: 7 minutes 20 seconds

Kate Burridge is professor of linguistics at Monash University. Peter Clarke is a Melbourne-based broadcaster, writer and educator who pioneered national talkback on Australian radio as the inaugural presenter of Offspring (now Life Matters) on ABC Radio National.

Topics: Inside Language | language | podcast