"Fun drive" versus "fund drive" (Pronunciation)

07:53 Sep 30, 2011 

You're quite right, Sheila; in "blues star" the /s/ is voiced, but not in "blue star". English speakers are extremely sensitive to voicing of sibilants, and Spanish speakers, for example, find these distinctions very hard to detect and reproduce in English.

06:02 Sep 30, 2011 

There is an almost imperceptible lengthening of the vowel in "fund", and in his other example "blues". In the "blue(s) star" example, I think there is a hardening of the /s/ from "blues"

00:29 Sep 30, 2011 

Jccantrell, I am Northern Irish and 'merry' and 'Mary' sound different when I say them too! As for 'fund drive', I don't think that 'slurring' the two together is just an American feature, as Charles said. I have tried saying them too, but I think in natural speech, you wouldn't hear the difference. Incidentally, I was fascinated to discover how in Catalan, the word 'parallel' is written 'paral.lel'. That 'dot' (don't remember the proper name, Wikipedia says it's 'punt volat') means you say 'paral-lel' and not 'para-lel'. It gives you quite a distinctive Catalan sound when you say it!

00:02 Sep 30, 2011 

As a British native speaker, I would say that this kind of confusion is not specifically American. The cases of fun/fund drive and blue/blues star would be just as indistinguishable in natural British speech. In fact you could argue that British speakers tend to slur their speech more than Americans do. Most of the Americans I know articulate pretty clearly; the British often "swallow" a lot of sounds. There are many regional variations.
I have been saying these pairs to myself, trying to do so naturally, and I believe there is just the tiniest difference: a minute lengthening of "fund" and "blues" compared with "fun" and "blue". I may be kidding myself. You'd have to do a laboratory test to be sure. But what is certain is that we unconsciously use contextual clues to detect such distinctions.

23:28 Sep 29, 2011 

Besides that example, my Dragon speech program tends to point out my slurring, such as "these stairs" -> these tears
Another choice one for me is "close" and "clothes" where I tend to pronounce the 'th' but others do not.

One interesting fact is that my regional accent pronounces these three words as three distinct words:
merry, Mary, marry.

In most other regions, two of the words sound exactly the same and you pick it up from the context.

Isn't living, spoken language just oodles of fun?