xkcd #2942: Fluid Speech
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Thank you to linguist Gretchen McCulloch for teaching me about phonetic assimilation, and for teaching me that if you stand around in public reading texts from a linguist and murmuring example phrases to yourself, people will eventually ask if you're okay.
Well, the only way to check beyond me muttering at myself would be to have a recording of me talking casually about hot potatoes :D
And yeah, I definitely pronounce "could you" as "couja" when relaxed. Hanging out with people from different countries makes you pretty conscious about your accent some times. Mostly when half the voice chat can't understand what you just said and the other half can't understand why they're having an issue.
I'd say part of this is the intended / official descriptipn isn't actually that. The spoken word existed first, then someone tried to capture that spoken word using a finite list of characters and character combinations that map back to phenomes. The written word isn't phonetically accurate to the letters it is composed of, and the written word is just close approximation of the spoken word itself.
Yeah, as I said my awareness is just "people make fun of my accent some times" (and I make fun right back, it's that kind of a friend group).