Punch Cards Q, and rambling reminiscent A's

From: Al Kossow Sent: Friday, September 20, 2013 2:45 PM On 9/20/13 1:52 PM, Fred Cisin wrote: There is a physiological/phonological reason for "punched card" to become "punch card", having to do with the articulatory difficulty of pronouncing the cluster [?tk] which occurs in rapid (i.e. not carefully articulated) English language speech. I can pretty much guarantee you that even the purists who insist that they *always* say [p?n?t.kard] are "hearing" what they are thinking, and that a sound spectrogram will show that there is no evidence for a [t] in the speech stream of a normal-speed utterance of the phrase. I'm speaking here as a trained linguist who spent 2 years in phonetics labs studying this particular sort of phenomenon, rather than pulling the claim out of thin air. I'm not disputing what the written language says the phrase is. Rich Alderson Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer Living Computer Museum 2245 1st Avenue S Seattle, WA 98134 mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/