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Ok this puzzled me for a few years now... Should one pronounce it "beyond" or "beyon'" ? The most consistent pattern I heard was that it's "beyond", except before d,t and th. So it's, say, "beyon'the call of duty", but "beyond any doubt". Am I right? And where on Earth did this pattern came from?
In British English you should be careful to pronounce the last consonant of a word properly (particularly T and D). Else you sound like an uneducated person. But you only need to pronounce the D in "beyond" carefully if you are speaking slowly. If you speak fast and the next letter is a consonant, then it merges with that letter.
Americans have their own way of handling consonants and I think they "drop" a fair number of them. Including the D in "beyond" in some accents. In American English T often sounds like D.
Because of these types of differences it's best to decide on speaking either British or American English; then you focus on pronouncing in that way and ignore the other accent.
Your written English is great, I'm sure this is not a serious problem. You'd only need to spend a month or so in an English speaking country and all this would feel very natural.
American English speaker here - I've never heard the word beyond without the "d".
Scott
American speaker here, I have to say that the "d" is meant to be pronounced but when people speak fast sometimes it is more silent and the "n" and "d" intertwine or sometimes the d even sounds like a t.
If you fully pronounce the word it will sound fine.
I think these contractions facilitate speech. In "beyon'the call of duty" if you fully pronounce the d and then the "th" it doesn't flow easily, so the n,d and th are sort of combined. I don't think you can spell this out and I don't think "beyon'the" accurately captures the sound. With "beyond any doubt" the d flows right into the a so it's pronounced.Quote:
Originally Posted by ac220
This is a good point.Quote:
Originally Posted by sperk
Thanks everybody. :)
@Johanna. I wish it was that easy. :-) Then again, as Hercule Poirot (or rather Agatha Christie) remarked once, sounding as zee stupit forener may have its advantages. Sometimes. Not so most of the time.
I would agree. If the beginning letter of the next word is a vowel, pronounce the d. If not (such as in the "beyond the call of duty"), pronouncing the d would give us too much of a mouthful of consonants (ha, like Russian...), so we drop it a little. What I find when I say it is that I do form the the d with my mouth, but it falls into the space between the words, if that makes any sense at all. I think this is the hard-to-describe sound somebody mentioned above. For example, if I write all of the sounds/letters that my mouth forms, but I write what my vocal cords actually say in capital letters, it would look like this: BEYONdTHECALL. There is a very tiny pause after BEYON where the d sound forms but doesn't quite get vocalized, but as a result of speaking quickly a bit of the beginning of the sound gets "caught" after the N, and a bit of the end of the sound gets "caughts" before the TH.
Thanks. :) I think I've understod what happens here and why.