pne | Amyisms: Cr- and reflexives (Reply)

Amy has difficulty distinguishing between sequences of initial stop + /r/ in my speech, it seems; for example, when I talked about there being no more trams in Hamburg, she mentioned pushing babies around (but that's "prams"). I think cr- also sounds like tr- and pr- to her.

This may be my pronunciation, or they may simply be hard to distinguish in general.

This also makes me misunderstand her occasionally, when she tries to use a word that starts with such a cluster and I don't recognise her pronunciation. For example, the other day she talked about something that sounded like /pfi:/, and I guessed "feet" -- but she meant "trees"!

Unrelatedly, her use of reflexives sometimes follows the German model (unsurprisingly); for example, this evening she told me, "I hurt meself the thumb" (= I hurt my thumb). ("Meself" is her usual form for "myself"; not sure why. Perhaps because German "mir" is "me" in English in non-reflexive uses?)