> Why have Americans always been unable to pronounce the intervocalic T?
> Bread and budder? WTF?
In this and most cases there isn't really another word that would fit in context. Also plenty of other dialects (i.e. Australian English) do exactly the same thing.
> I'm an author; I love horseback writing?
I'm this case, "riding" and "writing" have a marked difference in the length of the initial diphthong sound "ai".
I general American English is nowhere near the most ambiguous in this way. Many languages rely more heavily on context because they use ambiguous phonological and grammatical marking in common speech (i.e. spoken Japanese).
> Bread and budder? WTF?
In this and most cases there isn't really another word that would fit in context. Also plenty of other dialects (i.e. Australian English) do exactly the same thing.
> I'm an author; I love horseback writing?
I'm this case, "riding" and "writing" have a marked difference in the length of the initial diphthong sound "ai".
I general American English is nowhere near the most ambiguous in this way. Many languages rely more heavily on context because they use ambiguous phonological and grammatical marking in common speech (i.e. spoken Japanese).