#only unfortunate difference is that american english pronunciation is closer to the actual Spelling of the word so it's more difficult to -

[kiss-dumbbunnies]

they visited australia to pay nate a visit for his birthday :)

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nate, kess, and benjie have been good buddies since they were kids! nate had to move back to the ol' aussieland pretty early in their lives. they still usually kept in touch online, though!

apparently, nate and benjie had a bit of a falling out that kess was unaware of, and they hadn't spoken in quite some time. they seem to have reconciled, though...

they decided they'd all pitch in to pay for some tickets, and kick him out of his house for a few hours to prepare a super surprise party for his birthday!! :)

they had a lot of fun. he told them all about his wonderful [sic] adventures during his time in the outback. avery had no clue what he was saying half the time as she'd never once in her life encountered a man who could speak "english" without speaking english at all the whole time. she was awestruck. it was mesmerizing. devon didn't care because the girls were paying more attention to nate than himself. but he tried to be polite the whole time.

benjie and nate seem to be at least on good terms again. they had fun. avery had never seen so many different techniques for spider-killing and marsupial-clobbering. she vowed that the only time she would ever return to this country would be to study under his wing and/or marry him.

benjie and devon were sent to go get the tickets for the ride home while the girls stayed back and chilled with nate for a bit. it had only then dawned upon them that, caught up in their excitement of the idea of visiting a foreign land, they had completely forgotten that they had to pay for tickets to their destination AND the ride back. not only that, they had no local currency with them and no idea how to access their bank accounts without their cards. avery also probably forgot her passport somewhere in the bush. whoops! go figure!! haha!!! what will these crazy critters do to get themselves out of THIS sticky wicket??!!

[army-of-bee-assassins]

i'm currently in a master's program for speech language pathology and i just finished my classes on speech sound disorders and speech science, so i found this pretty interesting! i had to go rewatch the conversation with the hanged man cause it had been a while. i'm far from an expert, but i think the "th" (/θ/ and /ð/) -> /f/ or /v/ is a dialectal thing as opposed to an articulation issue. there's certain english accents that do it a lot. i'm american and terrible at knowing proper names for all the various english accents, but for a comparison i think of rose from doctor who. she has this kind of accent too.

english sibilants are /s/, /z/, /ʃ/ ("sh"), and /ʒ/ (spelled sometimes "j" or "zh" - this is the first consonant in jean vicquemare's name). from what i saw, the hanged man was using /z/ and /ʃ/ fine. i didn't notice any /ʒ/ words but i may have missed them. i did notice the /s/ deletion sometimes. i think it was almost always at the end of words, and often as part of a consonant cluster (like "-ts" becoming just "-t"). he pronounced it fine in initial and medial positions in words. so yeah! it sounds like he has a little trouble with /s/-final consonant clusters at the ends of words!

so i also went to go read the "law jaw" thought again to see how the game described it, since this is the only in-game text on harry having a speech impediment. my theory is that it has to do with some difficulty pronouncing /l/, but unfortunately the comparison to the hanged man as harry's actual voice ends here, because the hanged man pronounces all his /l/'s fine. he doesn't ever say "law" either so i couldn't check to see if it was maybe just that word.

according to the thought, when saying the word "law", harry's jaw shifts a bit sideways and the word sounds "oddly guttural and low". from what i know about articulation and the way sounds are formed in the vocal tract (as well as just testing it out loud myself), i actually don't think shifting the jaw to the side really does much to the sound at all. to be fair, i wouldn't expect the devs to know exactly how articulation issues happen.

i know this is definitely shifting away from canon here, but i think it's a tongue issue, not a jaw issue. if harry says "law" in a weird way, it's almost certainly the tongue that he's having a motor issue with, since that is the main articulator used in that word. the jaw and the lips aren't doing much other than keeping the mouth open. if the tongue is in the wrong place for the vowel, then obviously the vowel would sound different or distorted, and if it's different enough then that would change the whole word. so while that could be the issue with the pronunciation, i think it's the less likely option. i think maybe what is different about harry's pronunciation is that he's making a dark /l/ at the start of "law", when it would normally be a light /l/.

english has both dark and light /l/, it's just that light /l/ is usually pre-vocalic ("lake", "look"), while dark /l/ is usually post-vocalic ("roll", "feel"). the difference in how they're articulated is that the dark /l/ has the tongue higher up in the back, so it almost becomes a velar sound (even though the tip of the tongue still goes to the alveolar ridge). both sounds can appear in the same word on occasion, like in "lull". if you try to pronounce "law" with a dark /l/, i think "guttural and low" is not too far off in describing how it sounds!

this is even further speculation, but maybe harry has trouble with the /l/ in the word "law" specifically because the vowel (/ɔ/ or /ɑ/, depending on dialect) is a back vowel, meaning the tongue has to be further back - ie closer to where it would be for a dark /l/. however it's also a low vowel, meaning the tongue is low as well, so idk if this really holds up. but this kind of coarticulation (when a sound takes on features of a sound before or after it) is a very common thing in the production of speech, both in error patterns and in natural, perceptually correct speech. so it seemed like a fun idea to theorize on lol. if this were in fact the case, then harry would have a similar issue with other /l/ words containing similar vowels, like "lot" or "lost".

sorry for rambling so long. again, i am just a student so maybe this is all completely wrong. i enjoyed thinking through it though.

Harry’s little speech impediment when he talks to the corpse is really cute and also sexy. It’s so charming. I love him and his jaw problems.