"fink" and "fing" instead of "think" and "thing", I'm all for regional accents and street slang but when your a middle aged academic with a doctorate lecturing in English at a major university and taking part in a discussion on Radio 4 that's just an affectation I'm afraid.
My ex-boss at Velo Vision says 'fing' and 'fink'. It's just his accent/speaking voice, no affectation.
I'm sure someone on here recently said they can't hear the difference between f and th. Just an oddity of human senses, I guess, like colour blindness.
Mrs B rarely gets 'l' & 'r' wrong, although she grew up speaking a language in which there's no distinction between them, & has no problems with 'think' & 'that', although Japanese doesn't have either of the sounds we write 'th'.
Unless you have a hearing impairment, there's no excuse.
Well, bully for Mrs B.
Did you mean to sound quite so patronising and superior? Are we all to speak without accents of any kind?
Don't be bloody stupid. Did I mention accents? Did I claim that Mrs B speaks English with no discernible Japanese accent? Or suggest that would be desirable?
I'm talking about willingness to take the care to pronounce standard English, not an accent. Look at the job of the person in question. He should be willing to say 'thing' & 'think' in his professional life, even if he is more comfortable saying 'fing' & 'fink' at home, or in the pub. where, BTW, I wouldn't criticise him for it.
Or do you think it's acceptable for Mrs B to say 'fing' & 'fink' when she's at work? After all, voiced & unvoiced 'th' aren't sounds that occur in her native language. Of course, it could have a negative impact on the quality of some of the speech therapy she does (in English), but that's less important than her freedom to speak with her native set of phonemes, isn't it? Dammit, why not go the whole hog: why can't she just do her job in Japanese?
If the academic mentioned was, say, a mathematician or archaeologist, I wouldn't give a damn how he pronounces anything, as long as it's comprehensible. But he isn't.