You know what I'd like? I'd like a qualified linguist with a good ear to listen to a Joe Biden speech and report back.
A couple of weeks ago I spent some time doing this, and Biden's problem is that his speech really does sound a little slurred at times. My amateur conclusion was that he had problems enunciating his unvoiced fricatives, which suggests not a cognitive problem but only that his vocal cords have loosened with age.
However I'm not a linguist and I very definitely don't have a good ear. I sure wish someone who was both would provide a professional opinion about this.
He's been a stutterer since childhood, and still struggles with that condition. According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuttering), about 1% of people stutter. Joe Biden's success at controlling hit stutter to the point that he has attained the presidency speaks to his amazing drive and determination. Pundits and politicians who exploit Biden's condition, claiming that his speech suggests cognitive impairment when the know very well that he is a stutterer are beneath contempt.
+1 He's probably so sensitive to the stutter he feels it coming and rushes the words, or slurs them as the blogger says. I do this myself as a non-stutterer. In fact if we went through Obama's speech we'd find it. For Crap's Sake, Hitchens mumbled!
bingo.
I don't think this is new, but it might be more noticeable once you start looking for it.
+1
I am not a linguist and I have not slept at a Holiday recently. Joe is fine though
I have just enough training in linguistics to opine that this isn't so much a question for linguists as it is for speech therapists and maybe someone who is into phonetics. Linguists might be interesting in the sociology of aging as expressed in the language, but evaluating someone's speech for evidence of aging or whatever isn't really a linguistic issue.
I’m not a linguist.
However my wife has a PhD in linguistics, works as a researcher in intonational phonology, and absolutely considers the question to fall squarely in the domain of linguistics.
Understanding articulation, the constraints it places on production and perception, and the way it changes over time is a fundamental topic in the investigation of spoken language.
Yes, speech therapy is informed by linguistics and anatomy (here "articulation, the constraints it places on production and perception, and the way it changes over time"). But what causes and perhaps how best to address Biden's current minor struggles with annunciation isn't much of a theoretical question for linguistics. Particularly, the way Kevin expresses the question, it's a speech therapy issue.
Eh, I have a PhD in linguistics. This isn't my thing, but some linguists will have strong opinions. As will speech therapists and other people who don't claim to be linguists. I say more power to them.
I think "linguist" was just shorthand for "people who have made a study of this sort of thing."
A linguist is not the person you need to examine that. That would be a speech therapist.
See my comment above. Linguistics includes the study of spoken language.
Now, my wife does have students who are studying to be speech therapists, but that’s not the only reason people look at articulation.
I'm not sure that diagnosing someone from a video clip counts as "professional".
It's not a cognitive problem; he's fine in one-on-one interviews unless he gets agitated over something. But he does sound marble-mouthed in speeches sometimes.
I've noticed that I'm unintentionally more careless about enunciation as time goes on (I'm 49); my boss makes fun of me for it (he's 59, so, shrug emoji).
I'm guessing the slurring is just an age-related small impairment, and I'm also guessing that his staff don't press him to correct it because that would make him second-guess himself, which would make things worse especially with the pre-existing stutter problem.
But I'm just speculating.
Stutters have trouble beginning a word but not in the middle of a word. They all tend to slur words together.
My father, who is 84, sometimes is hard to understand and slurs his speech. He is still perfectly capable of holding complex discussions on current medical topics with active doctors and scientists he knows. Republicans are d**kheads, plain and simple.
Please give your father my best regards!
As long as trump rants & raves much like Hitler, whose speeches (& audience sizes he admires & tries to emulate), he is still far below Biden in speech quality, however it is measured.
That any US president has spoken like trump is shameful; both the sound & messages are revolting to decent people.
1) He definitely slurs his words.
2) Whether linguist of speech language pathologist, or someone else, we could really use someone with some expertise on this.
3) My political scientist take is that, whatever's up with his voice, he *sounds* old and that's at the root of his problems.
https://fullymyelinated.wordpress.com/2023/09/19/my-theory-for-why-joe-bidens-age-matters-so-much/
Yup, kid sounds and looks like he could keel over any second even if he won't.
Biden and Trump are probably both super agers.
I'm less worried about the enunciation than the content and coherency. There, Joe's just fine. Contrast with the Defendant. I once listened to a press conference back during the Bad Years; maybe a sound byte or two was fit for publication, but if you listened to the guy long form over an hour (or so), the repetition, the tiny vocabulary, the simplemindedness of his rants -- he ain't all there.
Now, some four years after I heard that press conference (and finally turned it off), he's declined significantly.
But sure! Go vote for DJT, because Biden is "old."
On second thought, don't do that thing.
You've started a discussion about this on Language Log - https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=61043