When I first arrived in Singapore about sixteen years ago, I discovered that McDonald's was much cheaper than in the UK, and as we were a bit short of money at the time, I allowed my two children to eat there as often as they wanted. (They soon got sick of it!) The trouble was that when I ordered two hamburgers, I sometimes received three, and this puzzled me.
Similarly, when I was with my wife in KL a couple of years ago, I asked for two train tickets and was given three.
So why is my pronunciation of two so often heard as three?
There may be three contributing factors:
- three is often pronounced with [t] at the start by people in South-East Asia
- when I say two, I aspirate the initial [t] quite a lot; in other words, there is a puff of air after the release of the [t]. But in Malay, [t] is not aspirated − there is no puff of air. This means that my [t] may not sound like [t] to some local people.
- I produce the vowel in two with a fronted quality. In other words, my tongue is further forward in the mouth when I say the vowel than is usual for people in Singapore, Malaysia and perhaps Brunei. The vowel in two is phonetically represented as [u:]; but if it becomes fronted, it may sound rather like [i:], the vowel in three.
