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How do English speakers pronounce "I've found"? Is it pronounced like /aiv faʊnd/ or /aif faʊnd/?

Beowulf
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    For many speakers in casual conversational context, probably a sort of mixture between the two. If we're going to "slur" /v/ into /f/ (and many people *will), the final result is likely to be somewhat intermediate between the two. But the more slurred into a single consonant it becomes, the more we're likely to settle on the second* one - so effectively, preceding /v/ will just disappear (but it would never go the other way around; we'd never articulate the /v/ but "swallow" the following /f/ in such contexts). – FumbleFingers Mar 24 '21 at 16:37
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    (That's to say, in casual spoken contexts, Present Perfect *I have [verbed] = I've [verbed]* is often indistinguishable from Simple Past *I verbed* for verbs starting with /f/.) – FumbleFingers Mar 24 '21 at 16:40
  • @FumbleFingers, so you, as a native speaker of English, often can't distinguish between "I've [verbed]" and "I [verbed]"? I thought they were indistiguishable only for non-native speakers. Then we can only rely on the context, right? – Beowulf Mar 24 '21 at 17:12
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    There are almost no contexts where it could possibly make a difference to the speaker's meaning whether he said *I fixed it* or *I have fixed it, for example. Also remember that in the mind of the speaker, there's zero* uncertainty about exactly which tense he intends to articulate - even though he himself might be completely unable to detect the difference if what he said was accurately recorded and played back to him some time after he's actually forgotten (i.e. removing "memory" from the equation). – FumbleFingers Mar 24 '21 at 17:20
  • @FumbleFingers thank you for answering my questions! – Beowulf Mar 24 '21 at 17:30
  • It's much the same thing when we have to switch from the hard TH in, say, *this, with* to the soft TH in, say, *thought, bath. So normally you'll only hear the second of those two in a sequence like with thought*. See this earlier ELL question. – FumbleFingers Mar 24 '21 at 17:46
  • @FumbleFingers, thank you for the interesting link! – Beowulf Mar 24 '21 at 18:46

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