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I thought "ts" should sound differently. I believe rights and rice are not homophones; if so, why should patients and patience be homophones? Because the sound t is canceled after n?

These two words, Patients vs. Patience, are no different. The words patients and patience are homophones, which mean they sound the same when they are spoken, but when they are spelt, spellings are different and have different meanings. — Toppr

Laurel
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joy2020
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    You are correct. They aren't homophones. The "ts" sound should be pronounced. It can be hard to hear it however if you aren't familiar with that sound, and native speakers talk rather fast sometimes and tend to flow words into each other – Billy Kerr Jan 22 '23 at 15:26
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    There is a spoken joke, once well-known in the United States (I want to say it was done by Groucho Marx, or maybe one of the "MASH" characters impersonating Groucho Marx, or both): "I wanted to be a doctor, but I didn't have the [patience/patients]." – HemiPoweredDrone Jan 23 '23 at 20:41
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    As you can see, this is a question you shouldn't trust native speakers to answer. The physics doesn't lie, but the idea that they're the same sound is incompatible with the way we think of our language. – the-baby-is-you Jan 24 '23 at 03:06
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    People are commenting as if rapid speech isn't a perfectly normal way of talking. Linguists would be pretty remiss if they didn't treat the actual articulation as language, and not just "how it 'should' be pronounced. Every language is like this, by the way. They are homophones. – Azor Ahai -him- Jan 24 '23 at 14:53
  • A couple more words to add to that list... Patient's, Patients' (posessive forms). – david Jan 25 '23 at 16:06
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    Frankly, I don't say them differently in normal connected speech. One thing is sounding the t in a perfect world, another is how people actually speak. He was impatient. There you do say and hear the t. – Lambie Mar 02 '24 at 20:24

3 Answers3

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There may be people who distinguish these two, and we can do so in especially careful slow speech, but for most English speakers speaking normally, they are indeed homophones.

It is indeed the /n/ that makes a difference.

In the transition from /n/ to /s/, if the velum closes a moment before the tongue-tip leaves the alveolar ridge, then there will be a momentary closure, ie. /t/.

Conversely, in the sequence /nts/, the /t/ is released only in the sibilant /s/, so is barely heard.

Araucaria - Not here any more.
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Colin Fine
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    Pay-shents and pay-shens are manifestly not homophones. – RonJohn Jan 23 '23 at 23:47
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    @RonJohn For the stilted, formally speaking amongst us who make that differentiation, you are absolutely correct. But the gazillions of people who say pay-shens in both circumstances would - correctly - disagree. ;-) – mcalex Jan 24 '23 at 01:11
  • Whether there’s an alveolar closure isn’t generally the deciding factor distinguishing /ns/ from /nts/ to me: rather, it’s the fact that tautosyllabic /VNT/ (vowel + nasal + unvoiced plosive) entails glottalisation of the vowel in most contexts. This glottalisation does not occur with /ns/, at least not in unstressed syllables (it does sometimes in stressed ones). Whether you pronounce patience with a /t/ or patients without a /t/, you will almost certainly have a glottalised schwa in patients, but not in patience. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jan 24 '23 at 19:13
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Edit: My old answer here was wrong, completely wrong, confusing two unrelated phenomena. I'm rather disappointed that I got 15 upvotes instead of angry comments. I would just delete this answer, but you can't delete an answer after the question is marked as solved, so I'll replace it with a quote from Geoff Lindsey's English after RP, which addresses the similar case of prince and prints (pp. 63-64):

Traditionally, many words of English contain a nasal consonant followed by a fricative. An example would be prince, /prɪns/. The /n/ is a stop sound, which means that the oral airflow of speech is stopped; the tongue blade is held against the alveolar ridge while breath is re-directed through the nose. As /n/ changes to /s/, airflow must be switched from nasal to oral, and at the same time the stoppage at the alveolar ridge must be released. If the second of these events happens a little late, there’s a brief period in which both nasal and oral airflow are stopped. This is a brief oral stop or plosive at the same place of articulation as the nasal, creating in this case [prɪnts] , which may be indistinguishable from prints. [...] Epenthesis of an oral stop between a nasal and a fricative is very natural. Many speakers do it on some occasions but not others; the epenthetic stop may be so brief as to be barely noticeable, or it may clearly be a f­ully-­fledged plosive consonant.

alphabet
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    I live in the northeast US, and grew up partly in the Midwest US. I pronounce these two identically, and I have not noticed a difference in the way others pronounce them. If some speakers distinguish them, I am not aware of it. I can only add a data point to this answer, which does not seem enough for a separate answer. – David Siegel Jan 23 '23 at 17:12
  • For this BrE speaker, it's not so much that I pronounce the t clearly but make a longer pause after the n. – Weather Vane Jan 23 '23 at 19:21
  • @DavidSiegel I suspect this is related to the slow march of t-glottalization, where /t/ is replaced with /ʔ/ in words like "button." I usually pronounce "right foot" as /ˈɹaɪʔ fʊʔ/. – alphabet Jan 23 '23 at 20:17
  • @alphabet alphabet I really can't read IPA at all well, so i have no opinion on that point. – David Siegel Jan 23 '23 at 20:20
  • @alphabet: I'm dubious that there is any glottal element in this case, since there are already partial closures at the tongue tip and the velum. – Colin Fine Jan 23 '23 at 22:51
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    Yeah, count me (in Houston) as another data point for "they're homophones": /ˈpeɪʃɨns/. I'd have to strain to pronounce the /t/. – dan04 Jan 23 '23 at 23:00
  • @ColinFine Yes, there's no glottal stop in "patients"; I'm just speculating that it's a related phenomenon. – alphabet Jan 23 '23 at 23:15
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    Grew up in northeast US - I pronounce these the same (and never realized it until now) - just another data point. – Aurast Jan 24 '23 at 18:42
  • @ColinFine There very frequently is a glottal element in patient(s) – if not fully a stop, then at least a glottalised vowel. That is commonly the main way can and can’t is distinguished in American English, too, or indeed wooden and wouldn’t in both British and American English. I believe this glottalisation is what Weather Vane described as “a longer pause” as well. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jan 24 '23 at 19:16
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They are not homophones

All due respect to Toppr, people who take the time to learn and practice good enunciation pronounce the "t" in "patients." I do so myself, and the position of my tongue when pronouncing those two words is very different, the result being a soft "t" in patients (tip of tongue behind my upper front teeth) vs. the non-existence of the "t" in patience (middle of the tongue pressed against the hard palate).

However, it's very, very common for them to pronounced as homophones in colloquial English

Few people worry about spoken language, therefore it is very common to hear the two words pronounced as homophones on the street. Keep in mind that we're talking about what is likely the majority of the English speaking peoples, who also pronounce the word "probably" as "prolly," which doesn't mean the word probably rhymes with holly.

JBH
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    First, you say no, but then you describe 'yes'. Second, 'people who take the time to learn and practice good enunciation' are not the gatekeepers of what is and isn't, correct language use. All the people who speak it, collectively, are. Third, 'probably' and 'prolly' are two different words. The written abbreviated form preceded the spoken. One wonders: do you enunciate and pronounce the 'th' in Sou'wester? ;-) – mcalex Jan 24 '23 at 01:43
  • @mcalex First, I say "officially, no." Then, I say, "unofficially, yes." People who speak English correctly are, by definition, the gatekeepers of what is and is not correct English. And by your final logic, there should be two words: patients and patiens. It isn't true - just as there aren't two words, probably and prolly. Unsurprisingly, the word "prolly" doesn't appear in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. It doesn't even appear in dictionary.com, which is the most liberal dictionary I know about. – JBH Jan 24 '23 at 02:51
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    "People who speak English correctly" are literally people whose meaning is understood by their listener and has zero to do with where one's tongue happens to be at the time. Not sure how 'liberal' Collins and Macmillan are but there ya go. One wonders: is "ain't" considered a word over in Prescriptivityland ;-) – mcalex Jan 24 '23 at 07:17
  • @mcalex "All the people who speak it" - includes school pupils in their first week of grade school, as well as past presidents of the United States. IMHO, and hopefully yours, these should not be among the gatekeepers of what is and isn't, correct language or pronunciation, especially when, for example, past presidents pronounced "nuclear" as "nuke-you-lar", presumably because they confused these with words like “circular” and “secular.” – Reversed Engineer Jan 24 '23 at 12:04
  • I regard myself as '[taking] the time to learn and practice good enunciation' and I don't 'pronounce the "t" in "patients".' (BrE, in my 60s) – Martin Bonner supports Monica Jan 24 '23 at 14:37
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    @ReversedEngineer School pupils who are being taught by their teachers how to make themselves understood, no; but Presidents of the USA? Absolutely! Although I wouldn't call them "gatekeepers", just "sources"; there is no "gate" that anyone can keep, language just happens. How do you think normalcy made it into dictionaries, even though "normality" was previously accepted as the "correct" word? Because people in positions of power have prestige, and prestige is one of the things that shapes the evolution of the language (any language). – IMSoP Jan 24 '23 at 17:20
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    It doesn't make sense to say that something "is not" a homophone, but is "pronounced as" a homophone. Homophony is a fact about pronunciation (and, perhaps, about perception), so if someone pronounces two words indistinguishably, it by definition is a homophone, for that speaker. What you're really saying is that they frequently are homophones, but according to some authority they shouldn't be. English has a huge number of words which were once pronounced differently, but at some point became homophones; that's a description of how they're pronounced, not a decision somebody made. – IMSoP Jan 24 '23 at 17:26
  • @ReversedEngineer While the pupils are being taught in the classroom? Possibly not. When those same pupils are in the playground talking to their friends about how "the other day the next door dog was on the road, and this car came up real quick, annit went 'doojz' an the dog got runned over annit's leg was munted but they took it to the vet annit's gonna be ok."? Yep, absolutely. Kinder dialect, maybe, but if the friend understands - and I suspect at least some non-kinder speakers would, too - how can you call it incorrect use of the language? :-) – mcalex Jan 25 '23 at 06:17