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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.](https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/129028/do-native-english-speakers-always-pronounce-th-correctly) – 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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