Why is "does" sometimes pronounced "is"? [duplicate]
I'm watching a movie at the moment and I came across something that I've always found strange in the English language.
In some questions, mostly something like "What does he look like?", the does is pronounced is, so it sounds like "What is he look like?".
EDIT: The example from the movie Click here
Solution 1:
This is a combination of two phonetic effects. First, final /t/ and initial /d/ often merge into a tap [ɾ] when the second word is unstressed. You probably know this sound from the general American pronunciation of “city” [sɪɾi].
Second, because of the weak vowel merger in many accents, is and does can have the same vowel, freely varying in pronunciation between schwa /ə/ and short I /ɪ/.
The net effect is that “what does” can be pronounced [wʌɾɪz], and be differentiated from “what is” only by context. Luckily, the two phrases are used differently, so in practice it’s easy to know what was meant.
Solution 2:
What’s is probably what you heard. This can be short for what is but also for what does.
Solution 3:
It does sound like "What is..." when that particular group of words is run together and here is why I think that happens. To pronounce "what does" properly, you would need to open your mouth twice, once for the a in what, again for the o in does. There are also two hard consonants, back-to-back between these two vowels. Native speakers will slur together the two words, avoiding the second hard consonant, skipping directly to the "s" of "does", resulting in something that sounds like waduz - which is probably being heard as "what is". (At least that's what happens when I say "what does" quickly.)