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"That that" spoken are two different sounding words so it makes sense. When it goes from verbal to written and I see it, I will almost always try to rephrase things to avoid that combo. It just jumps out as totally wrong.
are they? I just said "I didn't know that that was how it is" out loud and both thats sound the same
The A is slightly more emphasized in the second that. It's subtle
must be regional I guess
Could be. So you say them exactly the same and not an inflection shift?
No, why would I
Because you generally put more emphasis on the subject in English
I'll try and pay attention next time I have to say that that or if someone else says it. I think reading it and over thinking it makes it sound weird
I think it depends on if you want to emphasize something specifically or not. Second 'that' is the default it seems, but I first expected 'was' to be emphasized in this sentence
In fluent speech, the conjunction (the first "that") is unstressed, and as a result some speakers reduce the vowel a bit toward schwa. However, if you told those speakers to carefully pronounce each word, I bet they would pronounce the conjunction and the pronoun the exact same same. A more common example of this kind of reduction is the word "to", which is almost always reduced to /tə/ ([tə] ~ [tʊ] ~ [ɾə] depending on dialect and surrounding words) in everyday speech when unstressed.
Fun fact, you can reduce just about every unstressed vowel in English to schwa (if it's not already a schwa) and still be largely understood.
It's called weak forms, this video goes into a lot of details about them, has examples of "that that" as well: https://youtu.be/qlbGtEg68x4