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I heard this dialog in a Western film:

Ruffian: Are you Josey Wales?

Josey: That['d] be me.

Methinks Josey responded That be me and not That'd be me. Is the former even correct? Is That be me. also a sentence in subjunctive mood, just as That'd be me is. If That be me is correct, what would be the difference in meaning between That'd be me and That be me? Please, take note that this question is not a duplicate.

John Smith
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    Writing educated speech for a farmer would label the writer Ivory Tower. "That be me" is wrong, but what some say. An angry farmer using the subjunctive mood would sound like a school child. – Yosef Baskin May 03 '23 at 14:07
  • There is no subjunctive here! – tchrist May 03 '23 at 14:29
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    How be you / how-are you? covers the pirate-/rustic-speak. The articles deal well with 'That'd be me / That would be me.' I think this has been covered before. – Edwin Ashworth May 03 '23 at 14:43
  • Do you have a link to the actual video so we can hear it? This is likely just an assimilation of the [d] with the following [b]; compare this to how many speakers won't pronounce the [d] in "bad boy." There's likely a very short vowel sound between the "that" and the "me," before the assimilated consonant sound. – alphabet May 03 '23 at 15:05
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    (The Ngram chart mostly finds usages of "that be me" in phrases like "Why couldn't that be me?") – alphabet May 03 '23 at 15:06
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    for the record, he says "That'd" but the script says "that'll" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt30ov7CrG8 ) ( search terms: "josey wales" bounty hunter – Yorik May 03 '23 at 15:15
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    "That'd" when spoken can sound a lot like "thad" – Stephen R May 03 '23 at 18:00
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    I'm CV'ing mostly because if you look at Eastwood's mouth, there clearly seems to be another syllable between "that" and "me". (Perhaps 'd or 'll.) This question has other issues, too, such as the claim that "that'd be me" is "in subjunctive mood". – MarcInManhattan May 03 '23 at 19:37

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It's a difference of pronunciation, and listeners would hear "that'd be me."

As several commenters note, Clint Eastwood's character is assimilating the [d] sound in [that'd] so it sounds like [thad]. Whereas formally trained speakers might say a lucid two-syllable construction like /ðætəd/ or (with some assimilation) /ðædəd/ (see Cambridge Dictionary for an example), Eastwood's character says something close to /ðæd/ (which, incidentally, is Wiktionary's transcription). Since /d/ and /t/ are voiced and voiceless variants of the same sound, the voiced sound takes over, sometimes still with a vowel, and sometimes without. Hence you hear something like [thad].

Here are a few other examples of similar [thad] pronunciation rendered in transcript as "that'd." The first two are Appalachian speakers; the third is a speaker from Indiana, which I include to show this happens in multiple dialects:

TaliesinMerlin
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