Thank you to linguist Gretchen McCulloch for teaching me about phonetic assimilation, and for teaching me that if you stand around in public reading texts from a linguist and murmuring example phrases to yourself, people will eventually ask if you're okay.
Joseph Justus Scaliger said something similar about Basque in the 17th century:
Basque is a strange language… It is said that they understand one another, but I don't believe any of it.