Re: Glottal stops (was: B. Cthia and Nom) Saul Epstein Mon, 28 Apr 1997 13:22:42 -0500 From: Rob Zook Subject: Re: Glottal stops (was: B. Cthia and Nom) >At 10:54 PM 4/27/97 GMT, Jacqueline wrote: >>In message <3,0,1,32,19970423163127,009f8c94*atlas> Rob Zook writes: >>> >>> It's an interesting coincidence, but _Foundations of Linguistics_ >>> says that this is just opposite of one of the ways the glottal >>> stop works in English. For example, one can pronounce bottle >>> as b*tl or as b*'l (Again that * represents a International >>> phonetic symbol the one which looks like and upside down "c"). >>> >>You have effectively pointed out that glottal stops are >>very common in Cockney, if not in English. Do we have any >>Cockneys reading this who could cast light on the whole >>question? Cockneys pronounce "hospital" as "'ospi'al". > >Interesting. Now that you mention it, I realize you're right. >I actually mean the way American English often sounds when >spoken. Many times the middle 't' sound in words gets replaced >with a glottal stop. I would find it facinating to see when >these variations started appearing. My dialect pronounces the above words as [badl] and [haspIdl], so there's another variation. Even though English has a /t/ phoneme and a /d/ phoneme, some occurences of [d] are allophones of /t/, and vice versa. The word "voiced" is usually pronounced [voist]. (This is not to suggest that every time English spells a word with letters at odds with its pronunciation the letters map to specific phonemes, but it is true in some cases.) Dialects like Cockney seem to be trying to eliminate, or at least reduce in number, sounds made with the tip of the tongue. It's common to replace voiceless and voiced with [f] and [v]. So "without"=[wIf au'] I don't know when these specific variations first became widespread, but no language has ever been without these kinds of things while it was alive. It's one of the primary factors driving all linguistic change. Literacy is about the only brake, and even that is of no consequence if a language's writing is logographic. (Not that I'm advocating that linguistic change be resisted.) Anyway, a similar business seems to apply to Vulcan's glottal stop, about whose phonemicity I am still ambivalent. -- from Saul Epstein liberty uit net