Re: USAGE: Glottal stop for /t/ (was Re: 2nd person pronoun for god)

Tom Wier wrote:


>Quoting Clint Jackson Baker <litrex1@...>:
>
>> My final t's are always glottal stops--not only that,
>> but sometimes they even get glottalized in the middle
>> of words.
>
>A glottal stop, or an unreleased alveolar stop? Many Americans
>(including me) have the latter but not the former in words like
>"bat", "cat", etc. The tongue makes contact with the alveolar
>ridge -- it just does not release it.
>
I suspect many of us do it both ways-- it's just one of the steps along the
way from careful-to-fast speech.
bat, cat [b&t| ~ b&?], [k_h&t|  ~ k_h&?] (where "t|" is my rendering of
unreleased t)-- and of course it depends whether a V or C follows.

kitten ['k_hIt@n] -- ['k_hIt|n=] --maybe intermediate ['k_hI?t|n=] --
['k_hI?n=] , the difference in the last being when the tongue touches the
alv.ridge.
(Note that words with final -'VtVn never have t=flap, like in "butter" etc.,
or in the case of -tVm or -tVN.  So bottom and batting will have the flap,
but colloq. "battin' " could have the same variants as "kitten")

Similarly button, batten, Clinton, Fenton, Canton (towns in US, not China),
brighten, Brighton, muntin, mutton, sittin', hittin' etc. etc.

For me, at least, the tongue usually goes nowhere near the alv. ridge in the
middle of words like "oatmeal" or "ointment"-- ['o_U?mi@l], ['oj~?m@~nt|] or
['oj~?m@~?].  Now, if Engl. obeyed Indonesian phonotactics, these would be
underlying **oakmeal (made of acorns?), oinkment (made of pork fat?) :-).

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