glottal stops

[Paul B. Gallagher]

Dear Prof. Mills,

> Dear Paul,
> 
> This is in reply to your query about glottal stops.  (For some reasons 
> my posts to SEELANGS get bounced back.)  You say "A glo'al stop alone is 
> pure silence, so it cannot be a syllable."  Then ask "Do you mean that 
> the syllable /ends/ with a glo'al stop?  Or /begins/ with one?"
> 
> Someone else may say this, and I'm not sure if it's germaine to you 
> post, but a glottal stop isn't silent.  Like any other phonetic segment, 
> it has a physiological gesture and duration, and like all stops, it 
> makes a sound.  If your pronunciation is like mine, think of the 
> unguarded American pronunciation of the word "button".  /t/ and /n/ are 
> both made at the same point of articulation (the alveolar ridge), but 
> /t/ is a stop, while /n/ is a continant.  You know how to make a /t/, 
> but listen carefully tohow the /t/ in this word is released!  The 
> release is not at the alveolar ridge, but at the glottis!  In other 
> words, you're hearing a glottal stop.  But you're right, stops in 
> general don't form syllabic peaks, rather, they are found in the onset 
> or coda.
> More detail than you asked for, I know, but inquiring minds want to 
> know!  :-)

I was ABD in Linguistics at Ohio State, specializing in phonetics and 
phonology, before I "reoriented" myself to translation, so none of this 
is news.

What I meant by saying that a glottal stop is pure silence is that the 
stop itself (the closure phase) is silent (by definition). What we hear 
-- and this is obviously more true for oral plosives -- is the 
transitions to and from the stop. Based on those transitions, we 
subconsciously calculate how the silence must have been accomplished -- 
in other words, the point of articulation.

The phonetic realizations of English /t/ are quite varied, and you are 
right that part of the transition from a /t/ is usually the onset of 
voicing. And many English speakers do glottalize their voiceless stops 
in syllable-final position (I myself have [bʌtˀ.n], where the period 
represents the syllable boundary). Many Bri'ish speakers have taken this 
one step further and done away with the oral closure entirely, leaving 
pronunciations like [bæʔ.u] for "battle" and [bɛʔ.ə] for "better."

But Bill Ryan has already clarified, and I gather from his response that 
the glottal stop is between the first and second syllable, and the 
latter's coda is a schwa.

-- 
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
pbg translations, inc.
"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
http://pbg-translations.com

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