"di?nt" (with glottal stop)

[Laurence Horn]

At 12:38 AM -0500 11/15/04, Alice Faber wrote:
>--On Sunday, November 14, 2004 10:57 PM -0500 "Mark A. Mandel"
><mamandel at LDC.UPENN.EDU> wrote:
>
>>A question from a friend in Boston:
>>
>>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>>
>>I was on the Green Line, and there were a couple of African-American
>>teenage girls talking loudly to one another (they were about twenty feet
>>away, almost out of sight, but I could hear every word they said).
>>
>>And it occurred to me as I was listening that there's a linguistic
>>artifact that I've only heard from urban African-Americans my age or
>>younger, mostly girls.  It's a sort of glottal stop used in place of t or
>>d; eg. di-unt instead of didn't.  Do you know where this might have come
>>from?
>>
>>=====================
>>
>>-- Mark
>>[This text prepared with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.]
>
>I've heard this often from callers to NY sports talk radio who have no
>overt AAVE phonology (other than this, if it *is* AAVE).
>
Indeed.  And I've also heard it in Connecticut, as the counterpart of
the phenomenon we discussed a couple of months ago in voiceless
examples, as in "kitten", "mitten", "New Britain", etc.  But this is
perhaps restricted to this particular voiced context; I don't think
I've heard it with "hidden", where "a [hI?In] message" would be
perceived as the implausible "hittin' message".  Arnold can probably
explain all this (if anyone can).

larry