"Connecticut accent" in the Times

[Alice Faber]

Arnold M. Zwicky said:
>On Sep 9, 2004, at 8:58 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>
>>  Sorry, forgot to post this article from the Sunday Times regional
>>  Connecticut section...
>>  A lot of
>>  this is pretty silly or sloppy, but the glottal stop (in e.g. "New
>>  Britain") is certainly a real feature...
>
>whoa!  most americans have a glottal stop as their allophone of /t/ in
>"Britain" (and "button" and "satin" and generally after an accented
>vowel before syllabic n).  now, "cattle" and "bottle" are another
>matter entirely...

Nonetheless, this [nu bri?n] *is* a salient local shibboleth.
Everybody focuses on the glottal stop when they mock the dialect.
However, I suspect that what's really different is the following
vocoid. For most of us, it's a syllabic [n]. But in New Britain,
there's an actual vowel somewhere between schwa and barred-i.
--
 =============================================================================
Alice Faber                                             faber at haskins.yale.edu
Haskins Laboratories                                  tel: (203) 865-6163 x258
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