"Connecticut accent" in the Times

[Laurence Horn]

At 2:10 PM -0400 9/9/04, Alice Faber wrote:
>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.
>--
I think Alice is right on this, but I've always assumed the consonant
was different too--could it be that there's also some alveolar
closure for most of us, but only a glottal closure for the locals?  I
guess I should recuse myself, as I'm getting very confused here.

Larry