"Connecticut accent" in the Times

[Robert Wachal]

I believe that most of us have a glottally released /t/ rather than a
glottal stop in the cases cited below.

Bob Wachal

At 03:15 PM 9/9/2004, you wrote:
>---------------------- Information from the mail header
>-----------------------
>Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
>Subject:      Re: "Connecticut accent" in the Times
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>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