"Connecticut accent" in the Times

[Wilson Gray]

On Sep 9, 2004, at 10:03 PM, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "Connecticut accent" in the Times
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> On Sep 9, 2004, at 2:10 PM, Robert Wachal wrote:
>
>> I believe that most of us have a glottally released /t/ rather than a
>> glottal stop in the cases cited below.

Like Mr. Wachal, I, too, have the _impression_ that a
glottally-released /t/, if not universal, is very widespread.

>
> i most emphatically do not have a glottally released /t/ in "Britain",
> "button", etc.  but it only now (after decades) occurs to me that some
> people might actually have a glottally released /t/, which i've just
> been hearing as my [?]-released-into-syllabic-[n].

But, as you imply, it's also very easy to hear what we think we ought
to be hearing.

-WG

>   (to confound things
> further, Wells, Accents of English, reports on a british "glottal
> reinforcement", or *pre*glottalization, in various sets of words,
> including the "button" type: [?t].)
>
> i see now that Kreidler, the Pronunciation of English (1989), is cagey
> about these allophones.  p. 112: "The realization of /t/ may be a
> glottal stop [?] or a simultaneous -- or nearly simultaneous -- double
> closure, the vocal cords coming together while the apex makes contact
> with the alveolar ridge, [?t] or [t?]."  the environment before
> syllabic [n] is one of the relevant environments.  (kreidler recognizes
> that different dialects have different realizations in different
> environments.)
>
> so there are several dimensions of possible variation here -- the
> nature of the stop gesture(s), and also (as alice faber suggests) the
> nature of the following syllabic.
>
> facts, we need facts.
>
> arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)
>