On Tuesday, July 6, 2004, at 05:32 , Thomas R. Wier wrote:

> From:    John Cowan <[log in to unmask]>
>> Dan Sulani scripsit:
>>>    But I'm not so sure that an English speaker would notice the
>>> difference, given that (IIRC) English words which are perceived by
>>> naive native speakers as beginning with a vowel,  usually actually begin
>>> with a glottal stop! (There are probably dialects to the contrary,
>>> but I can't, offhand,  think of any.)
>>
>> Mine, for sure.

..and IME most (all?) of those of early 21st cent Britain.

>> I had to consciously learn to make initial glottal stops
>> when learning German, and I think it is regularly taught to people
>> learning
>> German, not just me.  I definitely say [T&rIz@n'&pl=], not
>> [T&r?Iz?@n'?&pl=]
>> for "that is an apple".
>
> At the danger of YAEPT:

This thread has already become a YAEPT, it seems to me.

> Isn't the claim that most English dialects have glottal stops utterance
> initially, not word-initially?

Is it? Where are all these glottal stop onset dialects spoken?

In contemporary Britain the glottal stop is common enough as an allophone
of /t/, when that phoneme occurs intervocalically or as syllable final.

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On Tuesday, July 6, 2004, at 03:42 , Danny Wier wrote:

> From: "Outo Otus" <olen_outo_otus@...>
>
>> I would thing [ro?S] and awkward combination, because a glottal stop
>> occuring just before another consonant is difficult to pronounce, without
>> inserting a shva. For example, try and say [o?t] or something of that
>> manner, I personally find it difficult, and end up inserting a shva.
>
> It is difficult, but there are languages that have CV?C syllables; most of
> those are found in the Pacific Northwest in Canada and the USA (Na-Dene,
> Salishan, Wakashan, Penutian). It's a lot easier if the last consonant can
> be a syllabic.

You mean like:
[brI?n=] Britain, [&?m=] atom, [lI?l=] little (tho the last is often more
like [lI?o]  :)

Being the wrong side of 50, I personally still use [t], but I have no
difficulty in pronouncing these words the way my students do. Personally,
I don't see any problem with [ro?S].

Ray
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