tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun May 25 11:39:28 2003
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Re: the glottal stop
On Sun, May 25, 2003 at 05:34:56AM +0000, Sangqar (Sean Healy) wrote:
> nuqjatlh? If you are not a native English speaker, you've made a mistake.
> If you are, your dialect must be quite different from mine.
I am a native English speaker. My dialect may well indeed be different
from yours. Since I had two friends look over my post, I may be talking
about an actual dialect, here, not just my own weirdness.
I'll avoid saying "in my dialect", though, as I'm not quite sure it
isn't my own weirdness.
> In my dialect, 'h' is a separate sound, not merely the lack of a
> glottal stop. Consider the sentences 'he eats' and 'he heats'. In my
> dialect, there is no glottal stop in either sentence, and yet the
> words 'eats' and 'heats' are easily distinguishable.
[snip]
> In the sentence 'I ate an apple', only the first vowel has a glottal
> stop in front of it (in my dialect).
Hmm. When I talk, I very definitely put a stop before "eats" in the
first phrase. In the second, I *think* I put stops before "I", "ate",
and "apple". I seem to leave the stop out before "an".
I see your point, though. When words are chained together, the "h" is
more than a mere lack of a glottal stop. When a word is in isolation,
however, I'd say that an English word starting with a vowel has an
implicit glottal stop preceding it. Further, that any word that starts
with a vowel needs either a puff of air (an "h") or a glottal stop to
get an air flow going that the vowel can modulate.
--
David "cogent" Hand
<http://davidhand.com/> <mailto:[email protected]> <icq:4321282>