tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue May 27 21:53:45 2003

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RE: the glottal stop



From: Alan Anderson [mailto:[email protected]] 
Subject: RE: the glottal stop

>How about the words "honor" and "heir"?  I believe that's the kind of
thing David was talking about.  I was taught in school that a carefully
pedantic pronunciation of those words *does* have a pure vowel at the
beginning, sans explosion.

I use a glottal stop.  I was never taught to use a pure vowel.  As I
understand we leave the "h" off these words because of their French
heritage.  Which begs the question, do the French say a pure vowel for a
word that begins with "h"?  When I was a fluent speaker of French, I'm
sure I used a glottal stop, but I never paid enough attention to notice
if native speakers used a glottal stop there (in fact, I didn't know
what a glottal stop was at that time).  Anyone out there able to comment
on this?

Jeremy



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