tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue May 27 22:57:40 2003
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RE: the glottal stop
- From: "Se'noj le'umaS" <[email protected]>
- Subject: RE: the glottal stop
- Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 09:51:02 +0600
> >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?
The reason words such as "heir" and "hour" have a glottal stop is so that
they are differentiated from their synonyms or near-synonyms "heir"-"hair".
The case of "heir" is very interesting, because there is almost an example
for all three cases- glottal stop "heir"; h-sound "hair"; and pure "air".
Se'noj
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