But stop the T in odd words
Speaking of dialects and geography and markers…Author of Jesus and Mo asked an intriguing question on Twitter the other day.
Has anyone in UK noticed the “inconsistent glottal stop” is a thing? Eg person will speak normally but stop the T in odd words…
Eg “strategy”, “creative” – but even then not always. Strikes me as incredibly pretentious and annoying.
I think I have, yes. A similar thing I know I’ve noticed many times is inconsistency about the intrusive R. You know the intrusive R, right? As in: Indier and China; North Koreaer and China [which of course sounds like North Career and China]; drawring room; Arabeller is in the drawring room. It’s mostly a UK thing but also a Boston and environs thing.
Some BBC presenters make an effort to avoid it. You can tell they’re having to make an effort because there are weird little hitches where they pause in order to avoid the R, hitches that don’t happen in the speech of people who don’t have an intrusive R to avoid. The ones that seem oddest to me are the ones where there is in fact an r but it’s at the end of a word, so a non-rhotic dialect like that of most of the UK wouldn’t pronounce it if the word stood on its own or before a word with a consonant. You with me?
Like: I am here. I am here to pick up a package. I am here in the room.
The one that seems odd to me is the careful pause after “here” in the last one – “I am heah. in the room” – when saying “I am here in the room” wouldn’t be an intrusive R since the R is actually there.
It seems like a really disturbed relationship with the letter R. Inserting them where they aren’t, or carefully avoiding them where they are.
But I’m equally weird about the glottal stop. I replied to Author’s tweets to tell my poignant little story of The Glottal Stop and Me.
I grew up not far from Trenton, New Jersey. I grew up pronouncing it with a glottal stop – Tren’on. Then one fateful day my mother, who was a language nerd just as I am (and a writer and editor), mentioned to me her dislike of that particular local glottal stop, which I hadn’t been aware of until that moment. Now I don’t know how to say the word – Trenton sounds pretentious and finicky, and Tren’on sounds like a grunt. I’ve probably never said it unselfconsciously since that day.
I’ll be in the drawring room with a cold compress on my head.
I write about this stuff all the time on my blog. I’m especially obsessed with Americans’ inconsistent flapping. As here:
http://tonguesandtongues.blogspot.com/2015/04/npr-and-flap.html
I will have to visit that blog.
I am from the NYC area, and a singer, and I have been trying for years with almost no success to rid my speech of glottals. I recall complaining during the Clinton administration that having both Clinton and Putin in the news gave entirely too many glottal stop opportunities (stopportunities?). I am very conscious of how I say kitten, curtain, and Trenton, among other things.
Also New Yorkish that I have been trying to undo is the tendency to say “tr” as “chr”; “tree” comes out “chree”, “train” as “chrain”, and so on.
@ 1 – Ah yes, I’m interested in that too. I think I’ve blogged about it before. My attention was grabbed once by a very glottal-stopped “butter” in a supermarket in London – “Do we need bu’uh?” Which led to a rumination on budder, and the fact that I couldn’t possibly decide to say it “butter” – it would just sound grotesquely affected in an American.
[goes back to reading your post]
Yes! Clinton of course is just another Trenton. I forgot that.
I have another suggestion (additional to yours) for why NPR types do that – because they’re making some effort to enunciate, because radio. That is it might not be pretentious or British-aping but just trying to be extra crisp and clear into the mic. I see your examples are KUOW – well ME TOO, and there’s one guy on KUOW who drives me up a wall because he invariably over-corrects words like “believe” into “beeelieve” – often to grotesque effect. He also speaks v e r y s l o w l y. I’m sure he’s doing it to be super super clear, but…
Bill O’Grady.
http://kuow.org/people/bill-ogrady
A lot of this is actually rule-bound (to the extent that anyone’s speech is rule-bound at all).
For example, “intrusive R” is actually a back-formation. It’s often found where speakers of a non-rhotic (R-dropping) dialect are in proximity to rhotic (R-preserving) speakers. Where I grew up in New England, folks from East of the Connecticut River would drop their R’s and say “cah” and “yahd.” Folks West of the river pronounce their R’s–but they also insert R’s in places where, if they were present, the other folks would have dropped it. If “idear” were a word, the folks in the East would pronounce it “ideah.” So folks in the West hear “ideah” as missing an R, and back-construct the word “idear.”
If you ever wondered why Archie Bunker says “terlet,” it’s because he lives in close proximity to people who say “joik” and “woik”… and “toilet.” So his social group corrects it to “jerk” and “work”… and “terlet.”
There’s also the KUOW guy (could be Bill O’Grady) who says en-vi-ron-ment (instead of—how would you render it without resorting to phonetic symbols?—en-vi-rn-ment). I do a lot of grimacing when I listen to KUOW.
Up here in Canada, the Francophone “haytch” is the quirk I tend to notice. Words that start with an “H” often lose it, Cockney-style (ie, help > ‘elp, hello > ‘ello, hand > ‘and), and all these amputated H’s instead get grafted onto the front of words beginning with a vowel. Just checking on Google, and found the terms h-deletion and h-epenthesis (PDF).
I worked in IT and had a British co-worker with a terribly grating London accent, who told me one day when I mentioned a program that was gone and sorely missed, “I wuh a be-uh tess-uh for them.” It took me more than one question to discern that what he meant was “I was a beta-tester for them.”
One of my friends in high school pointed out to me that not doing the glottal stop instead of ts is one reason people think I sound like I have an accent. “You say ‘button’. Most people say ‘bu’on’.”
I read better than I spoke as a child.
Ben @ 9 – SO DO I. In fact I almost never listen to it any more, for that reason – only On the Media and sometimes the BBC news hour weekday evenings. But the KUOW person who talks during the three breaks in On the Media makes me grimace the worst of all – she talks like a nursery school teacher being extra extra warm and soothing to her nervous tots.
I think that’s Kim Malcolm. Yeah, with her, it’s not pronunciation—it’s her “warm and caring” tone. (Sorry this is so fascinating to anyone not in Seattle.)
Oh god there’s more than one. I don’t know Kim Malcolm, the one I’m thinking of is Kammy (or Tammy) Koch.
Some commenters here might be amazed that many English speakers who don’t use the rhotic ‘r’ find the nasally American rhotic ‘r’ particularly irritating. Since English spelling is very inconsistent, I’d let people with ‘dialects’ (apparently that’s non-American accents) continue to use their quaint pronunciation and grammar.
My nomination for the most incomprehensible accent is the variety of English spoken in NZ, ‘e’ is pronounced as an ‘i’, ‘i’ becomes a vague ‘u’ sound and ‘a’ seems to have disappeared completely, so New Zealanders are very difficult to understand on the phone.
Tami Kosch.
The newish trend of pronouncing the letter H as “haitch” is what grates on me.
That, and things like Eggsxylophone.
I read an article about the haitch thing in the UK, it said that it was unusual in older generations there but becoming common in the younger generations, and speculated that it was American influence causing it.
I have never heard any US-raised person say “haitch.”
Then again, I was watching QI and Stephen Fry was talking about how eating squirrel is “quite popular in the States,” so whadda they know anyway.
RJW – oi oi oi! I didn’t say dialects are non-American accents! You must have missed the part where I said “But I’m equally weird about the glottal stop.” I speak an identifiable dialect that the NY Times was able to pinpoint on a map.
And I don’t disparage dialects (varieties, often regional varieties, of a language). What gets my goat is people putting on airs. It’s pretentious speech that gets me.
@17 Jafafa Hots,
Interesting, some Australians pronounce ‘H’ as ‘haitch’, my wife who was from a rural area pronounced it that way, the ‘haitch’ pronunciation seems to be disappearing here in Australia. I’ve always assumed it was originally Irish not American.
@ 18 Ophelia,
Point taken.
@19 Ben,
I agree, to some extent, however one person’s ‘pretentious speech’ is another’s standard English.
Hey! I object! I resemble that remark.
The rhotic r turns up all over the place. Southland NZ is a prime example. It leads to a bit of good natured banter from time to time. I understand it’s essentially a scots/irish thing and is common in areas heavily settled during those diasporas.
“haitch’ is the kind of thing Mrs. Slocum would say trying to sound posh.
@21Rob
There are many ‘dicks’ in NZ, people like to sit on them and admire NZ’s beautiful scenery, also why is there no plural for ‘woman’ in the Kiwi accent? ‘One woman, two woman’. Interesting about the NZ rhotic ‘r’, I can’t ever remember hearing it, and there are zillions of Kiwis here in Oz.
@22 Samantha Vines,
Ah, Mrs Slocum and her feline companion, I’m old enough to remember the show.
RJW, Indeed we do enjoy a good ‘dick’ to sit on while admiring the view. Usually while eating fush and chups. Not like those NSW splitters who sit on a dek while eating fiche and cheeps.
I’m not surprised you haven’t heard our rhotic R. It’s confined to Southland by a large wall, there aren’t that many native southland speakers on the winter side and I suspect not that many find their way to Shtraylia. On top of that most kiwis have very malleable accents and rapidly take on their new host nations idiom in a most chameleon like manner. My ex came back from a year in the UK with an upper class london accent, while my sister came back from four years in the UK speaking Sydney, because all her friends in the UK were from there.
I love listening to accents and word usage because it tells so much about history, both on a regional and personal level.
A few years ago I was on the Sunshine Coast. A lot of the locals thought I was from Adelaide, whereas kiwi’s, of whom there where many, pegged my home city instantly.
@ 24 Rob,
I’m originally from Melbourne so naturally I agree about the hopeless NSW accent, “fiche and cheeps” seems like some some type of Creole, we speak much better Igglish in Victoria. We don’t have distinctive regional accents in Oz so I really couldn’t pick someone’s regional origins unless I heard some key words, eg in Victoria we use mostly the short ‘a’, so if I hear ‘castle’, ‘dance’ etc with a long “a”, I assume the speaker comes from north of the Murray.
I’m not sure that I agree with the ‘malleable accent’ idea some people might assimilate completely, particularly young people, others seem to develop a type of hybrid accent. Recently an English friend returned to the UK to visit her family, who commented on her ‘Australian’ accent, she still speaks with a posh English accent as far as I can tell.
RJW @25, I don’t think either AUS or NZ have sharply defined regional accents like some other english speaking countries (looking at you England). But we definitely do have hot-spots. We also have gender and age related accents (or maybe dialects?).
Accent examples include The strong Sydney ‘e’ pronunciation of ‘i’ – as in fish and chips becoming fiche and cheeps, the Southland rhotic r, the Queensland twang etc.
Then we have the notorious rising inflection at the end of sentences, most common amongst women in NZ, especially younger women, that makes every single sentence sound like a question. That has to have a cultural basis, but then all language does I guess. I suspect there has actually been academic research into that, but I haven’t checked.
There is also what would have been described as a Maori/Polynesian English in my youth. A whole collection of vowel changes, glottal stops, and consonant mangling typical of Northland, East Coast NI and Central NI. However, that has now spread throughout the Country, especially in youth, but no longer seems to be largely confined to the original demographic (if it ever was).
I was asking an English colleague the other day where his accent was from. It was indefinably cultured, but not RP. He responded that he was from the midlands originally, but had lived all over England and then 13 years in NZ. His family thinks he sounds NZ, We think he sounds English. He thinks he has no accent…
For those interested, I’ll leave this here http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/story-of-english/
If I recall correctly, when discussing the Aus/NZ accent they described it as indistinguishable, which made me snort tea out my nose.
@27 Rob,
‘If I recall correctly, when discussing the Aus/NZ accent they described it as indistinguishable, which made me snort tea out my nose.’
Outrageous! I realise what an insult that would be to any patriotic Kiwi. I saw that series many years ago, there’s also a book version. The accents are probably indistinguishable to the British and Canadian presenters of the series, but not to you or me. However I’d have to admit that I usually can’t tell a Canadian accent from an American one, I doubt that the majority of Australians could either.