In American English, it’s at least common, if not standard, to pronounce “button” with a glottal stop. If you look up ESL literature on the topic,
Glottal replacement In RP, and in many accents such as Cockney as well as all American English, it is common for /t/ to be completely replaced by a glottal stop before another consonant,[14][15] as in not now [nɒʔnaʊ] and department [dɪpɑː(ɹ)ʔmənʔ]. This replacement also happens before a syllabic /n/, as in button (representable as [ˈbʌʔn̩]).
So how important is the glottal stop for pronunciation? I’d say it depends on where you live and how you are using English. If you live in North America, I think it’s a good idea to give this a lot of practice. I say that because this is the t sound substitution that is the most used, and it would sound severely odd to hear a native speaker always say a t sound in place of the glottal stop. Omission of the t sound or substituting a d sound is much more about personal preference, but the glottal stop isn’t. Sorry.
It’s perfectly standard in US English, just like the “t” in “water” becomes a voiced alveoalr tap (which sounds a bit like a “d,” but it isn’t formed in the same place as a “d” is in the mouth.)
It may be that it is common, even standard, to use a glottal stop coincident with the t in button; in fact it would sound a bit precious to pronounce it without a stop at all and fully articulate the final vowel. But when the glottal stop is the only articulation and the t is “completely” replaced–there is no contact at all between the tongue and palate–it sounds to me like a speech impediment. You will not hear professional news broadcasters use that pronunciation, which is usually the yardstick for standard pronunciation.
CookingWithGas, I don’t mean to pile on. Others explained this well, with good cites. I just found this to be a textbook case of thinking you hear something that you don’t actually hear. I’m sure I do this all the time — it’s a funny quirk of the human brain.
Back to the OP topic… Russian and Irish share the system of phonemic* palatalization, which is always being turned on and off in specific meaningful patterns.
*Phonemic means it’s the only way to tell the difference between two words that otherwise sound the same.
A native Irish speaker listening to a Russian, and vice versa, would distinctly hear each time the palatalization came and went. Something that would fly under English speakers’ radar. I speculate that’d make it that much easier for native speakers of Irish and Russian to learn each other’s languages.
In Irish, consonants with the front vowels /e/ and /i/ are automatically palatalized (“slender”). Consonants with the back vowels /a/, /o/, and /u/ are automatically non-palatalized (“broad”). Slender sounds are made with the front of the tongue lifted, and broad sounds are made with the back of the tongue lifted for contrast. For the exceptions—a slender consonant with a back vowel, or a broad consonant with a front vowel—silent vowel letters of the appropriate type are inserted to show the change from the default setting.
In Russian, similarly, consonants with the front vowels /i/, /i̯e/, /i̯o/, /i̯u/, /i̯a/ are automatically palatalized (“soft”). Consonants with the back vowels /a/, /o/, /ɨ/ are automatically non-palatalized (“hard”). For the exceptions, the “soft sign” indicates palatalization (as in the OP example Rus’). Older Russian also had a “hard sign” to turn off palatalization, but then they figured out they didn’t need it so they quit using it.
Do you consider this pronunciation to be a glottal replacement where /t/ is be completely by a glottal stop? This demonstration very explicitly shows that the t is sounded then stopped; it is even evident in the diagram showing the tongue movement.
In contrast, here is the Cockney pronunciation where the t sound completely disappears and is sounded only by the glottal stop. He doesn’t say “button” for us here, but uses “butter” as an example of the same thing. Here it is clear that the tongue does not touch the palate. I consider an American using this pronunciation to be eccentric.
Now, if the t sound in the first video sounds the same as the t sound in the second video to everybody but me, then I’ll concede defeat and never speak of this again.
I don’t hear anything I would call a “t” in those American examples. With the Cockney examples, the glottal stop sounds the same to me, or close enough, it’s just that in American English, we would not glottalize those ts.
Johanna, do you know of any recorded examples of minimal pairs? When the sound is terminal. The recordings I’ve found are of very different words, and since it’s not a distinction I’m used to, I’m having trouble hearing it. And a lot are of consonants followed by different vowels, as opposed to none in Rus’.
Thanks for the detailed and helpful link. Actually, though, that particular step (around 3:25) — a regular T, then a glottal stop — is not how most Americans pronounce these things. They don’t imply as much in the video. It’s the NEXT step, a little later in the video, where they do the most common American pronunciation— just a plain nasal stop.
(I don’t think I ever do the “T-plus-glottal stop” for button, but I do for satin — but only when I’m singing the Moody Blues. If I say, e.g., “satin sheets,” it’s back to just the nasal stop.)
I am guessing that the variation in American pronunciation on this correlates to age groups and possibly geographic area. So “most” may be a subjective experience.
There’s a three-and-a-half listening sample to a Russian speaker pronouncing 40 minimal pairs with hard-vs-soft final consonants. Of the 40 pairs, 3 demonstrate final *с – *сь :
окрaс – окрaсь ос – ось вес – весь
I never became even close to fluent, but I did study Russian in college for 2 years. This particular distinction – between final hard “c” and final soft “сь” – was never salient for me. At best, when spoken in isolation, it kind of sounds like the frication in “c” is held a beat longer to produce “сь”.
Sometimes a vowel will be influenced by whether a hard or soft consonant follows. Of the sample pairs at the link above, “вес – весь” will demonstrate this most clearly – the vowel in “весь” raises in anticipation of the palatized (soft) consonant to follow. That makes “вес” more or less rhyme with American English “less” while “весь” rhymes somewhat better with American English “lease”.