Well I’m glad we got you strai’ened out!
“I believe that’s him, yes.”
“Well, IDN’T *he * the one that’s always sayin’ he loves the nuances of our language?”
“Yup, he DOEDN’T have both oars in the water.”
I was in the shower just now and had to laugh when I thought of this thread, because I have my own little quirks, as you see above and as most southerners do. I guess with me it’s a learned behavior, although when I was in broadcasting, there were no mispronounced contractions.
Quasi
I’m from the west coast, and everyone I grew up with and know NEVER pronounces the t’s in any of those words.
Button, kitten, mitten, mutton, etc. It sounds VERY strained to me to actually pronounce the t’s in those words, almost like a form of hyper-correction. Glottal stop for the win!
Quasi, are you raging about the glottal stop BU’ON or the more, Pauly Shore-ish division making it two words BU’ and UUUUNNNNN ?
–another left-coaster who doesn’t pronounce T at syllable breaks if they’re followed by vowel + N
Oh, please. Was I raging? Really? And if I was, wouldn’t this have been moved already?
No, I wasn’t raging, especially since I also pointed my finger at myself for making the same mistake.
Who is Pauly Shore?
Q
Exactly!
Easy there big-trucker. I use hyperbole quite a lot and was under the assumption you understood that. My bad. No, you weren’t raging.
Who is…Really? Depending on your temperament he’s either a comic genius or some untalented Hollywood spawn who rode his mother’s coattails to no great effect. I would suggest obtaining a copy (rent or netflix, for the love of gawd don’t buy it) of Encino Man. It’s 90 minutes of your life you’ll never get back, but it’s possible you might enjoy it. If nothing else it’s got Sean Astin (Samwise Gamgee in the Lord Of The Rings movies) and I’ll be damned if his character is not as big a douche bag as Samwise Gamgee. At any rate, if the speech pattern you OPd about grates on you just a little bit, Shore will have you pulling your own teeth out.
“hyperbowl”?
That’s the kind of haircut Moe of The Three Stooges had, wasn’t it?
Sorry, I mistook you, Inigo. Easy to do on the net, and even easier when you’re me!
Samwise Gamgee? The crying Hobbit?
Every time I turned around that little feller was crying about something! If it hadn’t been (I also like “hadn’t of been” - see? I told you I love this language!) for the excellence of the rest of the trilogy, I may have cast him as Newt Gingrich.
They favor each other a little, dontcha think?
Anyway, back to the OP: I do come across a little raw at times, and this time is no exception. I should have worded the whole thing differently, realizing that not everyone knows of my love affair with our language.
And it really is Inigo. It really is. Having learned to speak English out of a dictionary by trial and error, I had a lot of fun making mistakes.
Anyway, we’re good. I just need to strew my posts with a little more humor in the syntax. And I pay a lot of sin-tax!
(That’s a sig line if anyone wants it!:))
Thanks
Q
I don’t get the OP either. I mean, glottal stops are pretty well-known as a feature of some dialects, not a medical condition. I can’t imagine Quasi going “you weird people with different dialects, are you sick or something?”
And I just don’t understand this line at all:
Up in where? Who says butten?
ETA: that cross-posted with Quasi’s last post. Quasi, that post sounds a little crazy.
Well, it should “sound a little crazy”, shouldn’t it, coming from me?
But what cross-posted, and did you report it instead of pointing out the obvious? “… that post sounds a little crazy?”
But try to sound it out for yourself instead of just reading it?
Sound it out and listen to where the sounds go in order to make them be intelligible.
We may need a speech therapist here.
PS: And the following sucks as well: I can’t imagine Quasi going "you weird people with different dialects, are you sick or something?
You took me entirely out of context. It was a legitimate question, and again, I call on a speech therapist to help me here! Maybe it is impossible for someone to pronounce words the way we normally do because of a physical abnormality.
I cite, for instance, COPD.
Q
It’s a pretty common American pronunciation on both coasts and also in the middle, so I’m surprised Quasimodem wouldn’t have noticed it before. (Or chose this particular instance to take exception to it, as opposed to any time earlier in his life :)). I agree, if anything, pronouncing the Ts in a word like “button” seems odd.
But hey, at least we’re not Cockneys. We do pronounce the Ts in “little”, though they come out as D sounds (“liddle”), and of course “meddle” sounds the same as “metal” and “mettle”.
From personal experience the “glottal stop” is pretty standard around here in the New York City area, so you should be well exposed to it from, say, Seinfeld, or Eddie Murphy, or the aforementioned Chris Rock.
The typical pronunciation of “Manhattan” for example would not pronounce a “t” or even a “d” sound in there, but Man-HA-'-n - like Woody Allen would say it (jump ahead by 45 seconds to hear him voiceover, “Chapter 1: he was too romantic about Manhattan”, from the movie of the same name).
There’s also Otis Redding, totally not a New Yorker, who’s “si’in’ on the dock of the bay”. And Mr. Burns from The Simpsons, who in episode 4F10 “Mountain of Madness” (the one where he gets stuck in a cabin with Homer) answers Homer’s “So what?” with a retort of “Sew buttons!” (no link to a clip but I have Season 8 on my iPhone). And another well-known cartoon character, Daffy Duck, says it that way too.
New Britain is part of Papua New Guinea. I very much doubt if they talk anything like that there.
In some parts of old Britain, maybe.
“Push the buh-on Max!”
Nope, doesn’t sound right.
I was thinking more like Connecticut.
I love this place. I never knew this was a thing! Thanks!
It was the late, great (God, I MISS him!), George Carlin who first made me aware of the “bilabial fricative” and the “philtrum”, things I must have missed in high school biology!
Q
That’s called an alveolar flap.
OP, I’m still confused. Is it an elision, flap, or glottal stop that you find so weird? I don’t understand what “buh-en” or “butt’n” mean.
My post cross-posted with yours - I was writing it while you were writing yours, so they posted at the same time. I don’t think that merits reporting.
I wasn’t taking you out of context because I was saying you wouldn’t do something like that.
Though now I’m not sure because I have no idea what you actually are saying. Sorry. Perhaps one of us needs a literacy lesson.
Speech therapy student here. Button/kitten/mitten etc. with a glottal stop in the middle is a perfectly acceptable dialect difference and is not due to any sort of pathology. I do it, as do many people I know. We all make /t/ sounds just fine in other contexts.
An old lawyer’s gambit: “I’m not going to say the defendant did so and so… I’m not going to say that.” (referencing your comment, “… I was saying you wouldn’t say that.”)
But no matter, I got the answer I wanted, despite that rather snarky comment at the end of your post.
What I was “actually saying” is, “there’s a marked difference in the pronounciation of those contractions. Why is that?”
And, as I said, I got my answer (s). End of story as far as I am concerned.
Mods: If it’s warranted, feel free to close the thread, thanks.