English as a second language, Part 5--The Swallowed 'T'
As I was wandering out the door at around 2 yesterday afternoon to take photos for the neighborhood photoblog, three youths, around 14 or 15, were walking down my street, probably after being dismissed from St. Joseph school. "'Ey mate," one of them calls to me, "got a lie-er?"
"A what?" I ask.
"Lie-er," he says. "LIE -er," he repeats, this time making a motion with his thumb mimicking turning the wheel on a lighter.
"Oh, no. Sorry," I said, understanding at last that what he wanted was a cigarette lighter, and walked down the hill toward Archway.
What I had just experienced, the linguists would tell me, is the "glottal stop," or what I would call the "swallowed t." The speaker had indicated the end of the syllable not with the hard "t," as I would, but by abruptly ending the vowel portion of the syllable somewhere in the back of the throat. While we are clearly not in the East End neighborhoods generally associated with the Cockneys, it sounds like the linguistic traits can be found everywhere.
ADDED: A note about my own linguistic traits. When I say "lighter" I pronounce it "LY-der," so I could be misunderstood easily, too.
Also, better information on cockneys can be found at the Wikipedia entry here.
"A what?" I ask.
"Lie-er," he says. "LIE -er," he repeats, this time making a motion with his thumb mimicking turning the wheel on a lighter.
"Oh, no. Sorry," I said, understanding at last that what he wanted was a cigarette lighter, and walked down the hill toward Archway.
What I had just experienced, the linguists would tell me, is the "glottal stop," or what I would call the "swallowed t." The speaker had indicated the end of the syllable not with the hard "t," as I would, but by abruptly ending the vowel portion of the syllable somewhere in the back of the throat. While we are clearly not in the East End neighborhoods generally associated with the Cockneys, it sounds like the linguistic traits can be found everywhere.
ADDED: A note about my own linguistic traits. When I say "lighter" I pronounce it "LY-der," so I could be misunderstood easily, too.
Also, better information on cockneys can be found at the Wikipedia entry here.
posted by Smitty Werbenmanjensen at 7:05 AM
5 Comments:
A good friend of mine is English (he arrives here tomorrow night, so I can start contaminating his dialect then, muahaha!) and we're always fighting about stuff like this. Granted, that's not one of the ones he does, but his lost postvocalic R (that which makes words like "centre" turn into "centah" and so on) has been some cause for consternation. We're still arguing (to endless humourous impasse) whether "salami" rhymes with "army." Of course, it does not, but... ;)
Me, of course, I have my own linguistic peculiarities, such as Canadian raising and the presence of a schwa in my native idiolect, which I guess is something most American English dialects don't have.
If you think the glottal stop is weird, you should hear some of the other Midlands accents turn a lot of the plosive consonants (b, p, d, t) into glottal stops, which, when combined with the loss of the post-vocalic R, means that what you get is a lot of dead air with vowels around it... *grin*
Pseudonymous nails it. That's EXACTLY what it sounded like.
Hmm, I'll get my husband to read this blog as he is practicing his accent for when we visit London. This is similar to his learning German before we went to Germany. He's even been watching British TV shows so he can practice.
If everyone would just adopt the US Midwestern accent, things would be much easier for us all! It is, after all, the perfect accent.
Ahem. The "perfect accent" is Tony Soprano's. Jerzee rulez!
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