"Say Your Ts"
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 16 มิ.ย. 2024
- Low-effort video but still turned out okay. I talk about the /t/ phoneme again, weird how two of my videos are about that, huh?
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0:00 - Video
3:25 - Credits
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I think this may just be a very elaborate way of stopping those "bri'ish" memes.
no, because apostrophe is a genuine valid le'-er to spell glo'-al stops.
many languages use this le'-er in their official Latin spellings/transcriptions.
btw, the IPA le'-er per se is an exaggera'-ed version of an apostrophe.
Still doesn't change the fact we can't hear the t's
@@Circ00mspice That doesn’t mean those Ts aren’t there
@@Wmann Well, they aren't there, they've been replaced by glottal stops.
British people love two things: tee-glottalisation and tea-globalisation
This comment is underrated :D
And either purposely or accidentally stomping out native languages
@@EVOLUTIONINCARNATE Hey, don't let us Brits stop you from learning and using Navajo, Ojibwa or Choctaw, for example. I don't think we'd care to stop you.
'hank you xD made me laugh
@@mrgoldengraham027 No worries, let us Yeehaw fellers take the reins here, since those languages are native where we're at. Though some of us (not me) are big on teetotal-ization. Them dang ol' bootleggers and baptists, man.
> wa'a
> "oooh, you mean wata"
Okay, John, where's your fucking "r"s??
Exaaaaaactly
Ha ha ha! I love it!
if you over-enunciate your Rs it makes you sound more american, but that might actually have helped with the analogy of non-brits being unfamiliar with the alternate t pronunciation
It's right above his fucking legs ;)
@The Arrogant Writer Something something 'intrusive r'
Perhaps Timmy should just tell John he's a [tʰwaʔ]. If John gets angry, it only proves he recognises a couple of perfectly comprehensible allophones. 😄
Underrated comment
can i use this? this is an epic uno reverse card lol
Bravo on this one
lmfaoooooo
i always heard it as æ not a
I have a university course about sociolinguistics and you just summarized an entire seminar session and 30 page reading with this video xD
thank you so much aha :)
pff
Since you mention "laziness" and classism, the whole thing reminded me a bit on when people bash certain variants of English, like the African-American Vernacular English with its many differences to "standard English" , but still relatively strict rules. I think that could make an interesting episode (just a suggestion, not a request). Also it reminds me on certain Roman elites and their attitude towards Classical Latin and Vulgar Latin.
Xidnaf has a good video on it
TH-cam is choke full of videos about AAVE and how legitimate it is and how racist it is not to agree.
@@idraote indeed. Like when people criticise the use of 'aks'
instead of 'ask' when the prescriptivists conveniently forgetting that was standard English, and common in native English dialects until very recently. Or the 'th > t' and 'dh >d' which was also widespread in southern English accents. In fact a surprising amount of AAVE phonology is similar to the old Sussex dialects, somewhat coincidentally.
Very true. AAVE does have its own grammatical rules. Hardly something lazy if one looks into it.
Irregular speech should be viciously mocked and hated. Linguistic assimilation to higher dialects is inherently good, assimilation to barbaric dialects is bad.
Ultimately language is about communication. Can you understand what they want? Good. If you can’t, ask nicely. Trying to correct people's pronounciation is pointless, counterproductive, and a dick move.
based
but it depends on what you're communicating. the way in which you express a phrase goes beyond the semantic content of its message
First sentence: I agree. The rest: no. You ask "Can you understand what they want?" rhetorically but the whole problem is when the speaker use an accent which means the listener can't understand. (Perhaps they can understand fragments of what they hear, but not enough to make a coherent understood whole.) You call it "Trying to correct people's pronounciation" but it really doesn't have to be anything like that.
@@rosiefay7283 i mean sure, but let's be honest here, practically nobody today is getting confused at british (or even bri'ish) T-glottalization and just want to annoy you.
Again, the key here is to "ask nicely"
@@rosiefay7283 By that I meant if you don't understand what they are saying, you can ask nicely, "Can you repeat that again" or "I'm sorry, what did you mean?". If all fails they can use visual pointers. Communication is hard and it's difficult to deal with problems like this in a nice way but we have to suck it up and deal with it.
By "trying to correct people's pronounciation" I mean doing what Klein says in their video; to say that they're speaking "incorrectly" and to "pronounce their T's".
I love to imagine some day when someone says “say your t’s” to me and I can pull this out of my back pocket, reciting this entire video by heart.
🤓
While this video describes how that phrase is wrong, you would still be pronouncing that letter incorrectly.
@@tybullock1841 imagine using the nerd emoji. 'Y bullock
@@maulino4036 That is not true. the glottal stop and voiced alveolar tap or flap, among other sounds, can both be allophones for the letter 't' in certain contexts. The letter 't' does not have a single pronunciation.
And let's not forget that many Americans voice their intervocalic 'T's making water sound more like wadder. I suspect I used to myself, as I grew up in California, but have been back in England since 1973 and no longer voice them...nor do I use a glottal stop. I haven't, however, adopted the Suffolk practice of changing what are [to me] one-syllable words, like brown, house, pure or more into bro-wun, hou-wus, pew-er or mo-wuh :-) [I hasten/edit to add that I don't consider these to be mispronunciations, merely local variations]
"aaron earned an iron urn"
-own = 1 syllable 90% of the time
-owl = 1 syllable 50% of the time
-our = 1 syllable 20% of the time.
Personally I say -own with 1 syllable but -owl and -our with 2 syllables. So if there existed two words like pile and pieyill they'd be homophones for me.
@@NoNameAtAll2 aarn earnt a ion urn
in american dialects, it's called the alveolar tap incase you're curious. /ɾ/
@@wish-keeper consider looking the phrase up on youtube
My biggest Pet Peeve about this is Americans hanging shit on Brits for “not saying t” when Americans also don’t say /t/ in the same environments! /ɾ/ and /ʔ/ are both equally not /t/!
You're right, but you meant to use the brackets []. // are for phonemes (abstract sound units in a given language), whereas [] are for phones (sounds). If you need further explanation let me know, I'd be happy to link resources!
@@mmmmmmmmmmmmm You tell him!
(Technically I'm Canadian but same difference). If you feel differently that's perfectly understandable but I sorta feel like it's just taking the piss out of brits. At least from my experience it isn't intended as mockery.
My accent is from the US range of dialect, although I still don't use a 'de' sound when pronouncing words like 'water' and in fact I pronounced my T's the exact same way native Japanese people do.
excuse me; I haven't studied the general IPA enough.
た、ち、つ、て、と example of ta row kana, minus the ち、つ, as they're pronounced, in order, chi (or tchi) and tsu respectively.
た、て、と, in order, ta, te, to.
Not only that, but t-glottaling is a *regional* accent feature, and it's only a minority of Brits who use it. IME most Americans I hear (and three are a lot of Americans on TH-cam) have the winter/winner and writer/rider mergers. Those and other accent features can make American speech hard to understand.
Thing is, John is still wrong for telling Timmy to use the voiceless alveolar stop specifically for words like "water" since in the majority of English dialects, if you're not pronouncing it with the glottal stop in that dialect (i.e. wa'er) you're most likely pronouncing it with the voiced alveolar flap (i.e. wadder). It'd be like if Timmy went from Norfolk to Dallas and got confused when James says "Do you want some wadder" when he's used to hearing and saying "wa'er" all his life. And John's over here like "🤓 um ackshyully yur bofe thaying it wrong it'th water!"
All in all, this was a very good video, and fuck John.
throw some extra aspiration on there to be really sure
You should be more respectful of John's superiority.
ive been saying "wadder" to myself the whole time and wondering if im saying a 't' or a 'd' for too long
A wild nifty appears
@@Ggdivhjkjl John only superior only in one aspect
It’s not even as if t-glottalisation is solely a feature of working class accents anymore either, which makes it even more stupid. Where I’m from, there has been a lot of dialect levelling owing to migration and as such most people speak like this, regardless of class.
It’s pretty common for middle class people like myself to switch between t-glottalisation and pronouncing it ‘the proper way’ depending on who they are speaking to, and just generally how they feel at the time.
I doubt it’s found much in the upper middle class though
@@kyrakia5507 I will die on the hill that [t] is not the proper way.
you're simply admitting that migration erases history.
Love how you said "poli'ical" at the end
Not just that: "Wha' am I saying? Le's no' ge' poli'icl he-e."
We should make the upper class pronunciation the wrong one just to show them what it’s like to be pushed around.
*wha'
also because received pronunciation is a stupid joke that's still being taught as if it's standard english or something
@@amirsur2750 *taugh'
We already did. Two wrongs don't make a right though
@@greenmachine5600 *don'' *righ'
I'd be interested in a follow-up to this, which addresses General American pronunciation of T's. First, in "water", a lot of people pronounce it with a sound that is heard as a D (even though it's really an alveolar tap). But then there's cases like "mountain", where that "t" gets glottalized, and the whole word gets nasalized.
Me too!!! Link below if it's made.
Same with the word "gluttony"
While that is how I'd usually say Mountain, I think in an unstressed position while speaking fast I might actually remove the 'T' entirely, Pronouncing it kinda like /mãũn̩/.
"Button" pronounced with anything other than a glottal stop will always sound bizarre to me.
@@Alsetman The Australian accent really goes all out when it comes to flapping t's
classism and classification according to accent unfortunately appears to be very ancient, even in Rome we know that most of the written records belonged to so called "high class" individuals while the rest of the people spoke a different dialect, this vulgar latin was ironically the one which eventually evolved into the modern romance languages.
I love to weaponize this knowledge against the French.
Vulgar Latin isn’t a thing
It’s dialectal variation over geological area, class, and time
Not a separate language
If Vulgar Latin WAS a thing then modern romance langauges would be considered Vulgar Latin
@@EVOLUTIONINCARNATE yes thats kind of what i was pointing at, that separating so called vulgar latin from "proper" latin was a classist thing
As a native Texan, we hardly T our Tees. Glottal stops and light Dees for the most part. Thank you pointing these pronunciations out. I hope ESL learners can find your videos helpful as well.
I'm Texan too. I never realized I had an accent until someone had me say "mountain", which always comes out as "moun'ain".
@@isayeet I’m from New Jersey, and I usually say “moun’ain” when speaking quickly (I say it “properly” when speaking slower). And most of the “t” sounds in the middle of words are said as “d” sounds by me and most of the people I know.
@@isayeet Yeah man. I'm from Manchester (UK) and I'd pronounce it " moun'in ".
@@isayeet Isn’t that a common feature of GenAm tho? If a /t/ appears before a syllabic /n/, that /t/ will be pronounced as a glottal stop, (so written > wri’en and important > impor’ant).
I personally find it weird when GenAm speakers *don’t* glottalise that /t/.
I remember watching this American TH-camr pronouncing those kinds of words with a hard aspirated t and I thought it really stood out as odd in his speech.
I’m not American tho so I don’t really know if that’s normal or not.
@@naufalzaid7500 What? Is that a southern thing? Most people in the US where I'm from from don't glottalize the Ts in written and important. If anything, we're far more likely to turn a t into a d, though those particular words seem to retain the T sound because it's stressed.
Come for the linguistic explanations, stay for the class analysis
I have vivid memories of being in primary school and the teacher telling us kids not to 'drop our t's'. At the time I took them at face value but only later did I come to realise that I wasn't speaking wrong, merely differently. Unfortunately in all societies classism around language is deeply embedded; even in Ireland where I was, where our own 'standard' pronunciation of intervocalic /t/ as a slit fricative [θ̠] would be considered 'wrong' by more prescriptive British English speakers, there was much stigma around the use of the glottal stop, marking you out as one of the 'inner city' (i.e. lower-class) Dubliners. A certain amount of implied poorness or unscrupulousness necessarily followed such assumptions. I still find myself subconsciously resorting to [θ̠] in more formal situations in lieu of the more comfortable [ʔ].
As a funny aside on the erroneous nature of the phrase 'dropping your t's', in Dublin English there is actually some element of truth to it. Word-final /t/ often gets completely elided to nothing, especially in fast speech.
You WERE speaking wrong. It's just that your teacher was also speaking wrong. We all speak wrong.
As someone not from Ireland, I actually also elide word-final /t/ when speaking fast, But it's more context dependent, I usually only do it when the next consonant is another alveolar one, Or sometimes if it's another stop.
@@bacicinvatteneaca, þin Englisc is atol.
Imagine someone says "pronounce your t's" and man starts an in depth analysis of linguistics
In my US west coast dialect we also replace the /t/ in certain situations, such as intervocalically as a tap /ɾ/ like “water” [ˈwɑɾɚ] and at the end of syllables as a glottal stop /ʔ/ like in “what” [wʌˀ] or deleted entirely like in “winter” sounding like “winner”
Fascinating stuff!
I essentially have the same allophony in my Standard Canadian accent. Though (at least in my mind) the "t" isn't dropped in "winter" as in my speech it's like the "t" and "n" combine into a nasalized tap.
My Canadian accent has this too and it can genuinely cause confusion because "inner-" and "inter-" sound almost the same despite meaning almost the opposite. Also "didn't" sounds dangerously close to "did"
also US west coast, agreed with all your examples but I also sometimes replace an intervocalic /t/ with a /ʔ/ (especially when followed by a syllabic nasal) like in "button" [ˈbʌʔn̩] or "mountain" [ˈmãʊ̃ⁿʔn̩]
/wʌt̚/, atleast in my opinion. I agree with the rest of your comment though
@@WatermelonEnthusiast9 maybe I might even say [wʌt̚ʔ] (the ʔ may be just a stød superscript though)
I use an accent with t glotalisation which has never been much of a problem exept with middle class people but my accent also entirely drops Hs(at least as far as I can tell) which has been a problem occasionally especially when speaking with people who's first language isn't English
Also the implication of "the" has caused confusion eg. "Do you want to got to the shops" becoming " do you wanna go shops"
Dropping articels and prepositions is also common among young people in my region of Germany, as well es dropping the subject when it's unambiguous, so "Lass(t) uns in den Laden gehen" becomes "Lass Laden gehen"
What is middle class? There are only 2 classes.
@@Deathington. Only two classes? Man, I can tell you're British! In America, there were traditionally three classes--and 97% of us self-identified as middle class. In the last few years, the media has been sneaking in a "working class." What the hell is that, I asked myself when I started seeing it in the news. I looked it up, and it's a new class that's been created between the lower class and the middle class. I suddenly found myself a member of this class I never knew existed before.
@@Deathington. I am from Sweden and you're sort of right. Here, there has been traditionally a working, middle and upper class. But over time, the working class has been disappearing, since it's being replaced by the middle class. Also, the upper class is loosing meaning and has shifted a lot, but it's still sort of there.
@@Deathington. exactly. The class that owns the means of production and the class that doesn't.
as someone in the "yeehaw" category-in more than one sense-I certainly hear t glottalization in Am. E. a lot. there are some cases where I use it, too, though not as many as some Americans from other regions.
As a Canadian I never realized t-glottalization was considered lower class in Britain. I guess I assumed it was similar to the allophony I have between t/d and the alveolar flap where it's standard across all classes.
In reality it is the pronunciation of higher beings.
I say the T in "water" like "wadder" so I can't speak on this issue, lmao.
Thanks for the linguistics lesson, though! That's interesting. Have a nice day! :)
At least our glottal stops for t's don't cause confusion between word pairs such as metal/medal, grater/grader, etc. like one dialect of English I've heard. 😉
As a German, my weird foreign English accent only glottalizes the t in the word mountain.
My English cousin did exactly this to me the other day (I’m Australian so I say it like woorder)
woorder ma'e!!!!!
Yeah nah
That's another allophone of t! And it occurs a lot in American and Canadian dialects. So when saying "water bottle" they say:
wɑ-ɾ-ər bɑ-ɾ-əl
not
wɑ-tʰ-ər bɑ-tʰ-əl
@@xXJ4FARGAMERXx true, to the point that the "proper" pronunciations with an alveolar stop (waTer/preTTy/iT/compeTely/tenT) sound pretty forced/unnatural to me, since it seems that most common accents either glottalize or voice the tees. (i'm not a native english speaker, so ofc it can feel different if you're from an area where tees are always pronounced "properly", but tbh i don't even know if there are any places like that..)
@@j2k14 yeah it just sounds weird when people do it. This ain’t as common but I feel the same way about people who don’t vocalize L’s
For me all of those differences are both fascinating as well as frustrating. I've learnt standard English in school reasonably well but when I went to England I still had issues with understanding people there. That's the frustrating part. On the other hand as a person who comes from a country which went through dialect leveling it was fascinating to see in how many ways you can say things using one language
“Use your voiceless alveolar stop” just doesn’t have the same ring to it tho…
"Let's not get political here" they say to the _LINGUIST_ who studies _LANGUAGE_ which will _USUALLY_ be political to some degree.
(Edit: changed _ALWAYS_ to _USUALLY_ )
Everything is political to some degree, even ur mum.
Why always?
No
@@tomasbeltran04050 cos language is an inherently social thing, and every time we use it we impart social implications greater than the literal meaning of what we’re saying - a large part of that is thru accent
@@WJ-tv1mz i doubt that. It's a social tool for communication with no further implication
"Could you pass the wa'er?"
"Are you sure you don't want to gargle some earl grey? You seem to like having T in your throat"
I think this same negative perception of "dropping the T" happens with the TH sound too. Nowadays, people tend to replace the "th" sound for "f" in thing and for "v" in brother, for example. It seems to be equally discouraged.
@Michele Pretty much anywhere. I'm close to Manchester and it's fairly common here. The same goes for the "T dropping". I'm not saying that people actively pick others up on their pronunciation, but I am sure that if some southern RP pedant heard it, they would recoil. I've heard of this also happening in working class London accents and those in Yorkshire too, but mostly among younger people. I'm no linguist though, just something I've noticed.
@@mrgoldengraham027 Indeed, th-fronting is a phenomenon in all regions of the UK. Some more than others - for example, in east and north London dialects it’s almost the norm and has been for decades - but I think the main predictor is age, with younger people more likely to do it than older people. I’m from the Midlands and I’ve th-fronted all my life.
Why would you change the sounds you use?
@@bacicinvatteneaca It's not change though, is it? I say it how I have always said it, the same goes for how the people around me say it. I didn't just decide to speak a certain way, it is learnt through the environment. The same goes for you. You speak and don't actively think about the intricacies of your pronunication. Just because I do it differently to you doesn't make me alien.
3:02 speaking of classism, I feel like the word uncultured is classist. Say, for example, a rich person from the city learns math and science and languages after going to school for the same amount of time as a poorer person from the country who in addition to learning say 50% of the curriculum that person A did, this person also learned how to farm, fish, cook, and hunt. Now say they have a conversation and person A speaks about an advanced science topic. To accuse the other of being uncultured is classist, for person B may not know this high-class specific thing, even though person B knows many things that person A knows nothing about. It’s just that these things are done by a different class or even a different group of people.
And science and math aren’t even culture!
go outside
That's why the upper classes develop their own dialects, to exclude those who are not from their class. Of course it's classist, that's the point.
You totally can replace the middle glottal stop in "uh-oh" with an alveolar plosive, at least in my dialect. Ut-oh is weird to write, but sounds right(or at least not strange) to me
very interesting, definitely does not apply to my dialect but there you go
the glottal stop is still there, you're just putting a t before it
Great video!! I also love the music you put together at the end it’s very nice
In my dialect, our t's change into d's, and nobody bats an eye. The moment someone "doesn't say their t's," someone makes fun of them or just talks badly about them
I like all the british Ts. The slight lispy one, the glottalization one, idk, they just sound nice. My Oregon accent turns all my mid-word Ts into Ds. Wadder. Liddle. Ts are weird.
I love these videos so much! Linguistics has a special place in my heart lol
I just really appreciate the care you take to mention that, even though John was very much being a jerk in his case, there are those with accent differences, non-native speakers, and individuals who are HoH who might all have genuine struggles with this. I think in general it’s good to assume the best, but definitely don’t let someone make you feel like a fool for saying a word somewhat differently
This reminds me of when people go out of their way to tell other people that words with a “wh” sound like “whale” and “white” should be pronounced “hwale” and “hwite” and that pronouncing those words as “wale” and “wite” is incorrect.
1. It is incorrect. Sound changes are by definition saying things wrong compared to the current understanding of language.
2. Mergers are literally losses of information, and in this case it meant the disappearance of the only set of instances of a phone. How is that not wrong?
Hwa gives us a reason hwy we still have in h in hwale and hwite. That's hwy I like to say hwa, plus it sounds nice. Though nothing wrong with saying wale and wite.
As a Texan, I can confirm that we don’t use the glottal stop for t
We use it for v between two vowels instead lol
(ie; Never -> ne’er)
Also water is pronounced more like wahder here
We do that in PA too. Ever -> err and have -> ha’(only when the next word in the sentence begins with a consonant)
No its because they lost their "T" in the harbour
Silence Swede before we bombard Stockholm like we did Copenhagen 1807
'ate me tees,
'ate people correc'in me,
luv me glo'al stops. Simple as.
As someone named John I can confirm this video’s accuracy
Allophony tends to happen under specific circumstances so one phoneme can have multiple sounds but demand particular ones at different times. And if one of these allophones happens to be similar to another phoneme, that's just a coincidence which _might_ become a merge but it's not guaranteed
Bri’ish: I bough’ my daugh’a a bo’le o’ wo’a
‘Muhrican: I baad ma daader a baadle a waader
Me: I boughT my daughTer a boTTulh uf waTer
I will never say my T’s! I’m grateful for this amazing and well-informed video, which I will surely enjoy for many, many years in the future!
Thanks. This is one thing we won't need to explain about accents in our videos thanks to you.
The last part reminds me of dropping final /s/ in Spanish. Now not so much, but before, most of the Southern accent in general was considered "lazy" or just "wrong".
All sound changes that ever happened in any language that ever existed are due to laziness
But the difference is that Spanish is very regular in its spelling and pronunciation, while English seems to have a spelling just because they had to create one, how many vowel sounds for just 5 letters? Dropping final S is more like the contractions that Spanish doesn’t represent in the writing
Love this! You could also have mentioned that /t/ very often becomes a glottal stop whenever followed by syllabic /n/, like in mountain, certain, important, button and so on (at least in North American accents)
I'm a Brit with an accent fairly close to RP, and I certainly do the same in all those words except, perhaps, mountain.
I low-key want a shirt of a dude standing next to a chair that says "Imagine sitting, please".
lmao the end caught me soo off guard
great video as always
As a non native speaker I have no real way of pronouncing the word 'water' sometimes I say, water or wat(h)er, sometimes wo'a, sometimes wota, other times wader, maybe wa'er as well... it's one of those confusing words that I have no solution for.
the best part is that none of those are an incorrect pronunciation
Depends on your accent if you speak in British accent say wa’er if American say wader
And then there's people in rural Scotland who proudly pronounce 'water' as 'war', and staunchly defend themselves whilst being completely incomprehensible...
The Scottish that moved over here in the US are a bit (and I mean a little bit) different from the Scots over in Scotland, and I should know given I have both Scottish and Irish family by bloodlines.
In fact, for reference, my grandmother's maiden name is directly an Irish Gaelic word, my grandmother's parents are from Ireland. My grandfather is the one with heavy Scottish ties.
war makes more sense then wa’er tbh
1:13 chad Squamish using the number 7 as the glottal stop
I'll say my T's, but only on chewsdays
As a person born and raised in Amarillo, Texas, I think it’s far more common to hear “waDer” not “wa er” Just dropping the T sounds extremely British to me. Most southerners speak it would be a consonant D in the middle of the word, not T or glottal stop. Plus, in many southern slang terms such as fixin’tuh (fixing to), the T sound is extremely apparent if not overemphasized. I could be completely wrong, but as always, I enjoy your channel so much and appreciate deeply how entertaining comedic, and most of all, informative your videos are!
This is something I really like about English, as a non-native speaker. The way phonemes that sound completely different to me are allophones, while sounds I can't differentiate between are seen as fundamentally different. I am sure this is true for other languages too, but English is the one I'm most familiar with. I love glottal stops, they are one of my favorite sounds. I think it's dumb calling out people for not "saying their t's" because a lot of the time, the English t can be replaced with something more akin to a d or an r. Even the standard English t is "softer" than the Spanish T I am used to, so when English speakers learn Spanish they sound a little bit like children, which is really cute! Most Spanish speakers aren't harsh with foreigners trying to learn, and say stuff like "It's fine, I understood what you meant" even if it isn't "correct" by academic standards.
At my work, we had people from all sorts of different countries, so we took the opportunity to arrange language classes in various people's native languages. I tried the Mandarin class, taught by a colleague from Beijing.
Early on, she was trying to get me to pronounce a particular word. She said it. I said exactly the same thing, so far as I and the other native English speakers present could tell. She said, no, repeated the word and we tried again. After four or five repetitions I got bored and said something that sounded, to me, completely different from what she'd said - and her face lit up and she said "You've got it! Well done!"
It's just amazing how different languages group different sounds into phonemes totally differently.
I always love how they say "What am I saying, let's not get political here", and stops the video. Love it!
The counter is to tell the jerk to say their 'r's
I GOT WAY TOO FUCKING HAPPY WHEN YOU SAID GLOTTAL STOP OH MY GOD
This was indeed a very poli’cal video
This also applies to the "Utah accent" where we just a glottal stop in words like mountain, saying "moun' in"
Same thing in CO, so it's not a Utah accent.
I’m middle-class. I use my Ts.
I do find it funny that the guy asks "What?" with a hard T at the end, when I've never heard anyone not say /wɔʔ/.
There is also a phenomena, in some English dialects, of saying the /t/ or /d/, in e.g. wedding, soda, and bottle, with an voiced alveolar tap or flap. An [ɾ] …which is an R-sound. It is an R-sound, but people tend not to even realise this, and think of it as a T/D-sound, because it is used for the /t/ or /d/. I certainly didn't, until I found out, in a video about the Japanese L/R-sound (which is often a [ɾ])
@@gregoryford2532 The *_voiced_* alveolar tap is an R-sound. Period. (and regardless of language)
If you mention the J-sound, when writing in English, you obviously mean [d͡ʒ], as that is how the letter is pronounced in English.
The letter J is pronounced differently, in different languages, of course (most commonly as [j], mind you), but that has NO relevance to anything I said, in any way.
BTW:
Care must be taken, to write the English J-sound as [d͡ʒ], [d̠ʒ], or [ʤ].
Never [dʒ]!
(as it is, sadly, often written)
[dʒ] is clearly a voiced alveolar plosive followed by a voiced postalveolar fricative. Much as in the Kurdish word دژ (anti/against), which is pronounced [dʒ].
Japanese is not a bad example at all, *_as it wasn't an example, in any way, whatsoever!_*
I just mentioned that I, from watching a video about the Japanese L/R-sound, learned that some English words have t:s/d:s, that in some dialects are pronounced as [ɾ].
So I didn't talk about Japanese, at all. (other than the brief mention, that the L/R-sound is often [ɾ], which had nothing to do with what I was saying. The Japanese L/R, as with the same sound in many other East Asian, and many other, languages, can be pronounced with an R-sound or L-sound. Sometimes a person might use both, in the same sentence. Perhaps even for the same word, if it used more than one. in the sentence
…but, again, none of this has anything to do with what I said about how some English words, in some dialects, pronounce some /t/:s or /d/:s, with [ɾ])
I never considered that the Japanese l/r sound might sound like a flapped d/t. My mind has been blown.
Thank you for mentioning foreign speakers of english. I'm French and we ave similar cases of "elitist" vs "worker class" prounuciations so i get your point. But also, it took me many years between being able to speak and understand English perfectly and being able to understand these alternative pronunciations without effort.
As far as I’m aware most americans don’t even say t as a /t/, the majority say t as /d/ and the glottal stop in most cases. At the beginning of syllables it’s a d and at the end it’s often a glottal stop. This does vary a lot based off the area, but especially where I live basically everyone almost never says an actual t sound except for in weird niche situations where it’s part of an affricate or a consonant cluster that acts as an affricate like ts, st, and pt.
It’s weird, but while we completely associate t with a /t/ sound, it’s not actually as common as you’d expect in several of the largest english speaking populations
Yes but can we agree that saying "Aluminum" is stupid
No it was the original way and you just added /i/ because you don't know how to read in Bri'ain
@@NathanTAK literally every single language in the world, including multiple varities of english say Aluminium, in fact most metals that dont have a common name like gold or iron end with -ium
The IUPAC and all scientific literature agrees.
@@NathanTAK The original was actually Alumium, so if it's really using the original word that matters, you might want to switch
@@NathanTAK It's literally spelled with an i. But both pronunciations are fine.
When I was studying at my university (my native language is Russian) I was fascinated when I learnt you could say bottle like bo'le and water like wa'er, and I was even more happy when I thought myself how to pronounce it properly.
I am surprised that there are some people that find it incorrect and bad (?) to use glottal-t; that is such a beautiful thing then used in the right moment. Thank you for sharing and explaining this topic! I love your video!
sending this to my family
in my area, we often slur our t’s into d’s or have the same pronunciation of t’s as showcased in this video (i.e; water to wadder, atlanta to a-lanna, or even my own name, matt, being pronounced with only the first two letters and then a hard stop) and it always confused me when city folk said they couldn’t understand me, or that i was “slurring my words”. it caused me to correct my backwoods canadian accent for YEARS and i’m only now easing back into it, fuck it if folks can’t understand me, that’s just how most local farmers speak
…wait there are people who act elitist about this?
yep, unfortunately
Right here in this comment section, too!
yes
Americans can't make say "bri'ish lol" and then go and say "briddish"
This channel is the spiritual successor to Xidnaf
thank you for making this as someone who uses t glottalisation
To me, the rule is very simple: I have to make myself as clear as possible, and it doesn't matter if I'll sound pedantic.
I'm often giving instructions to other people, so if they understand me wrong, my job is rendered useless.
By the way, nobody has to sound posh to communicate with clearness.
Speaking of classism: how about the assumption that making fun of how other classes speak is only done in one direction?
Punching down is an issue punching up isn't. Class is inherently a marker of power often unearned. High class disdain is reinforced by the powerful institutions they control. The inverse basically never happens.
@@mnm1273 I wouldn't be so sure about it.
Have you ever heard the stories about AA communities disparaging people for "not being black/AA enough"?
Is their "blacker" colour earned?
@@idraote Black isn't a class.
@@mnm1273 so you say. But, beside being uselessly literal, I know US social studies researchers who wouldn't agree with you.
@@idraote It's not being uselessly literal it's refusing to be dragged off topic. I was talking about class based distinctions and you are changing the topic to a race based debate. White people in the US have a significant spread across all classes and so if your theoretical argument about African American vernacular being used by white people was real it wouldn't be about class but race. It's also not about making fun so frankly you're just bringing up an entirely irrelevant point just to try and pick a fight.
Oh-oh, my 'at 'urned around my jug of wa'er!
*Here's the thing...*
At least where I'm from (Eastern Surrey, Southern England), replacing glottal stops for t's in words such as "water" and "bottle is not associated with the lower class, but with Roadmen and Chavs.
In schools, roadmen and chavs are the kids that misbehave, chew gum, speak vulgar slang nobody understands, swear every 10 seconds, smoke cigarettes at age 14 and wear expensive clothes that look like bin bags, just because it says "Nike" on it.
When growing up, Chavs and Roadmen do drugs in children's parks, and play music so loudly the whole neighbourhood can hear.
This is what the gottal t gets associated with here, so it is no wonder that people will tell you to pronounce the "t" properly.
Obviously this isn't entirely the case, many still pronounce their t's glottally and they aren't chavs, but it's a "chav cliché" to glottalise the t's.
As for the "it's lazy" thing you mentioned. No surprise people see it that way, you're literally omitting a letter you can perfectly say. True you're replacing the "t" with a glottal stop, but how many non-Linguistics nerds know what a glottal stop is? Exactly, that is why it is seen as lazy by the general public.
NOTE 1:
As I mentioned, you don't have to be chav to pronounce t's glottally. And you won't be associated with one if you do (for banter, if you overdo your glottal t's, or never pronounce them that way and suddenly you spit out a glottal t, you might jokingly get called a chav by friends). Another majority that gets associated with glottal t's are Scots and Northerners, once again nothing wrong with that.
NOTE 2:
Many might argue that it is still classism. Many end up chavs or doing drugs because of poor conditions. In fact the "chav sociolect/"language"/slang" really reminds me of Cockney accent or that of various poorer regions of London. Sure, but being poor doesn't necessarily make you chav. In fact, I've been made fun of for wearing "poor looking trainers", by a chav that wore like a whole bunch of expensive branded clothing.
NOTE 3:
PEOPLE ASSOCIATE THINGS DIFFERENTLY. One thing that may be chav for one, does not necessarily get associated as chav by another.
NOTE 3.5:
I've noticed people have different meanings for "chav" and "roadman". Some say they're the same thing. Some say roadmen are male, chavs are the same but female. I know people who say a roadman is a person who grew up in lower class (callback to politics), while chavs can be rich but imitate roadman culture. Idk. I defined how I define them, you just have to deal with it.
But many people also do t-glottalisation a lot more subtley than others. I speak reasonably standard for my age and background (well educated, Sussex, 50s) and do it sometimes, but I don't have some of the traits associated with some of the stronger estuary accents.
Btw, the word chav is actually racist, although most don't realise it. And I've long come to the conclusion that people who are snobby about others are far more offensive and certainly more ignorant, than those they're denigrating.
@@joegrey9807 I appreciate your answer.
For your use of glottal stop, I did mention briefly in the first note that you don't necessarily have to be associated with people with malicious intent to use the glottal stop, and I gave Scots and Northerners as example. Anyone can use glottal stop, where ever you are, even I do, but not very commonly. I just explained why glottal stops are frowned upon (atleast where I am from), I personally was not arguing for nor against its use.
As for the second part if your comment... how is the use of the word "chav" racist? I am not arguing, just asking. The last disclaimer from my original comment was that different people have different different definitions of the words "chav" and "roadman"; I'd be curious to see your taken on "chav", not just mine.
@@cerebrummaximus3762 chav is from the Roma word 'chavi' meaning child. So it's stereotyping the behaviour of Roma. As with many stereotypes there's an element of truth for part of the population, but it doesn't help the rest of them. I try and avoid it after a Roma friend politely pointed out the connotations it had.
As a Scot, you can pry my gottal stops out my cold dead hands.
And then we Americans and Canadians come in and randomly drop Ts for Ds (in addition to dropping them lol)
i love how the villain always has a moustache
You pronounced "poli/ʔ/ical" at the end of the video. Which makes me remember than the related word "politics" is an exception to t-flapping in American English: it always has a true alveolar stop: "poli-tics" in the US. Since the context for glottal /t/ between vowels is pretty much the same as the context for flap /t/ in AmE, my question is: Which variants of the word "politics" have you heard in the UK? Are there people who glottalize the /t/ in that word or is it an exception like it is in American English?
The pattern you're looking at there is based on whether the "t" comes before or after the word's emphasized or unemphasized syllable. In "politics", the preceding "i" is unemphasized (and the following "a" tends to be secondarily emphasized, or at least more emphasized than the "i", although not as much as the first syllable's "o"), so the "t" doesn't change, but, in "political", the preceding "i" is emphasized, so it's open to becoming something else like "polidical" or "polissical" or "poliʔical". (Phonetic changes almost always follow some kind of rule... meaning not something teachers require their students to do but just a way of describing what's happening that's applicable to a broad set of words with certain phonetic traits in common instead of just one word.)
@@_volder True, but the secondary stress on the last syllable of "politics" almost seems a bit circular. The t is aspirated due to secondary stress, but we mainly know of that stress due to the aspiration. In words like "ability" the t can be flapped or glottalized. This happens for the -lity and -city (capacity) words (ending with the happY vowel) but not for some words with /lət/ infixes and a final consonant (excluding past /d/ or plural /z/). It's not just "politics". The word "relative" is usually unflapped in American English. lat = /lət/ and that -ive is the KIT vowel.
Another exception to American T-flapping is "Protein". No one here says "Prodeen".
@@NegativeReferral Same for "eighteen" vs "eighty". In fact that makes 18/80 easier to tell apart in AmE, while in BrE even native speakers can mishear these words if they miss the final /n/. By now, flaps are likely lexicalized, because the happY set allows flapping ("pitied") while the FLEECE set disallows it ("protein"), but both are pronounced with the same vowel quality in many dialects. So it's not a completely deterministic process, speakers are remembering some words as flapped but not others. There are also words like "competence". /tən/ sequence, but the /t/ is not glottalized because it doesn't immediately follow the stressed syllable. But not flapped either for many speakers.
@@NegativeReferral That leads me to wonder if the "rule" would be best described not just in terms of accented/emphasized syllables but also whether the following vowel is a "long" or "short" vowel...
I can just hear you seethe in briishnes
i can hear you seething in ugly accent hahaaaha
I’m from the western US (like, deep west, cowboys and horses and everything) and I can’t pronounce my t’s either (moun’in instead of mountain is the example I always use) and the amount of times I’ve heard this is mind numbing. Awesome video!
Definitely you, everyone I know out west pronounces t's hard.
I love your outro
I really don't get how dropping your T's would be lazy, it's replacing one sound with another in some but not all places based on complex rules, it's more complicated if anything
Is it being replaced in locations where it's easier to pronounce glottal stop though?
'Glottis' may well be my new favourite word
*glo'-'is
Brits: Can you pass the wa’er bo’le
Yanks: Haha, it’s actually wadder boddle.
Immigrants: _confused screaming_
I didn't even know that's a working class thing
Dunt git me shtartet wiff "th-fronting".
Jus fink abou' i'
*abou'
@@TrulySpeechless FANKS MA'E!
Don't get me sharted 😳
In America our th frontings a lot less severe. It only becomes f at the end of a word otherwise it sounds more like a dental t or d sound
I'm from the black country, a region in England just northwest of birmingham. our dialect is very unique, "are" and "am" get switched in most cases, negatives like "aren't", "don't", "won't" get abbreviated further to "ay", "dow", and "wow", double negatives are common. but all of my life, ive been told by everyone in any position of authority that the way i and all of my peers have been speaking is "just wrong". we've been told that talking the way we do makes us stupid. i, as the "smart kid", was especially pressured to drop my accent. by the time i finished secondary school (a grammar school, full of first and second generation migrants who were taught english the "proper" way), my accent had all but vanished.
i consider this an absolute tragedy. one of englands most unique and interesting accents is disappearing, and the process is ripping apart a community. this story isn't unique either, it's playing out in regions all across the UK, particularly scotland and the north of england. but videos like this - albeit short - are important steps in defending people's heritage and communities. thats what i like about linguistics, it gives us the ability to appreciate the world's many different cultures and communities, a lot of which are under attack.
Arm frum the black country, n arm praud ev it! Cheers n 'av a gudd'n.
The majority of people wasn't speaking "properly" pre-industrialization but their descendants just kinda forgot about it and moved on.
@@deadweight2121 not entirely true. strong regional accents continued to be a thing after the industrial revolution. theyve come under attack due to classism and mass media
The sad thing about this is that both RP English and the regional variety can be maintained if someone makes the conscious effort to do so.
It's like speaking a second language, you don't need to drop one to learn the other.
@@idraote exactly, regional accents just arent respected enough. but then again, neither are the regions themselves...
@@Theo-oh3jk bit hard to write an accent, english spelling is bad enough as is
THANK YOU! MY BROTHER SAYS THIS AND IM LIKE "WE LIERALLY HAVE THE SAME ACCENT"
Amusing and informative. Thank you.
Always found this confusing. How can one ‘not say their ts’ if the pronounciation of the word still changes based off of the presence of that letter? We dont pronounce the h as it usually is in ‘chew’, doesnt mean that it isnt said at all. Imagine then going on to learn a language like Welsh and having your brain destroyed that get this, some languages use letters for entirely different sounds.
Edit 24/7/22 : wanted to just expand this with some of my experiences with this. Growing up in south east england i learned to pronounce the t in many words as a glotal stop, and ‘th’ as similar to a ‘v’ or ‘f’. Many people in the south east in more senior or important positions or those that require a higher degree of education are taken by people from wealthier areas such as much of London, who usually speak in those ‘recieved pronounciation’ accents. This included many of the teachers i had, who would often correct me stating that the pronounciation and even my accent itself was ‘incorrect’. This still continues now that im older attending a sixth form in a grammar school which are just brimming with these same types of upper class people, and its crazy how horrible mostly wealthy london born people can be even now.
Its just disgusting how crapping on the lower classes is still normalised in some senses, especially when i talk with mostly northern americans who do the exact same thing without realising it.
Good job intentionally missing the point. The point is that no one should ever want to "speak funny". Al languages and all humans should stop existing to av oi d ugliness and suffering
What do you say to those of us who change our T’s into more D-ish sounds?
I find the hard T sound to be just as abnormal as not pronouncing it at all.
Is D just a soft T?
ahahaha that's very fun... but /d/ is in essence a voiced variant of /t/, pronounced in the same part of the mouth etc. the only difference is that /d/ has your vocal cords vibrating, which they already are when pronouncing vowels - thus in intervocalic environments (like wAtEr), it's very easy for some dialects to start voicing that "t"
also i should add in other cases it remains unvoiced, but loses its aspiration (look it up lol)
@@kklein ahh, thank you very much for your insight.
I've noticed that my (and the general) Northern Irish dialect seems to match some American vocalised 't's like in "water", and some English glottal stops like in "tent". Just interesting the similarities and differences
"Ay, could I have some water?"
"Say your T's!"
"Fuck off, you know what I said."
Wot a noice chewsday, oimma drink from moi Wa'er bo'lle.
Do you olso eat dif-fe-rent chuna e-ve-ry day?
Innit bruv?
'Imma' sounds American