in pursuit of the glottal stop

[burntcopper]

Yesterday, I sat in a soundproof box while ciderpress recorded my voice. She wanted south-east England voices, so that was me and jen and buddleia. Apparently I've got a very obvious Berkshire accent. Repeating phrases over and over. When it was Jen's turn, it's amazing how clarified and almost RP she speaks - apparently partially due to her teaching it as a foriegn language. And then you get me. It started out nice and clear and a bit RP, then as time goes on, the glottal stops come out in force and it gets ridiculously fast. To the point that my time was about half of everyone else.

Got out of the booth, and the first thing I'm told is that I apparently have two different 'eeee' vowels. See me blink a tad. And then listen to a bit, then test it out in my mouth all last night. She's right. If it's something like 'clean' - ends with an m or n - you get the classic wide-mouth stretch 'eeeee', tip of tongue against the back of your top teeth. If it's like 'sweet' - hard consonants like d or t and thus sacrificed to the almighty glottal stop - mouth barely opens and the tongue doesn't touch the top of your mouth. Weird. Oh, and some bits of the broader Berkshire 'ooo-arrr' accent come in the longer I've been repeating; dunno if the others could hear it, though.

And then we gossipped about linguistics and fandoms and the embarassing things our fandoms do.

Aparently she's going to chop it all up into bits and do perverted things to it int he name of her degree.

Tonight : Shakespeare in the (hopefully not) rain.

Comments

[genarti]

...Hunh. I just tested out your example words, and yep, I do the same thing with the two different eees. Or, well, an equivalent that matches your description; I don't know that it's exactly the same, since my accent is middle-of-the-road newscaster American. (Midwestern American, that is to say, of the enunciated sort. I get a bit more regionalized to Ohio or New England on specific words, but that's my general accent.)