English Questions

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allf100
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English Questions

Postby allf100 » Fri Dec 03, 2021 11:46 pm

Hello,
I have two questions about the pronunciations of 't' in English.
1. A native speaker tells that Americans pronounce 't' in rebuttal as 'd', and the British pronounce 't' as 't'.

I went to check the online Cambridge Dictionary which states the almost same phonetic signs in both AmE and BrE.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictio ... d/rebuttal
rebuttal
noun [ C ] formal
UK /rɪˈbʌt.əl/ US /rɪˈbʌt̬.əl/


I wonder why the dictionary doesn't state the word as /rɪˈbʌd.əl/ in AmE.

There's an arrow below 't' in AmE US /rɪˈbʌ.əl/. Does it mean 't' is pronounced as 'd'?


2. In AmE, someone says native speakers don't actually pronounce the last 't' in 'important', 'can't' etc.

Do the British pronounce 't' in the words I mentioned above?

I am curious whether or not native speakers do pronounce 't' in 'night'. I watched the video of musical named Phanton of the Opera in which Sarah Brightman pronounces 't' of the night very weak; while in a music competition, two Chinese singers pronounce 't' very clearly in the same musical. I asked this is because the pronunciation of musical is probably different from that in daily speeches.

Thank you!

P.S. The title of this thread is not for specific questions, because I don't wish to flood the forum with my questions of English, and probably I will post my other questions now and then.
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Re: English Questions

Postby Xenops » Fri Dec 03, 2021 11:59 pm

allf100 wrote:Hello,
I have two questions about the pronunciations of 't' in English.
1. A native speaker tells that Americans pronounce 't' in rebuttal as 'd', and the British pronounce 't' as 't'.

I went to check the online Cambridge Dictionary which states the same phonetic signs in both AmE and BrE.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictio ... d/rebuttal
rebuttal
noun [ C ] formal
UK /rɪˈbʌt.əl/ US /rɪˈbʌt̬.əl/


I wonder why the dictionary doesn't state the word as /rɪˈbʌd.əl/ in AmE.

There's an arrow below 't' in AmE US /rɪˈbʌ.əl/. Does it mean 't' is pronounced as 'd'?


AmE native here. When I say rebuttal, it does sound like a soft "d", but giving it a "t" sound is fine as well, though I tend to think of the British saying it more that way.


2. In AmE, someone says native speakers don't actually pronounce the last 't' in 'important', 'can't' etc.


I pronounce both "t"'s.

I am curious whether or not native speakers do pronounce 't' in 'night'. I watched the video of musical named Phanton of the Opera in which Sarah Bright pronounces 't' of the night very weak; while in a music competition, two Chinese singers pronounce 't' very clearly in the same musical. I asked this is because the pronunciation of musical is probably different from that in daily speeches.


My impression is if the last consonant is not part of a consonant cluster, then it will be pronounced in regular speech. With "important", I personally pronounce the "t", but not all Americans do, stopping at the "n" instead. I don't always pronounce the "th" in "strengths" either, making something like "strengs".

Like in other languages, the phonology of English can be contorted in songs, and might sound different than regular speech.
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Re: English Questions

Postby allf100 » Sat Dec 04, 2021 2:22 am

Hi Xenops,

Thank you very much for the answers in details. You're very helpful.
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Re: English Questions

Postby Deinonysus » Sat Dec 04, 2021 3:47 am

I hadn't seen the circumflex below symbol used in IPA before and it looks like it does in fact mean that the letter becomes voiced. What I have more commonly seen is the voiceless symbol (ring below). So for instance d̥ would indicate a sound that is soft like a d but without any voicing (such as the d in Icelandic or Mandarin). So I'd think that ṱ would indicate a d sound that's a bit harder, like a t. But this is not the case. /t/ and /d/ between vowels are pronounced exactly the same in American English. In fact, they are often described as a tapped r sound /ɾ/.

In American English, final stops are usually unreleased, like in Cantonese or Korean, so the mouth goes into the position of the stop but there is no percussive sound. Also, this typically shortens the vowel. Of course, an unreleased /t/ after an /n/ doesn't do anything because /t/ and /n/ have the same tongue position, so the only noticeable effect is that the vowel in "can't" is cut off a bit, while the vowel in "can" is longer. In British English, the final stops are typically released so there will be an actual 't' sound at the end of "can't."

The issue with Phantom of the Opera is interesting because different musical genres tend to be associated with particular accents, regardless of the singer's native accent. Pop music is sung with an African American Vernacular English influenced American accent, and opera is sung in a weird combination of a British and Italian accent. Phantom of the Opera is a musical (which would usually mean it's sung in a pop or Broadway style), but it's influenced by opera and it's about opera, so the singers might use more of an opera pronunciation than a pop pronunciation, or something in between. Even though Sarah Brightman is English, she is a bit of a "popera" singer so her soft pronunciation of the "t" in "night" could be because of that pop influence. The Chinese singers might have been singing in a more operatic style; opera singers will typically pronounce consonants very strongly.
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Re: English Questions

Postby Dragon27 » Sat Dec 04, 2021 8:39 am

1) There are basically two levels in pronunciation that you have to consider - phonemic and phonetic. Flap T (in 'rebuttal') and unreleased stops are phonetic phenomena in English, and since dictionaries usually write down only phonemic representation of words they may omit specifying these kinds of narrow phonetic details. Although some dictionaries do add some choice phonetic details here and there.
2) Flapping is typically considered a feature of American pronunciation, but it's fairly widespread in British dialects too (though usually not considered neutral). In addition to that Americans pronounce the flap sound not only for T, but D as well. Unreleased stops aren't confined to American English either, but the exact distribution of phonetic realizations of T as unreleased stop, glottal stop or pre-glottalized T may differ in these two varieties. There's also American propensity to fuse T into the preceding N, when the conditions for flap T are met, like in 'winter' pronounced similar to 'winner'. Needless to say, that in slowed down or consciously accurate speech more sounds could be enunciated in a clearer way.
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Re: English Questions

Postby allf100 » Sat Dec 04, 2021 10:37 pm

Hi Deinonysus and Dragon27, thank you very much for your kind help.

I can distinguish 'can't' from 'can' as Deinonysus said and someone else demonstrated in the video pronunciation teaching.

'winner' and 'winter' will be still a challenge for me to pronounce them well in AmE. I will pay more attention to the American pronunciations of the words if I hear them.

Thank you so much, everybody. Have a great day!
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Re: English Questions

Postby allf100 » Mon Dec 20, 2021 3:32 am

Hello again,

Beijing's homegrown vaccines are less effective. Yet even with the new challenge of Omicron, it's not clear if officials will ever sign off on Western jabs

Source: CNN

The Online Cambridge Dictionary indicates that 'jab' is BrE, and 'shot' is AmE. The news snippet I quoted above is from CNN which is an American media outlet.

I'd like to know if the dictionary's info about the usage is accurate. Can I replace 'jabs' with 'shots' in this context? (Of course, I speculate that the journalist who wrote the report might be British or prefer British English.)

Thank you!

PS:
jab
UK informal
(US informal shot)
an injection :

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/jab
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Re: English Questions

Postby Amandine » Mon Dec 20, 2021 4:25 am

I'll let a Brit speak to usage there, but in Australia it would be normal to use both interchangeably but I feel like I hear/read "jab" far more often than "shot" even in more formal contexts like newspapers. "I'm double jabbed'', ''Are you double jabbed?" are very common to hear. I remember thinking that before Covid "shot'' would have been more common. I think would have said I got my shots as a child, not my jabs although more recently "No jab, no play" entered the public consciousness as the slogan of the mandatory childhood vaccination policy. This article in Guardian about its origins notes its "chummy and infantilising" quality of the word and I really think there is something to the idea that we have adopted it on en masse during Covid as a way to deflect from the seriousness of everything and maybe the usage has also increased in American English for the same reason.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/ ... tions-jabs
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Re: English Questions

Postby DaveAgain » Mon Dec 20, 2021 9:06 am

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Re: English Questions

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Mon Dec 20, 2021 5:59 pm

The word jab in this context comes new along with the corona virus to me, an American. I use the word shot, and I see or hear the word jab only in news reports, chiefly concerning other countries.
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