xkcd #2942: Fluid Speech
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Thank you to linguist Gretchen McCulloch for teaching me about phonetic assimilation, and for teaching me that if you stand around in public reading texts from a linguist and murmuring example phrases to yourself, people will eventually ask if you’re okay.
And in my case, it’d be more like /gna/. And yes I do pronounce the “t” in hot potato.
You pronounce the t in hot and then pronounce the p of potato?
Yeah. If I try going faster, it turns into “ht’ptayto”. Like a hard stop with tongue against the roof of the mouth before the teeth.
Although admittedly, this is self-reporting.
I’m sitting here trying to replicate what that sounds like from your description and I’ve only succeeding in sounding like a madman.
Different accents, then.
I feel like it’s the glottal T. I know for me, personally, my tongue doesn’t touch my teeth, but there is still a T sound. I am not British, though I am from Jersey (New).
My tongue definitely touches the teeth/roof of mouth there. I do swallow the vowels though.