P’s cause the biggest problem because your lips are so close to the microphone, but there’s also a third phoneme that has an aspirated allophone: the /k/ sound. It takes work to keep those aspirated P pops out of the audio. In audio recordings, that burst of air creates what’s called a “pop.” I use a physical, metal pop filter in front of my microphone to soften the pops, and my audio engineer (Hey, Nathan!) runs filters that get rid of them even more so you don’t have to hear them. Then, when you open your mouth, the air escapes with a slight puff before the vowel sound starts. In the episode where I talked about aspirated /t/, I also talked about aspirated /p/, in words like “purse.” To make the /p/ sound, you put your lips together, and let the air pressure build up behind them for a moment. Let’s start with some allophones of /t/ that are part of a larger pattern. Even so, some have quite a bit more than others, and /t/ has the most of all. Just about every phoneme has more than one allophone. So aspirated /t/, the glottal stop, the alveolar flap, and the CH sound are all allophones of the phoneme /t/.ĭepending on how you count them, English has about 40 total phonemes. It comes from the Greek words for “other” and “sound,” and refers to the specific ways of pronouncing a phoneme. When we refer to “the T sound” and don’t care which particular pronunciation we’re talking about, then we’re talking about the phoneme /t/. Exactly how many ways of pronouncing T are there, anyway? Today, we’re going to take a T inventory and find out.Īt this point, it’s worth introducing two technical terms so that we can talk about T’s with greater ease. So that makes four ways of pronouncing the T sound: aspirated T, glottal stop, alveolar flap, and the CH sound. Here’s what I said then: “‘Let’s look at words that start with just TR, like ‘truck,’ ‘trap,’ and ‘transmogrify.’ If you listen carefully, you can hear that for many speakers, the T is actually pronounced more like a CH sound.” Going even further back into the archives, another episode from 2016 talked about yet another way of pronouncing the T sound. It’s also what allows the saying “Work smarter, not harder” to rhyme, even though “smarter” is spelled with a T and “harder” is spelled with a D. The confusing thing about the alveolar flap is that it’s also one of the ways American English speakers can pronounce the D sound, so that “atom” the thing that a physicist might study, and “Adam” the masculine name, sound the same. That’s the pronunciation in most varieties of American English in words such as “atom.” The word “alveolar” refers to the alveolar ridge, which is the bony bump in the gums behind your front teeth. If you’re a longtime listener, you might also remember an episode from 2016 when I talked about another way of pronouncing T, called the alveolar flap. If you listened to that episode, you might remember that a glottal stop is also the sound we make to separate the syllables in the word “uh-oh.” I compared this sound with “aspirated T,” which you get in words like “toy.” After you touch your tongue to the roof of your mouth just behind your front teeth, and then let it down, you get a little puff of air before the vowel sound comes in. A few episodes ago, I talked about why the T sound sometimes seems to be missing from words like “kitten” or “button.” The answer was that in those words, many speakers use a sound known as a glottal stop.
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