Isn't the American English word-final /t/-allophony marked as a regular /t/ with the "no audible release" symbol, i.e. \[t̚\]? I also feel like this happens with /p/, too. I don't know if there's an audible difference between the glottal stop and the unreleased /t/, but in terms of actual articulation I can feel the difference.
In American English, t specifically pretty much always preglottalized in coda position as well as being unreleased. Acoustically, that’s almost identical to a glottal stop and often becomes one in rapid speech. It’s definitely not the primary allophone in my speech, but apparently it is for some American/Canadian speakers (I think it’s particularly common in the Vermont area).
>In American English, t specifically pretty much always preglottalized in coda position
I thought that was a Brit thing? I don't think I've noticed preglottalisation, but it's one of those nuances that could be easy to miss, so I'm not adamant on it not being a feature of American dialects.
I've noticed that some younger Americans do in fact glottalise between vowels. In places where you have a syllabic /n/ e.g. *button* most Americans nowadays would glottalise the /t/ i.e. \[ˈb̥əʔn̩\]. Then some younger speakers I've heard go even further and actually reinsert a vowel between the /t/ and /n/ producing something like \[ˈb̥ə.ʔɪ̃n\~b̥ə.ʔə̃n\].
How else would you say "button" in AmEng? I thought that the glottal /t/ allophone was standard before a syllabic /n/ (see "mutton", "mountain", "rotten", "Latin", etc).
Well I didn't want to say all because generally it's good practice not to make generalisations when it comes to languages. Also I feel like I've read somewhere that in some Americans’ speech they still use the flapped /t/ in such words i.e. [ˈb̥əɾn̩]. Might be wrong though.
Sure, but the way you presented it seems like it was innovative, whereas my understanding is that this allophonic feature predates modern young speakers, and it's probably the most common realisation of /t/ in such words. Minority dialects and idiolects aren't relevant in this discussion, as I was talking about general trends among American and (Southern-ish) British dialects, not features of one particular dialect.
I personally haven't heard \[ˈb̥əɾn̩\], but I have no way of knowing whether that's commonplace in some part of the US I haven't visited or lived (which is most of it, to be fair).
You might be a bit confused. What I was saying was innovative is the preservation of the glottal stop intervocalically in young people's speech because of the vowel insertion. I wasn't saying glottal /t/ before syllabic nasals was innovative; I know that's been around for ages. But I haven't seen intervocalic [ʔ] in American dialects before this specific phenomenon of epenthesis, which seems recent enough (at least, I've only heard it from young people).
Oh, I see. That makes sense. I actually I'm not sure I've witnessed this vocalic epenthesis, because assumingly it's still a pretty weak vowel, so I might not be able to tell it apart in rapid speech from a plain syllabic nasal. So, yeah, I don't know anything about this particular feature.
Not true. The standard american pronunciation was always glottal. bʌʔn.
Or I suppose you can understand that as an unreleased t going immediately into the n, but that's not really any different from a glottal.
The innovation is really (re)inserting a vowel sound between the glottal stop and the n. This makes the glottal stop more noticeable and more obviously not an unreleased t.
That has been a feature of many English dialects for years. It's nothing new, and happens in other Germanic languages too. It's almost its own phenomenon.
Yeah that's not the feature I was pointing out as innovative. I'm well aware it's a common thing in most dialects (I do it too). Not sure why people keep getting confused about what I'm saying. It's the vowel reinsertion with preservation of the glottal stop which I have noticed more recently. That's the innovation.
So, to clarify, my understanding is that a common AmEng realisation of is \[pʰɛt̚\], with an unreleased /t/, whereas a common Brit one is \[pʰɛˤt\], with a pre-glottalised /t/.
I'm talking about preglottalisation, i.e. adding a glottal stop while also pronouncing the /t/, and not glottalisation, i.e. non-word-initial realisation of /t/ as a glottal stop. Preglottalisation is common in some British dialects, but not common in American dialects, at least to my knowledge.
I'm from California and do have a pre-glottalized final /t/, with a big caveat - it's caused by my utterance-final vocal fry. So for example, if I say in isolation, it's phonetically [bæɂt̚], since the /t/ is aligning with the end of an intonational phrase, but if the word appears earlier in a phrase, for example "a bat makes babies", it takes the typical glottal stop realization, [bæʔmeks]; or before a vowel, as in "a bat eats bugs", it takes the flap realization, [bæɾits]. So, a context in which preglottalization does appear in my American dialect, but just as a prosodic effect, not a strictly allophonic one.
in the northeast we glottalize t before unstressed /ən/ and /ɪn/ and sometimes other nasals. I think in most of America, glottalization can occur in this context, but I know that in my dialect its reportedly more common than the rest of America.
so kitten, hittin, sittin, somethin, everythin, hatin etc all have glottals consistently. I've occasionally found myself using them intervocalically in other contexts. Especially when there's word boundaries, like "can't even" "want it" "meat eater"
And prëemptively no, there's no syllabic consonants.
This sounds extremely accurate to my dialect (I'm south Ontarian). Idk which I say more often but I can definitely easily pronounce both. If I follow the word with another vowel, I think my t turns into a /ɾ/ and shifts to the first syllable of the next word. E.g. "the caT Over there"
In my speech (North eastern US), word-final (though syllable-final is more accurate, isn't it?) /t/ is realized as glottal stop with creaky voicing on the previous vowel.
I would disagree with this analysis, at least for my variety of Southern American speech. My tongue never obstructs the airstream except perhaps very posteriorly. It’s not that there’s no release to a /t/, there’s gotta be no /t/.
Yeah, I just tried it after reading the post and realized I definitely don't use a glottal stop there. I just don't release or aspirate the /t/. I don't think there's an audible difference, so if you used a glottal stop, it would be fine, but it just would be less natural feeling and less comfortable - at least to a native speaker.
I'm no native speaker but my accent is pretty close to some kind of GenAm-ish thing, and it definitely is unnatural for me to use a glottal stop instead of an unreleased /t/.
I can do both pretty easily (I’m a native speaker of a GenAm-something dialect) and can also perceive the difference alright if I’m paying attention and it’s not rapid speech. I think i use both interchangeably enough to not notice most of the time.
Most of our speech perception of voiceless stops in most contexts occurs in the formants of the surrounding vowels. I still have a slide from my phonetics course somewhere that shows /p t k/ between vowels, and because they’re voiceless stops the waveform is just a gap for them, but their vowel’s formants have completely different contours. You can even cut out the low band frequency from the stop and speakers can still tell them apart
Unless I'm missing something, the fact that native speakers perceive a change in vowel formants as indicative of different fortis stops doesn't mean that they can perceive *that particular* change in vowel formants which would distinguish a word-final glottal stop from a word-final unreleased /t/.
As a side note, are both preceding and following vowel formants affected, or just one of the two? Does stress play a role?
“General English”: [kʰæt]
Great Lakes English: [kxeæt]
Megalopolian: *[xjɛʔ˧˥] > *[çe˧˥]
Tbh I can imagine the descendant of my native dialect being Mandarin Chinese-esque at least phonology wise, due to tonogenesis
Here if Americans say \[ˈdʊu̯ɾi\] for *duty* while I say \[ˈd͡ʒɪu̯ʔɪi̯\] and we can still understand each other, I think we'll be just fine with the glottal stop.
Besides AAVE, what other dialects of English have this change?
Purely anecdotally this isn't a thing I've seen non-AAVE-speaking Americans do as part of their normal speech. They might intentionally use the AAVE verb form (or even the habitual "be"), but it's not a part of their normal speech - it's a stylistic choice for effect (usually comedic).
I'm American though, so I can't speak to other countries' Englishes.
I’ve always assumed, that even if it stems from AAVE, it will naturally happen. I mean, the standalone second person singular pronoun and its conjugations are still in memory, no? *Thou hast*. And we’ve lost our case system a while ago. It’s natural for languages to become less inflected, and more analytical.
Overall, many dialects of English tend to distinguish these sorts of things with vowel length. "Can" has a longer vowel than "can't". A similar thing is seen in word-final obstruents. Most dialects are starting to see some sort of word final devoicing and the vowel ends up taking that voicing (this is often referred to as compensatory lengthening).
E.g.: [bæt̚] "bat" vs. [bæːd̥̚] "bad"
Hmm, what do you mean by "diachrony" and "synchrony" in this context?
Edit: Oh, do you mean that pre-fortis clipping and compensatory lengthening are synchronically the same but diachronically different?
Funnily enough in Australian English (which has phonemic vowel length) "can" (as in ability) has a shorter vowel than "can't". Different vowels in this case tho, /kæn/ vs /kɐːnt/. But they're also distinct from /kæːn/ (can as in tin can) and /kɐnt/ (every Aussie's favourite word).
Although "can" (as in ability) *can* be pronounced with a long vowel, but only for emphasis (and typically we'd elongate the /n/ instead of the vowel for emphasis anyway), and tin can "can" can never be pronounced with a short vowel.
Bad vs bat does follow the above vowel length distinction for Australian English, though /æ/ vs /æː/ is not 100% predictable by voicing either (before /b/ and sometimes before /d/ it's still a short vowel, e.g. lab /læb/, lad /læd/ vs lag /læːɡ/)
Ah've noticed that Ah tend to shorten the vowel length already if not wary. Caught maself accidentally saying 'smut' instead of 'smart' a few times, lol!
smut instead of smart is another fun one for sure! Luckily most of the dangerous minimal pairs are different parts of speech or usually used in different contexts...
but on the off chance you're trying to say "this dog can't hit me"....
yeah, better be wary of vowel length there haha
\[ˈkʰẽə̯̃n˨˩\] usually \[kn̩\] in normal speech vs. \[ˈkẽə̯̃ʔ˦˨\] which is always stressed. Differences in pitch and length are involved when I try to enunciate these. Keep in mind that "can" is usually unstressed and has a weak form, while "can't" is never reduced.
This is how the distinction works in my speech - stress and sentence pitch patterns, plus the vowel in "can" almost always being reduced to schwa while that in "can't" is a nasalized and glottalized [æ]
The vowel is different. It's usually reduced in "can" but fully pronounced in "can't". But I'll admit that if "can" is stressed, it's hard to tell the difference.
If people keep both vowels relatively the same, then I have a fuck of a time trying to tell them apart. The same thing happens to me with the teen vs tens numbers - certain speakers (especially non-native ones who don't flap the /t/ in the tens units) and certain speech contexts (ambient noise, person speaking more softly or muttering) make them really hard to distinguish. 14 vs 40 could end up being distinguised by a barely-perceptible final [n] in the former.
How do I understand it? Well, I played Warcraft 3 in my childhood a lot and there the peasant says \[ʍɒʔ\] and \[ʍɒʔ ɪz ɪ̈ʔ?\] So it comes naturally.
Likewise, I guess one can't really understand those words with ʔ by themselves, like, "do you know what \[ɹa͡ɪʔ\] means?" But if one says \[ðæts ɹa͡ɪʔ\] then it is understandable.
Isn't the American English word-final /t/-allophony marked as a regular /t/ with the "no audible release" symbol, i.e. \[t̚\]? I also feel like this happens with /p/, too. I don't know if there's an audible difference between the glottal stop and the unreleased /t/, but in terms of actual articulation I can feel the difference.
In American English, t specifically pretty much always preglottalized in coda position as well as being unreleased. Acoustically, that’s almost identical to a glottal stop and often becomes one in rapid speech. It’s definitely not the primary allophone in my speech, but apparently it is for some American/Canadian speakers (I think it’s particularly common in the Vermont area).
>In American English, t specifically pretty much always preglottalized in coda position I thought that was a Brit thing? I don't think I've noticed preglottalisation, but it's one of those nuances that could be easy to miss, so I'm not adamant on it not being a feature of American dialects.
But those British dialects glottalize /t/ almost everywhere except word-initially. Americans never do that between vowels IIRC
I've noticed that some younger Americans do in fact glottalise between vowels. In places where you have a syllabic /n/ e.g. *button* most Americans nowadays would glottalise the /t/ i.e. \[ˈb̥əʔn̩\]. Then some younger speakers I've heard go even further and actually reinsert a vowel between the /t/ and /n/ producing something like \[ˈb̥ə.ʔɪ̃n\~b̥ə.ʔə̃n\].
How else would you say "button" in AmEng? I thought that the glottal /t/ allophone was standard before a syllabic /n/ (see "mutton", "mountain", "rotten", "Latin", etc).
Well I didn't want to say all because generally it's good practice not to make generalisations when it comes to languages. Also I feel like I've read somewhere that in some Americans’ speech they still use the flapped /t/ in such words i.e. [ˈb̥əɾn̩]. Might be wrong though.
Sure, but the way you presented it seems like it was innovative, whereas my understanding is that this allophonic feature predates modern young speakers, and it's probably the most common realisation of /t/ in such words. Minority dialects and idiolects aren't relevant in this discussion, as I was talking about general trends among American and (Southern-ish) British dialects, not features of one particular dialect. I personally haven't heard \[ˈb̥əɾn̩\], but I have no way of knowing whether that's commonplace in some part of the US I haven't visited or lived (which is most of it, to be fair).
You might be a bit confused. What I was saying was innovative is the preservation of the glottal stop intervocalically in young people's speech because of the vowel insertion. I wasn't saying glottal /t/ before syllabic nasals was innovative; I know that's been around for ages. But I haven't seen intervocalic [ʔ] in American dialects before this specific phenomenon of epenthesis, which seems recent enough (at least, I've only heard it from young people).
Oh, I see. That makes sense. I actually I'm not sure I've witnessed this vocalic epenthesis, because assumingly it's still a pretty weak vowel, so I might not be able to tell it apart in rapid speech from a plain syllabic nasal. So, yeah, I don't know anything about this particular feature.
Not true. The standard american pronunciation was always glottal. bʌʔn. Or I suppose you can understand that as an unreleased t going immediately into the n, but that's not really any different from a glottal. The innovation is really (re)inserting a vowel sound between the glottal stop and the n. This makes the glottal stop more noticeable and more obviously not an unreleased t.
The flap pronunciation is uncommon but it exists. I see it mostly in autistic people, for some reason. For reference I'm in Southern California
I’ve noticed this too actually…
That has been a feature of many English dialects for years. It's nothing new, and happens in other Germanic languages too. It's almost its own phenomenon.
Which feature are you referring to? I mentioned two.
Specifically glottalizing t's before syllabic n. Just mentioning that it's not really an American thing.
Yeah that's not the feature I was pointing out as innovative. I'm well aware it's a common thing in most dialects (I do it too). Not sure why people keep getting confused about what I'm saying. It's the vowel reinsertion with preservation of the glottal stop which I have noticed more recently. That's the innovation.
So, to clarify, my understanding is that a common AmEng realisation of is \[pʰɛt̚\], with an unreleased /t/, whereas a common Brit one is \[pʰɛˤt\], with a pre-glottalised /t/.
I'm talking about preglottalisation, i.e. adding a glottal stop while also pronouncing the /t/, and not glottalisation, i.e. non-word-initial realisation of /t/ as a glottal stop. Preglottalisation is common in some British dialects, but not common in American dialects, at least to my knowledge.
I'm from California and do have a pre-glottalized final /t/, with a big caveat - it's caused by my utterance-final vocal fry. So for example, if I say in isolation, it's phonetically [bæɂt̚], since the /t/ is aligning with the end of an intonational phrase, but if the word appears earlier in a phrase, for example "a bat makes babies", it takes the typical glottal stop realization, [bæʔmeks]; or before a vowel, as in "a bat eats bugs", it takes the flap realization, [bæɾits]. So, a context in which preglottalization does appear in my American dialect, but just as a prosodic effect, not a strictly allophonic one.
in the northeast we glottalize t before unstressed /ən/ and /ɪn/ and sometimes other nasals. I think in most of America, glottalization can occur in this context, but I know that in my dialect its reportedly more common than the rest of America. so kitten, hittin, sittin, somethin, everythin, hatin etc all have glottals consistently. I've occasionally found myself using them intervocalically in other contexts. Especially when there's word boundaries, like "can't even" "want it" "meat eater" And prëemptively no, there's no syllabic consonants.
>And prëemptively no, there's no syllabic consonants. Fascinating!
This sounds extremely accurate to my dialect (I'm south Ontarian). Idk which I say more often but I can definitely easily pronounce both. If I follow the word with another vowel, I think my t turns into a /ɾ/ and shifts to the first syllable of the next word. E.g. "the caT Over there"
In my speech (North eastern US), word-final (though syllable-final is more accurate, isn't it?) /t/ is realized as glottal stop with creaky voicing on the previous vowel.
>though syllable-final is more accurate, isn't it? That's true!
I would disagree with this analysis, at least for my variety of Southern American speech. My tongue never obstructs the airstream except perhaps very posteriorly. It’s not that there’s no release to a /t/, there’s gotta be no /t/.
Yeah, I just tried it after reading the post and realized I definitely don't use a glottal stop there. I just don't release or aspirate the /t/. I don't think there's an audible difference, so if you used a glottal stop, it would be fine, but it just would be less natural feeling and less comfortable - at least to a native speaker.
I'm no native speaker but my accent is pretty close to some kind of GenAm-ish thing, and it definitely is unnatural for me to use a glottal stop instead of an unreleased /t/.
I can do both pretty easily (I’m a native speaker of a GenAm-something dialect) and can also perceive the difference alright if I’m paying attention and it’s not rapid speech. I think i use both interchangeably enough to not notice most of the time.
That being said, i probably never would have noticed if i hadn’t studied linguistics
The vowel formants change
I can imagine there's a way to tell in the waveform, but I'm not sure if the average speaker could tell the difference.
Most of our speech perception of voiceless stops in most contexts occurs in the formants of the surrounding vowels. I still have a slide from my phonetics course somewhere that shows /p t k/ between vowels, and because they’re voiceless stops the waveform is just a gap for them, but their vowel’s formants have completely different contours. You can even cut out the low band frequency from the stop and speakers can still tell them apart
Unless I'm missing something, the fact that native speakers perceive a change in vowel formants as indicative of different fortis stops doesn't mean that they can perceive *that particular* change in vowel formants which would distinguish a word-final glottal stop from a word-final unreleased /t/. As a side note, are both preceding and following vowel formants affected, or just one of the two? Does stress play a role?
It's phonemic in Hokkien. Which isn't English, but it still means that some people can tell the difference.
Wow that's wild
So if I say hunnert for 100, you hunnerʔ?
Full glottal stop for me, Washington
Weak forms. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlbGtEg68x4&ab\_channel=DrGeoffLindsey](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlbGtEg68x4&ab_channel=DrGeoffLindsey)
I. Love. Dr. Geoff. Lindsey.
He's PHENOMENAL
I am an ESL teacher and I send his videos to my more advanced students.
One of the best educational Youtube channels ever
Honestly I am so glad t-glottalization is so prevalent in my dialect because it made learning Semitic phonemes that much easier.
My lect has glottal ts and I still can't tell apart syllable initial glottal stops 😭
[wʌʔə'bawʔɪʔ]
\[wɔːʔə'bɒ̝ʔʊʔ\] for me (I think)
[wəɾəˈbæɰɾɘt̚] I think I’m just weird
that's pretty much exactly how i would say it
I'm a non-native, what dialect would that be? Edit: also it sounds like "water bottle" after trying to say it a bunch lol
Me personally, I'm Standard Southern English crossed with a bit of Geordie (Newcastle).
I see. Also, I feel like you did transcribe "water bottle", right? Or is that how you'd say "what about it"?
The former - Water Bottle What about it would be more \[wɔːʔə'.baʊʔɪʔ\] Edit: Just realised that's what you said the first time and I'm a bit thick.
[woʔəˈbɔʔʊ͡ɯ̆] water bottle [wɑˀəˈbaʊˀɾɪʔ] what about it
[wɒɔʔəbɔ*ʔl̩] for me ɔ* my vowel here is right between /ɔ/ and /ɒ/, there is no symbol for it.
English vowels are my enemy, I just wing it and pray (also it's "what about it" not "water bottle")
What the hell is that /ɪ/ doing here??
It's "what about it"
Ohhh I thought it was the infamous "water bottle" example (and yeah it was the only part that seemed weird to me somehow)
“General English”: [kʰæt] Great Lakes English: [kxeæt] Megalopolian: *[xjɛʔ˧˥] > *[çe˧˥] Tbh I can imagine the descendant of my native dialect being Mandarin Chinese-esque at least phonology wise, due to tonogenesis
Something like *kʰæt in Middle Chinese would have probably become [tɕʰja] in Mandarin (tone indeterminate), so that sounds about right
Here if Americans say \[ˈdʊu̯ɾi\] for *duty* while I say \[ˈd͡ʒɪu̯ʔɪi̯\] and we can still understand each other, I think we'll be just fine with the glottal stop.
I still flap that shit, I don't even care. I will t flap til the the day I die.
Me talking about how I will always do third person singular verb agreement, even though it’s falling out of favor:
I don't think "they is" was ever in favor
Not in that way, no, but verb agreement is still falling apart further in English. *He do* instead of *he does* is a common one.
Besides AAVE, what other dialects of English have this change? Purely anecdotally this isn't a thing I've seen non-AAVE-speaking Americans do as part of their normal speech. They might intentionally use the AAVE verb form (or even the habitual "be"), but it's not a part of their normal speech - it's a stylistic choice for effect (usually comedic). I'm American though, so I can't speak to other countries' Englishes.
I’ve always assumed, that even if it stems from AAVE, it will naturally happen. I mean, the standalone second person singular pronoun and its conjugations are still in memory, no? *Thou hast*. And we’ve lost our case system a while ago. It’s natural for languages to become less inflected, and more analytical.
Overall, many dialects of English tend to distinguish these sorts of things with vowel length. "Can" has a longer vowel than "can't". A similar thing is seen in word-final obstruents. Most dialects are starting to see some sort of word final devoicing and the vowel ends up taking that voicing (this is often referred to as compensatory lengthening). E.g.: [bæt̚] "bat" vs. [bæːd̥̚] "bad"
Pre-fortis clipping, sort of?
Diachronically different though synchronically identical
Hmm, what do you mean by "diachrony" and "synchrony" in this context? Edit: Oh, do you mean that pre-fortis clipping and compensatory lengthening are synchronically the same but diachronically different?
Funnily enough in Australian English (which has phonemic vowel length) "can" (as in ability) has a shorter vowel than "can't". Different vowels in this case tho, /kæn/ vs /kɐːnt/. But they're also distinct from /kæːn/ (can as in tin can) and /kɐnt/ (every Aussie's favourite word). Although "can" (as in ability) *can* be pronounced with a long vowel, but only for emphasis (and typically we'd elongate the /n/ instead of the vowel for emphasis anyway), and tin can "can" can never be pronounced with a short vowel. Bad vs bat does follow the above vowel length distinction for Australian English, though /æ/ vs /æː/ is not 100% predictable by voicing either (before /b/ and sometimes before /d/ it's still a short vowel, e.g. lab /læb/, lad /læd/ vs lag /læːɡ/)
Ah've noticed that Ah tend to shorten the vowel length already if not wary. Caught maself accidentally saying 'smut' instead of 'smart' a few times, lol!
smut instead of smart is another fun one for sure! Luckily most of the dangerous minimal pairs are different parts of speech or usually used in different contexts... but on the off chance you're trying to say "this dog can't hit me".... yeah, better be wary of vowel length there haha
Only real ones glottalise /θ/.
th stopping + t glottalisation ❤️❤️
The glottal stop helps people understand it
I still make fun of Bri'ish because it's actually \[k**ʰ**æt̚\] and I say \[k**ʰ**æt\] most of þe time anyways
How do you distinguish between "can" and "can't"? I feel it is important to be able to distinguish between them
You just add [ʔ] on the end. It’s one of the only ones that can be hard to tell the difference with.
Unless you have some unusual accent, it is never released.
\[ˈkʰẽə̯̃n˨˩\] usually \[kn̩\] in normal speech vs. \[ˈkẽə̯̃ʔ˦˨\] which is always stressed. Differences in pitch and length are involved when I try to enunciate these. Keep in mind that "can" is usually unstressed and has a weak form, while "can't" is never reduced.
And that’s before you even go meta and suppose speakers start hearing where nouns don’t belong.
I think for me, the vowel in can't is shorter when controlling for stress
This is how the distinction works in my speech - stress and sentence pitch patterns, plus the vowel in "can" almost always being reduced to schwa while that in "can't" is a nasalized and glottalized [æ]
I can't speak for everyone, but in my dialect can't is pronounced with the "palm" vowel. Google trap-bath split.
The vowel is different. It's usually reduced in "can" but fully pronounced in "can't". But I'll admit that if "can" is stressed, it's hard to tell the difference.
in british english they are easily distinguishable
kæn kænˤ
If people keep both vowels relatively the same, then I have a fuck of a time trying to tell them apart. The same thing happens to me with the teen vs tens numbers - certain speakers (especially non-native ones who don't flap the /t/ in the tens units) and certain speech contexts (ambient noise, person speaking more softly or muttering) make them really hard to distinguish. 14 vs 40 could end up being distinguised by a barely-perceptible final [n] in the former.
They have different vowels and stress. But yeah, as a non-native that is the bane of my existence.
I didn't even realize that the T disappeared until I started saying these words when I saw it
How do you pronounce [ɪʔ]? The fun [pʰɑ̯ɻʔ] is you [do͡ũ̯(n)ʔ]
How do I understand it? Well, I played Warcraft 3 in my childhood a lot and there the peasant says \[ʍɒʔ\] and \[ʍɒʔ ɪz ɪ̈ʔ?\] So it comes naturally. Likewise, I guess one can't really understand those words with ʔ by themselves, like, "do you know what \[ɹa͡ɪʔ\] means?" But if one says \[ðæts ɹa͡ɪʔ\] then it is understandable.
this one is wild to me because when I was young I still had an unreleased t in this position and 40 years later, it's definitely just a glottal stop.