Hearing glottal stops at beginning of an utterance

January 19, 2015 5:46 PM

Is it possible to hear a glottal stop at the beginning of an utterance?

I am a native English speaker and have Bar-Mitzvah–level proficiency in Hebrew (that is, very little). In Hebrew school, I was taught that א and ע are "silent". Now I can see that other sources refer to them instead as glottal stops, and in some Romanization systems they're specifically marked with an apostrophe. I can only distinguish the presence and absence of a glottal stop in the middle of a utterance. And I can only do it easily in the middle of a word.

Is it actually possible to hear a glottal stop at the beginning of an utterance? Is this just something I can't do because it's not a part of English or is it actually impossible? What does it sound like?

posted by grouse to Society & Culture (12 answers total)

Best answer: And I can only do it easily in the middle of a word.

Are you sure? Linguist here, and most native English speakers will say a word like "apple" with an initial glottal stop, and not a vowel; see this blog post. If you want to hear it, say the phrase "Uh-oh" really slowly: odds are, both of them will start with a glottal stop (I'm sitting here trying it, and I can't do it without one).

And, if you really want to go down the rabbit hole with het and ayin, here's a recent dissertation on Yemenite Israeli Hebrew.
posted by damayanti at 6:04 PM on January 19, 2015 [5 favorites]

Best answer: Yes it's possible if you aren't an English speaker :) There are languages where a word that is otherwise the same means one thing if it starts with a glottal stop and a different thing if it doesn't.

In English, we pretty much always start words that begin with vowels with a preceding glottal stop if they are at the start of an utterance, so a word that starts with a glottal stop may sound slightly more "Englishy" to you if you can hear the difference at all.

Otherwise the difference is that a glottal stop sounds kind of like a more abrupt start to the word than without an initial glottal stop.

You can train yourself to hear it. I can hear it maybe 80% of the time when I am concentrating.

(Native English speaker, professional linguist.)
posted by lollusc at 6:04 PM on January 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Damayanti, I think the point is that BECAUSE English words with vowel initial tend to get a glottal stop, English speakers won't hear that, or its absence. Rather they will just hear it as a "normal" vowel. They are treating glottal + vowel as the allophone of that vowel that surfaces when word initial.

The OP isn't saying they can't produce it, but that they can't hear it, which makes perfect sense if it's just an allophone.
posted by lollusc at 6:06 PM on January 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

Oops, yes, sorry, misread that!

Is it actually possible to hear a glottal stop at the beginning of an utterance? Is this just something I can't do because it's not a part of English or is it actually impossible? What does it sound like?


The blogpost I linked to will clarify what lollusc means by "allophone": basically, English doesn't have a contrast between word initial glottal stop + vowel and just word initial vowel like, say, Hawaiian does. Hawaiian speakers are really good at hearing these sounds because they need to. But because you don't need to hear the difference between the two, you don't: distinguishing sounds is like a muscle. If you don't use it, you lose it. Just keep listening for it, and you might eventually be able to pick it out.

But be careful, because if you listen to closely to glottal stops, everyone might start sounding like a Cockney person.
posted by damayanti at 6:13 PM on January 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: This is all very interesting. Is there anywhere I could get recordings where I could hear, say, "apple" pronounced with and without a glottal stop at the beginning?
posted by grouse at 6:36 PM on January 19, 2015

I can't think of any, but you can produce it yourself. If you say smoothly "the apple" (with the pronunciation of "the" that rhymes with "knee", not the one that rhymes with "huh") vs "apple", you will most likely pronounce the first one without an initial glottal stop on "apple" and the second one with one. I know the first one isn't utterance-initial, but it might still help you.

Also, you might have more luck finding resources in other languages. E.g. Hawaiian as Damayanti suggested is a good one. If you google around, you might find example audio of the contrast between Hawaiian "minimal pairs" with initial glottal and without. (A minimal pair is two words that differ only in one sound.)
posted by lollusc at 6:41 PM on January 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Here: I just recorded "apple" with and without glottal stop. (Warning: autoplaying sound.) It's difficult for me to hear the difference, but I know how to form the sound with and without the stop. My undergrad linguistics training (and all that time I spent pronouncing individual phonemes in phonetics class) is paying off!
posted by ocherdraco at 6:45 PM on January 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

Best answer: I think it's actually easier to hear the difference with just one syllable. Here's "ah" with a glottal stop before it followed by "ah" with no glottal stop. (Autoplaying sound again.) I repeat the pair once.
posted by ocherdraco at 6:51 PM on January 19, 2015 [4 favorites]

ocherdraco's second upload ('uh uh 'uh uh) is a good example. In the first, both instances of 'apple have a glottal stop at the beginning. Source: for one semester, I was an articulatory phonetics lab instructor in a class that used Smalley and led people through chapter 7, among others. The second link will take you to dozens of recorded examples.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 7:05 PM on January 19, 2015

Hey ocherdraco, I can hear the difference and feel the coming and going of the stop when I reproduce your ahs. Sort of like the difference between "a nice cream" and "an ice cream, " no?
posted by mono blanco at 7:06 PM on January 19, 2015

When I was a PCV, I spoke a dialect with meaningful glottal stops at the beginnings, middles, and ends of words. It took a few months to accurately hear and pronounce them. I observed that local children took a while to completely master the sound as well.
posted by Sir Rinse at 11:08 PM on January 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

FWIW, I think generating waveforms could help you to confirm what you're hearing or not hearing as you practice this stuff. Either record yourself with Audacity or import other examples (e.g. apple / apple and uh / uh / uh / uh). That'll yield pictures, and you can examine the word-initial vowel onsets for likely indications of what happened, in particular looking for sudden vibrations associated with abrupt releases of airflow from a closed position vs. somewhat more upbuilding vibrations starting from an open position. If you convert to WAV in Audacity, you can use Praat to get spectrograms too, though I suspect only the alternative waveform browser would be useful.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 9:05 PM on January 20, 2015 [1 favorite]