It's just strange to me because "t" is pronounced with the front teeth, while the glottalized "t" is produced with the back of the throat; that seems like quite a noticeable journey that couldn't have happened all at once. If I'm correct, do linguists have any clue what intermediate steps would have been taken, and can someone demonstrate a couple of those pronunciations with English words?
Learn English – How to proceed from pronouncing “t” in the regular way to t-glottalization, as found in various English accents
british-englishlinguisticsphonology
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Learn English – Is the history of h-dropping in English in any way related to the silent h of French
The question of H-dropping in English is a frequently revisited one and the succession of theories put forward could be a topic in its own right.
Without going too far back in time one of the most authoritative sources on the subject is James Milroy who, in a paper titled "On the sociolinguistic history of /h/-dropping in English", published in 1983 proposes an extensive sociolinguistic theory of the phenomenon in the context of Middle English. He is regularly cited by later articles and has penned the dialectology contribution in the volume of the "Cambridge History of the English Language" dedicated to Middle English.
A quick summary of his theory could be that:
- The phenomenon was widespread in 1300, "in the dialects of Eastern England Kent and from Surrey to Lincolnshire".
The tendency was a matter of prestige: "...the regions that were amongst the most important commercially and administratively, and it comes from texts many of which are quite formal in style and learned in content".
It can probably be ascribed to some form of contact with French which were perceived as more prestigious because H-dropping "does not seem a 'natural' change in Germanic... even if there were sporadic tendencies in /h/-loss in OE, the French-English contact situation was the single most important influence on its rapid progress in Middle English".
The story does not stop there because later authors have made a number of objections.
Although H-dropping was well advanced in Medieval Latin (it is today complete in Italian1) the picture was a different one in Medieval French at the time when MFr and ME were in contact.
As in England where different regions showed different situations, the /h/-loss was more pronounced in the South of France (that's where the Latin influence was stronger as well as the largest part of the Plantagenet continental dominion) and in Paris but other parts of France, including Normandy were generally retaining the "h".
The later re-insertion of the 'h' in French that occurred under the influence of Latin affected spelling only, not pronunciation, hence the vestigial 'h-muet' - the 'h-aspiré' being actually a hiatus (glottal stop) preventing the 'liaison'. For instance,
le homard(from German) has a glottal stop butl'homme- note the elision - (from Latin) doesn't.Some /h/ of Greek origin retain the glottal stop such as
le héros. So did words of Germanic originla harpe,le harengor non-Indo-European languagesle harem,le hamac,les haricots2.So the Anglo Norman influence should in theory have spared the /h/ in Germanic words.
Finally, some Swedish and Germanic dialects have undergone some h-loss.
So it seems that French was just a proxy for a phenomenon that in reality had its roots in Late Latin and that in addition English had an endemic tendency for h-loss of its own. This is confirmed by the more general theory of lenition, a general phenomenon of the natural evolution of languages, of which the /h/-loss is actually only the final stage.
All in all the situation is quite different today. As it happens in Present Day English pronouncing the aitches is much well regarded than dropping them - H dropping now being a mark of London Cockney or Estuary English dialects.
Note 1: complete in Italian... except for a few spelling exceptions (like hanno vs anno).
Note 2: here is a short list of French words requiring the h-aspiré. Most of them are not from Latin or Greek origin.
Wikipedia has the following pie chart showing the word origins:
It shows the breakdown as
- Latin (including words used only in scientific / medical / legal contexts) ≈ 29%
- French ≈ 29%
- Germanic ≈ 26%
- Greek ≈ 6%
- Others ≈ 10%
It cites some references which back up these numbers but I don't have access to those.
To answer your question, it does not appear to be true that 50% of words are Germanic. However, that probably depends on what your context is. If you exclude scientific, medical, and legal, you will probably find a much lower incidence of Latin words. Given that English is itself a Germanic language, it's more surprising that Germanic doesn't account for MORE of the vocabulary.
Best Answer
Short answer: The transition from /t/ to glottal stop does not require intermediate steps.
Explanation:
There are three main factors involved in the production of a consonant: place of articulation, manner of articulation, and voicing. The glottalization of /t/ is essentially a loss of place.
/t/ is a voiceless alveolar stop. These three words in the name represent the three main factors. Voiceless means there is no voiced 'hum' (as in /d/). Alveolar means that the sound is produced on the alveolar ridge (the place). Stop (also called plosive) means that the sound is made by a full closure of the oral cavity followed by a burst of air.
/ʔ/ is the (voiceless) glottal stop. As you can see by the name, 2 out of the 3 parts of articulating the sound are the same as /t/. Glottal sounds are produced in the glottis itself.
When a consonant that is normally (or formally) articulated in one part of the mouth is articulated instead in the glottis, this is a form of lenition known as debuccalization. As you can see, lenition and debuccalization are phenomena that occur independently in a vast number of languages. It is essentially a "weakening" of a consonant.
Since this is simply the loss of one feature, there are no intermediate steps — except that, in cases of a total and permanent loss of place in some context within a language, there is usually (if not always) a period where there is free variation between the lenited form and the full form, until eventually the full form becomes so rare it falls out of use.
In American English, we currently have free variation in the way we pronounce /t/ at the end of many words, like get, hat, astronaut, and so on. In careful pronunciation, a full /t/-sound (closure followed by release) is made. But often the /t/ is articulated but never released, and in many dialects (including my own), the /t/ is realized as [ʔ], the glottal stop. So, I often say [gɛʔ], [hæʔ], [æstrənɔʔ], and so on. This is an example of an intermediate stage of lenition. Perhaps, in a couple hundred years, speakers of my dialect will never pronounce the /t/ in that context.