Every character has a story #13: U+0241 and U+0294 (upper and lower case glottal stops)

re: Every character has a story #13: U+0241 and U+0294 (upper and lower case glottal stops)

Daniel Garlans — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 16:09:52 GMT

Is a glottal stop the "click" that you see in certain African languages, or is it that one where you sorta swallow in the middle of the word?

re: Every character has a story #13: U+0241 and U+0294 (upper and lower case glottal stops)

Michael S. Kaplan — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 17:33:03 GMT

Someone just pointed out an "example" in English (where glottal stops are not phonemic) -- if you say "uh oh" then between the two syllables is one (and if it is at the beginning of the sentence then before the word is one, too).

But I have trouble conceiving of a case pair of them!

re: Every character has a story #13: U+0241 and U+0294 (upper and lower case glottal stops)

Stuart Ballard — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 19:00:01 GMT

Now I want to see the Spotted Vegetarian Turtle Stop image! ;)

As far as the case pair is concerned, presumably if you're saying "Uh oh" at the beginning of a sentence you'd want to write it (for the sake of argument, since I have no "glottal stop" key on my keyboard, I'm pretending it's a G instead) as "Guh goh". An uppercase glottal stop for the one at the beginning of the sentence, and a lowercase one for the one that isn't.

Does that make sense or am I just demonstrating my ignorance?

re: Every character has a story... glottal stops

Ben Bryant — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 19:39:07 GMT

Is that the same as Hawaii (the dash in Hawa-ee)?

re: Every character has a story #13: U+0241 and U+0294 (upper and lower case glottal stops)

Ben Bryant — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 19:58:17 GMT

There is a dialect (dialect is probably too strong a word) in parts (or a stratus?) of the U.S., in which people do not use "an" in front of a noun beginning with a vowel, but instead of the n they use a glottal stop. E.g. "a airplane."

re: Every character has a story #13: U+0241 and U+0294 (upper and lower case glottal stops)

silverpie — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 20:44:47 GMT

And as if that weren't confusing enough, Hawaiian uses the opening-single-quote-like U+02BB (or the same-glyphed and better-supported U+2108) as its glottal stop (presumably to distinguish it from the apostrophe--the two can appear together if a word with a stop is put in English possessive form). As for casing, it's ignored, and if it begins a word, the second letter is capitalized to get titlecase.

re: Every character has a story #13: U+0241 and U+0294 (upper and lower case glottal stops)

Elsebeth — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 22:31:59 GMT

Hmm, interesting with the reference to Europeans. Danish actually uses glottal stops, we just don't use them in our written language. A little trick to make it more difficult for foreigners to learn the language, I guess. We have quite a few word pairs where the only difference in spoken language is the glottal stop ("beans" vs. "peasants", for instance).

re: Every character has a story #13: U+0241 and U+0294 (upper and lower case glottal stops)

Michael S. Kaplan — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 10:41:56 GMT

Stuart, you are not showing ignorance -- you are recognizing that something is going on here, and trying to identify it! :-)

re: Every character has a story #13: U+0241 and U+0294 (upper and lower case glottal stops)

Jim Hughes — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 18:54:06 GMT

A glottal stop is a common nuance in spoken English in the South East of England, being frequently used in the <a href="http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/estuary/home.htm">Estuary English</a> and Cockney dialects.

Amusingly the word glottal would contain a glottal stop in these dialects, as in Glo'all.

re: Every character has a story #13: U+0241 and U+0294 (upper and lower case glottal stops)

alanjmcf — Fri, 19 Aug 2005 18:05:22 GMT

And coincidentally hear a programme broadcast this week discussing it at, http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/word4word.shtml, "Programme Three: London and the World?", "[...] look at the features of Estuary that have found a place here - TH-fronting, glottal stops and such lexical items as the near national standard terms 'knackered', [...]"

re: Every character has a story #13: U+0241 and U+0294 (upper and lower case glottal stops)

Stuart Ballard — Fri, 19 Aug 2005 18:08:17 GMT

Still looking for the Spotted Vegetarian Turtle Stop image... Google only finds this post, though...

Jim, good point - I'm originally *from* the SE of England and it never occurred to me :)

re: Every character has a story #13: U+0241 and U+0294 (upper and lower case glottal stops)

Michael S. Kaplan — Fri, 19 Aug 2005 20:20:17 GMT

Hi Stuart -- we'll see. :-)

Newer, stronger, more case pair stability! The world's first 5.1 million dollar character encoding standard!

Sorting it all Out — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 18:06:41 GMT

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