Of T's and D's and Glottal Stops

I thought perhaps that the odd person reading this blog might be interested in an email I sent to John McWhorter about his podcast Lexicon Valley.  A few items of information that may be helpful:  A glottal stop is the sound represented by the apostrophe in the more authentic-sounding pronunciation of  "Hawai'i" and the sound between the syllables in "unh-uh," the negative counterpart of "uh-huh."  The capital I represents what we usually call a "short I" like in "bit,"and the capital E represents a "short E" like in "bet."

I'm writing about the "Tee Time" installment of the the podcast.  The examples you played of people saying words ending t-vowel-n seemed to me to be examples of how, in my experience, Americans have always in pronounced those words except when they're teachers giving a spelling test.  In the college linguistics I took a few decades ago, this phonological phenomenon was described as an unreleased t and then a syllabic n with the omission of the intervening vowel made possible by the t and n being made with the same position of the mouth, particularly the tongue, so that the stop t can be seamlessly transformed into the nasal continuant n.  And this explanation satisfied my sense of what I was hearing in other people's speech and what I was doing in my own.  I can see, however, that a glottal stop perhaps does occur as one is arranging one's mouth for the n.  Maybe this is now the received analysis or maybe my professor just didn't apprise us of an alternate interpretation.

Be that as it may, I have a hunch that at least some of the people writing to you asking about where the t went are noting a somewhat different--and possibly more recent--phenomenon.  Beginning at least twelve years ago when I was last at a previous place of employment, I recall the way some of the younger women said words like button or cotton being particularly jarring.  They used for the t  a glottal stop that was made more distinct by the restoration of the vowel before the n, so that cotton sounded like kaq-In.  (I'm using a q for a glottal stop.  I should probably get an IPA font.)  And I remember krq-In for curtain being wholly unintelligible until a little more context clarified what was meant.

While I've continued to hear this -qIn pronunciation more and more often, even more recently I've begun to hear the t pronounced as a d with accompanying changes in the vowel before the n and in the analysis of the syllables in a word so that button sounds like buh-dEn.  And further, the vowel restoration seems to be spreading to words ending d-vowel-n.  On our local public radio station in Toledo, Ohio, a recorded announcement about an event at a botanical garden ran over and over for a week.  One speaker, a young-sounding woman, consistently pronounced garden as gar-dEn.  Another speaker, a possibly older-sounding man, alternated between gardn and gar-dEn.

And speaking of alternating pronunciations, I was listening to Vox's The Weeds podcast last week and one of the commentators pronounced the Russian president's name as puq-In, but all other t-vowel-n words differently, e.g., rotten as ro-dEn.  And maybe sometimes the E collapsed toward a schwa. I wonder whether you think the pronunciation of syllables such as these are changing in two ways at once or whether for some people rotten as roq-In is the old, established way to say it and they're in the process of changing to ro-dEn.