Oakenshield unflappable

For previous discussion of this theme, regarding how much I love the way Mr. Armitage says the word “little,” go here. Re-reading that, I want to mention that I did find an example of him using the glottal stop for the “t” consonant, but a careful listen reveals that even then, he still doesn’t velarize the final “l.” He says “little” around 0:25.

Anyway, the thing I wanted to talk about again briefly was the squee I experience when I hear Richard Armitage say particular words. In this case, the word is “fighting,” as at about 0:21, when Thorin asks Bilbo, “Done much fighting?” and the way he pronounces the “t” (voiceless alveolar stop) in that word.

This is another instance where Mr. Armitage (unsurprisingly — I’m not saying he should) does not engage in the kind of intervocalic alveolar flapping, or synchronic lenition (“weakening”) of the “t” that would be typical in much of the United States. In the previous example, he was confronting the pronunciation of the geminate (double consonant) “t.” Here, the question is the pronunciation of the voiceless alveolar stop or “t” when it is not in Auslaut (coda), as when it occurs before the suffix “ing.”  Many U.S. speakers here would exchange the “t” for an alveolar flap; this lenition is said by linguistic specialists to increase the sonority of the consonant. Mr. Armitage emphatically does not do that — we still hear the plosive quality of the stop as it would be heard in Auslaut (at the end of the syllable). There are also implications here for the related form of the preceding vowel (a long “i”) — it can’t move toward a diphthong as fully as it would in the mouths of many U.S. speakers.

All of which is to say — love how he says that word. Or more prosaically — thank you, Richard Armitage, for having a British accent. Sigh ….

~ by Servetus on November 4, 2012.