to want to reintroduce the letter T into the English language?

[MrsSchadenfreude]

That's it really. Sick of glottal stops. Was sitting behind a woman on the train the other day, who was going through the alphabet with her daughter (Na'alie, sister Ka'ie) saying "Wha' le''er is tha'?"

But I think I am fighting a losing battle.

I am intelligent. Are you? I'm also not a patronising stuck up cow. Are you bored? Or do you enjoy insulting people on the internet because they don't know who you are? How pathetic!

Arrrgh!!!!

Look, try it yourself now. Say "bovvered". Now say "bothered". No saving of effort at all in the first.

Bovvered - your bottom lip touches your top teeth.*

Bothered - your tongue touches your top teeth.*

Be as 1950s as you like about English pronunciation but pleeeeease don't trot out the tired, old "lazy speech" myth.

*Disclaimer: it's been many years since I studied phonetics and my description of articulation is probably dodgy.

And I was enjoying this thread earlier too.....

no I'm not bored - I'm enjoying myself!!!!

Oh ok so am I actually!

shona - if it isn't laziness then what is it ( apart from a speech impediment for some people) ? what is the actual reason? junglist - why don't you pronounce words corectly? is it a conscious choice or can't you help it?

Altogether now:

The tip of the tongue, the teeth and the lips

Courtesy of Junior Choir c.1982. Now smile gels!

It's just one of the many wonderful differences that makes our great country what it is.

The idea that we should all speak with a bastardised approximation of RP only came with the advent of radio. Before then whole communities lived out their lives in peace and harmony without realising that they were fick.

Just as standardised spelling came in with the printing press.

You're just trying to wind me up now INNIT. Oh and by the way it's spelt CORRECTLY not corectly.

To me it is all about clarity. If someone enunciates words clearly I can understand what they are saying, especially over the telephone.

If you ring a call centre or anywhere and the person on the other end of the phone doesn't pronounce half their consonants you can't understand a word they are saying.

Agree Island. Another pet hate of mine are teachers (you know who you are, Mrs Gray) who can't be bothered to pronounce their consonants, but still expect 5 year olds to understand why you say le'er but write letter.

junglist when you say 'innit' do you mean 'aren't you' ? the two are ever so different you know. Haven't you learned that on your 'degree' course?

I live in yorkshire. We have all your lost letter "t"s. We keep them in t shed.

Like I said, the way people talk has nothing to do with intelligence. What's with degrading the degree? Are you insecure? Seeing as you're judge and jury, try starting your sentences with capital letters. Lets get as petty as we possibly can EH.

YANBU at all,

it drives me bonkers.

do you mean 'let's' - as in 'let us' ?

re: the degree - I shall have to draw my own inference there. It is interesting that you won't answer the question though! ( about why you say 'bovvered' or 'innit' ).

That is how the words come out of my mouth. My mates sound the same. We are chavvy cockneys, albeit intelligent ones.

thanks junglist. That's what I thought you were! nice to agree on something.

Donnie, YANBU.

You are being very very very very unreasonable. Language and accents evolve and change over time...

And anyway... It takes more energy to produce a glottal stop, than a "t", so it's hardly a "lazy" option - but what if it were... Language is all about getting your message out efficiently! How many of you "t" lovers think conciously about how you enunciate every word? I bet you drop "t"s all the time without even noticing it - we all do it, or we'd sound like stilted robots.

I speak as a Speech and Language Therapist.

Doesn't a glottal stop mean there is more risk of the vocal chords constricting? Not if you keep the silent laugh feeling of course but in general?

I can talk in braod dialect if I so wish. But when talking to people over the phone or who may come from a different area or to the public at large I do make an effort to enunciate.

I agree it is a bit of an unwarranted value judgement to say that this particular pronounciation is lazy.

English is quite a lazy language.

For example, take a word like "human" where the "a" is not pronounced but is replaced by neutral vowel sound. This is because (another example of lazy!) it is just easier to say a unstressed syllable followed by an stressed syllable.

I suspect you would really just like her tribe to talk like yours. I think it is borderline OK to encourage your children to talk like you (they will probably have to join the tribe, after all) but yes, unreasonable to expect strangers on a train to follow your rules.

That's different from choosing to leave out a consonant though! Try saying 'Sco ish' and then saying 'Scot tish' - the former is far easier, with the consonants sliding into each other. It's not even a tribe thing - it's a personal thing, with people born and bred in the same area choosing whether to enunciate correctly or not.

We shorten words all the time (gym vs gymnasium, bus vs omnibus etc). Why is it any lazier to leave the t's out than shorten them in other ways?

As for "tribes", I meant that you are much more likely to talk the same way as your friends and family do. It is also known as sociolinguistics. If you studied it, I think you might not be so certain the dialect you speak is the "correct" one and other people are wrong in the way they speak.