Re: Donkey and monkey

On 30 Dec 2006 18:48:04 -0800, <benlizro@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote
in
<news:1167533284.123258.324000@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
in sci.lang:

[...]

It reminds me of the fact I think I mentioned here a few years ago,
that I have geminate /t/ in "thirteen" and "fourteen". I doubt if the
two cases are related, except insofar as they show how phonemic
differences in the shape of common words can persist for years
unnoticed.

Of course geminates are common in English when two of the same
consonant come together at a morpheme boundary, as in "hot-tub" or
"sackcloth". But I don't see any such explanation for these cases. I
don't even have my pronouncing dictionaries here at the moment, so I
don't know whether these pronunciations are recognized variants.
Anybody know?

M-W OnLine recognizes the possibility, giving these
pronunciations for 'thirteen':

"th&r(t)-'tEn, 'th&r(t)-

That's /,T@r(t)'tin/, /'T@r(t)tin/. AHD4 gives only the
equivalent of /T@r'tin/. The OED (1989) gives [T3:'ti:n],
['T3:ti:n].

I'm pretty sure that I usually have [?tt] in 'thirteen',
occasionally reduced to [?t]. In 'fourteen' I seem to have
both [O?tt] and [O:t], but I've no idea what the proportions
are. At least some of the time I have [?kst] in 'sixteen'.
In 'eighteen' I seem as a rule to have distinctly less
glottal closure than in 'thirteen'.

Brian
.