--- In phoNet@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski
<piotr.gasiorowski@i...> wrote:

> 15-08-03 12:33, Jean-Paul G. POTET wrote:
>
> > No doubt emphasis plays its part, but, to me, English has the

initial

> > glottal stop whenever there is no liaison.
> > The liaison rule operates for utterances like <an ear>,

constituted of a

> > single iambic foot : [°@ "nI@], but it does not in the case of

<one ear>,

> > <two ears>,
> > In utterances like <one ear>, <two ears>, that are constituted of

two

> > trochaic feet each, isn't the glottal stop compulsory : ["°wAn '°?

I@],

> > ["°thu '°?I@z]?
>
> I don't think so, but then I was explicitly instructed by my RP
> pronunciation teachers to avoid the glottal stop in such cases.

Let's

> hear the opinion of our native English-speakers (the avoidance of

[?]

> may well be a dialectal phenomenon).

I though you distrusted native opinions! The glottal stop may be
present in crisp enunciations, but I would have said the only glottal
stop in 'In one ear and out the other' was at the start of 'ear'. In
counting ears, the glottal stop seems optional, which is why I think
it's a matter of crispness.

If you were training Poles to pass as Englishmen, oversuppressing the
glottal stop would probably be a good idea.

An interesting set of phrases to consider is 'a grey tape', 'a great
ape' and 'a grey ape'. I suspect an Englishman would write,
using '&' for schwa because '@' in the archives is mangled to hide e-
mail addresses, [&greI?eIp] as "a great ape". (I've omitted details
on the vocing of the [g] because I'm not sure how or what to show.
They matter!) I have a colleague who pronounces his surname,
Johnson, as
[dZQn?s&n]. A lot of people hear this as 'Johnston'. (This puts me
in mind of Johnston's crocodile, Crocodylus johnsoni [sic].)

Richard.