Can someone shed some light on what is being discussed below?

The parties involved are a Swede called Meadish, a Scot called
Oleeber and a New Yorker called Bina. The full discussion is at
http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=16028 , but I
think I have captured all the relevant parts here.

The basic source for the Meadish's contribution is claimed to be:

An Introduction to Language, Sixth Edition, Harcourt Brace. Authors:
Victoria Fromkin and Robert Rodman. ISBN: 0-03-018682 .

<Start discussion>
Meadish: "A 'stop' is a sound which is stopped completely in the
oral cavity for a brief period. The final sounds in the words top,
dude, dune, root, rack, rag, rang are stops."

Oleeber: "I'm having problems with this, Meadish.

I understand "top, root, rack and rag" because the mouth must change
before the next word can be formed (I think) but with "dune and
rang" there is a rolling feel to the end of these words and it
doesn't feel like a "stop" to me."

Bina: "are u a native english (american) speaker?

"Americans from my area, maryland, say: dune with a quick stop at
the end, where as deep southerners probably would say: duuuuunnne.
And we say rang almost as if the 'g' gets stuck in your throat, not
ranggggggg."

Meadish: "I took those examples of stops from the book I
recommended, which is based on standard American pronunciation. I
was a bit surprised myself to see 'n' and 'ng' as stops. (I was
originally taught to speak RP (the Queen's English, BBC English) but
have been in contact with so many separate groups of English
speakers that my accent is now a mid-Atlantic mish-mash with a few
antipodean attributes. Unless I make an effort to speak RP that is,
but it feels unnatural and fake to me).

"So I think Bina is right, in standard American English, they are
stops, whereas in the UK variations of English, they are not (you
could probably write a thesis on this...)."
<end discussion>

Richard.