As mentioned in
my last post, an American ordering water in a British restaurant often amounts to a verbal slapstick scene. (But if you want to read some real verbal slapstick, see my dear friend
lazybrain's most recent post.) American visitors to these shores typically have to ask for water at least three times before communication is achieved--and there is similar difficulty for some
BrE speakers ordering water in the US. One commenter back at the last entry presumes that this is because of the (southern)
BrE lack of post-vocalic /r/s (i.e. 'r' after a vowel sound). That is to say, many
AmE dialects pronounce a distinct /r/ at the end of
water, whereas some prominent
BrE dialects don't.
I don't think that's the problem, though. Firstly, when (mostly [r]-ful) northern Americans order water in the (mostly [r]-less) southern states, we don't get that slapstick, and vice
versa. Second, there's a lot more going on in
water.
I think the biggest problem is the pronunciation of the /t/. In most standard forms of
BrE, it's pronounced [t]--like the [t] in
tiger. (In some non-standard forms of
BrE, it can be pronounced as a
glottal stop--i.e. an interruption to the flow of sound that is made by closing the glottis, in the throat. Many Americans (like me) use a glottal stop instead of a [t] before a syllabic (pronounced on its own) /n/, as in
mitten. It's also the sound between the vowels in
uh-oh!) In
AmE, a /t/ between two vowels is typically pronounced as an
alveolar flap.
Alveolar refers to the gum ridge behind the top front teeth. In a flap (or 'tap'), the tongue passes very quickly over that point. When
BrE speakers parody this sound, they often use a [d], but a flap is not a [d], as described in this tutorial:
Flaps are abbreviated forms of the alveolar plosives /t/ and /d/ and the alveolar nasal /n/. In a normal alveolar plosive closure, the vocal tract is blocked for some 50 ms, but in the flap, produced by one rapid tap of the tongue against the alveolar ridge, the duration is very short, on the order of 10-20 ms. The flap is very common in American English. [From Center for Spoken Language Understanding, Oregon School of Science & Engineering, Spectrogram-reading tutorial]
When I lecture, the two things I try to be careful about are: (a) pronouncing my /t/s, and (b) saying
cannot instead of
can't (I cannot say that I always succeed), since I discovered quickly that these were the American pronunciations that most impeded my communication to
BrE speakers.
But wait! There are more differences between
BrE and
AmE pronunciations of
water. The /a/ vowel differs quite a bit, with the
BrE version being (in my amateur-phonetician estimation) longer than the
AmE version, giving the word a different rhythm in the two dialects. The standard southern
BrE vowel is also quite a bit
rounder than the very open standard
AmE vowel.
So, there are two differences in the rhythmic profile of
water that differ quite a bit cross-
Atlantically, plus two vowel differences (the quality of the /a/ and what happens with the /r/). It's amazing that anyone ever quenches their thirst in another country. (Unless it's with beer. My brothers
mastered the ordering of a pint almost immediately.)
A tip for
travel(l)ers: modify your
water. If you want the free stuff, say
tap water in Britain and
iced water in America. (If you don't want the ice, ask for
iced water without the ice--just modify your
water with a word that the waiter will be expecting to hear!) I don't recommend slowing down your pronunciation--that only
exaggerates the differences. If you're American, using a fully pronounced [t] should be all it takes to make your
water comprehensible. I don't recommend that
BrE speakers take on a flap, since a badly executed flap may make it sound like you're mocking the American you're speaking to. Just say
water as many times as necessary, then accept the compliments on
how intelligent your accent sounds.
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