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Okay I've searched and searched and con't find anything on this. So tell me. Does anyone else say Ha Track instead of Hat Rack, or is it just me?
Posts: 6367 | Registered: Aug 2003
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I've always said Hat Track...but then I introduced a friend of mine to the forum and he says Hat Rack...and so does OSC. So I'm trying to change my habit, but it hasn't been working very well so far.
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Ah, I wasn't thinking of the entire word. I was thinking that moving the t in front of man wouldn't change the pronunciation if it were two different words.
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So by hat rack, do you mean not actually saying a t but using a glottal stop, they way most folks do with Kitten and Mitten? I only actually say the t in "jatraqueros", though I can't think of a reason I would have said that aloud.
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See, I was going to bring up the glottal stop. That's how I pronounce "Hatrack." I believe Americans in general use the glottal stop instead of actually pronouncing the "t" with the front of their tongue.
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tman is not a well formed syllable in English, though it probably is in some other language. Track is.
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I guess that was my point. TR has it's own pronunciation that isn't *really* t and r put together. But the only way for an American to pronounce "tman" wound be to move the t to the word before it.
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I have always said hat-rack, yes, with a glottal stop. I have heard people saying ha-track but I just put it down to the fact that all y'all talk sorta funny anyways but don't worry we don't hold it against you.
[ February 11, 2004, 12:19 AM: Message edited by: ak ]
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Y'all? Are you implying that Texans mispronounce Hatrack or that southerners usually get it right?
Posts: 2258 | Registered: Aug 2003
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Funny this should come up. I was arguing with my Mom about it the other day. She thinks it is pronounced "Hay-track" and I was trying to tell her it's "Hat-rack", but she doesn't believe me.
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quote:TR has it's own pronunciation that isn't *really* t and r put together.
Actually, it is. The t becomes palatalized by the r that follows it, making it almost but not quite a ch.
quote:The problem there is that ch doesn't really sound like c and h.
Welcome to the world of English spelling. It's just a spelling convention. In Old English, the ch sound was represented by a c preceded or followed by an i or an e, which caused palatalization of the c. The same thing happened in Vulgate Latin. In Latin it was always a k sound, but in Italian, c + (i or e) is pronounced like ch.
But I'm sure that's more than you wanted to know about that. The point is that the word "hatrack" is "hat" + "rack." When a t is the last letter of the first part of a compound word, it almost always turns into a glottal stop. I can't actually think of any exceptions to the rule off the top of my head.
[ February 10, 2004, 11:08 PM: Message edited by: Jon Boy ]
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I'm confused by the people who say they pronounce it "hat track." Are you pronouncing the t twice?
Posts: 9945 | Registered: Sep 2002
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Similar to this, I likely mispronounce many of the names in Speaker for the Dead. Yes, yes, there's that helpful how-to-pronounce-portuguese-names bit in the front, but I totally ignored it
I like how I "think" their names.
Like Eilonwy in the Lloyd Alexander books... I used to say "ellon-wee" instead of "eye-LAHN-wee" which is the (sorta?) correct way.
And now, back to Hat Rack. Which anyone who knows anything knows, is pronounced Hatr Ack.
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PSI--As a linguistic economist, you can teach the likes of Alan Greenspan how to pronounce "interest."
Posts: 5957 | Registered: Oct 2001
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I've always said Ha-Track. Hat Rack just sounds weird to me. But apparently I am wrong. Oh, well. That's nothing new.
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