Swallowing the T consonant sound is known as T-glottalization, and it’s prevalent in many British dialects, especially Cockney and the northern dialects like Mancunian, where it most often occurs in the middle of words. Listen to Stanley Holloway do it when he sings, “Wi’ a lih-ul bit o’ bloomin’ luck.” The whole song is full of glottalization.
That said, sometimes the better educated classes—especially ladies—did it, too, with the ending of contractions. So it can happen that one says “aren’” in place of “aren’t.” The situation here is murky and weird, though, because Higgins is presumably imitating Karpathy at this point, so none of this makes sense.
Chalk up another one to Lerner being messy.
Laura |
