This glottal stop thing is interesting to me. Apostrophes are used in Romanized Chinese to denote that the word is two characters instead of one. For example, the word "xian" would be one character in Chinese. But the city "Xi'an", located in the North of China, is made of up two characters. In this function, it does serve a purpose.

Pharoah:Yes, but isn't a glottal stop somewhat redundant after a consonant? I always thought that they were only explicitly written to separate adjacent vowels (eg in Hawai'i).

Put it this way - the biggest difference between a heavy Spanish accent in English, and the Queen's English, is that the queen inserts a glottal stop just before the final consonant in words that end in a vowel and t, p, and k.

Spaniards English: cot, pot, lock, stop (cod, pot, lock, stop)
Queens English: co't, po't, lo'ck, sto'p

This is one reason English speakers suck at not aspirating their unvoiced consonants - we're so used to sticking in a glottal stop here and there without writing it that we have trouble reproducing certain stops without one. In this sense, a written glottal stop can be quite useful.

But I do think the use of ' as a glottal stop is overused, especially in conlangs or "alien" sounding names where it does not even find any use.

(Re: "Na'vi", in the movie they don't really pronounce it right from what I heard (all I heard was "navi"), but imagine an Australian or cockney speaker saying "nut-vee", now imagine them saving "navi" - there is quite a big difference in pronunciation

trojo:

Alciona:Though this leads me to an Esperanto question. Is there a glottal stop where two of the same vowels run together, as in scii ? Are glottal stops preferable in other instances where vowels run together?

I read somewhere, though I can't recall where now, that glottal stops between doubled vowels are acceptable and common, though not required. The rule according to PMEG is simply that double letters are pronounced as two distinct letters. Some people have trouble doing this without glottally stopping.

Thanks, Trojo!

ceigered:(Re: "Na'vi", in the movie they don't really pronounce it right from what I heard (all I heard was "navi"), but imagine an Australian or cockney speaker saying "nut-vee", now imagine them saving "navi" - there is quite a big difference in pronunciation

The humans weren't pronouncing it right, but the aliens were. When the word Na'vi appears in the subtitles when they're speaking their language, it's possible to hear how they pronounce that word natively. The glottal stop is audible. Also: Na'vi sounds to me like it has an internally-inflected genitive case, based on how they pronounce the translations of "the Na'vi's" (posessive) or "of the Na'vi".

On a side note, having the humans pronounce it wrong actually was probably more realistic than having them pronounce it right.

Oh serious? That's good then, I personally turned my head off for most of the speech and focused on the subtitles

sjheiss:

orthohawk:the "not 'V'" will sound exactly like the name of the Avatar language.

In General American? No, that would make the an unreleased alveolar plosive, not a glottal stop.

In many dialects of Britain it may be a glottal stop though.

I think it's migrated past the alveolar plosive and gone glottal.........much like the codus-S of Caribbean Spanish has lost the lingual aspect and the glottal aspiration remains.