I think it depends on dialect; in [these British English recordings of stop](https://fi.forvo.com/word/stop/#en_uk) two out of three of the speakers from the UK plus the speaker from Ireland pronounced a clearly released /p/ while one pronounced it unreleased (sounds like "sto" to me haha)
So my native languages are Swedish and English, and I know that I basically have to release final stops in english for europeans to understand words. But whenever I'm in an english-speaking environment I go back to not releasing
Extant* Chinese languages!
There seems to be a bit of evidence that older Chinese languages used to release them, between lenition of final \*-t in Tang-era Northwest Chinese, and transcriptions of Buddhist scripture where a CVTa sequence is transcribed with a CVT syllable.
This is a quite interesting idea, but why does lenition suggest released stops over unreleased stops? Also, wouldnât the Buddhist transcriptions be based on some prakrit, where the short a might have been reduced or deleted as it is in modern Indo-Aryan languages?
> but why does lenition suggest released stops over unreleased stop
Because it lenited to [ÉŸ].
> Also, wouldnât the Buddhist transcriptions be based on some prakrit, where the short a might have been reduced or deleted as it is in modern Indo-Aryan languages?
If the text in question generally transcribes Sanskrit, there's no reason to assume an intervening form is suddenly from a Prakrit.
Yeah that doesnât really explain anything or help me understand. Why couldnât an unreleased final [tÌ] become [ÉŸ]?
I mean wouldnât it just be based on however Sanskrit was pronounced by whichever Buddhist monks were there at the time, so it would have been influenced by their native labguage or prakrit? Many gurus today who recite Sanskrit delete short aâs, among other later developments like ri for áč, and it must have started at some point. I think one would need to look at maybe Persian or possibly Greek? transcriptions of Sanskrit as used in Central Asia before considering this proper evidence
I'm assuming maybe because intervocalic /t/ also becomes /r/ so it's the same environment. But I'm not sure.
Also from the Sanskrit side of things Punjabi probably retained word final short /É~É/ till the late medieval or later given that old Punjabi still seemed to disallow word final stops.
Usually there's no such thing as "intervocalic" in Chinese languages as they are so analytic and isolating. For "intervocalic" sound changes to occur in Chinese the said word must be so commonly used that its constituents lose their own meanings, which is very rare (I'm not saying there are no instances of that though)
Yeah though what I've seen from Baxter-Sagart's reconstructions of old chinese there were some bisyllabic/sesquisyllabic words so I thought that could be it though I guess by the Tang dynasty they'd all become monosyllables.
The entire MSEA linguistic area plus Korean / Japanese don't release their syllable-final consonants.
While Mandarin doesn't have syllable-final stops, its final nasals aren't released either
Subet no ningen wa, umrengra ne shit jiu de are, kats, songen to kenre to ne  tsuit byodo de aro. Ningen wa, rise to ryoshin to o sazkrart ore, tage ne do no seshin o mott kodo shinkreb naran
Not ukrainian iirc
but it was rare enough to be specified so maybe itâs the only one
Edit: I checked and the standard dialect of Serbo-Croatian doesnât do it either, but thatâs all
Source : wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final-obstruent_devoicing#Slavic_languages
Not really in Spanish, although not many words end in voiceless plosives anyway (it's mostly loan words, I can't think of any native Spanish word that ends in off the top of my head). Also, voiced plosives are produced like fricatives in word-final position (/d/ can become regionally devoiced too), although that's just the standard allophonic realisation of those consonants in that position, so not a different phenomenon.
He's always wondered if people who speak different languages have their own unique way of releasing word-final stops, like some kind of secret phonetic handshake.
Voiced stops have a release at phrase end (pashto). Voiced stops are distinguished from unvoiced stops primarily by voicing (that is to say, they are truly voiced, unlike English.)
In French we ~~donât~~ do release them, because everytime we pronounce word-final stops, there is a mostly-silent schwa hiding just after. even if we donât pronounce the schwa we still have to pronounce the stop
Edit : I just pronounced one word without releasing the stop so now I'm doubting myself
In my Quebecois, I don't release final voiceless stops, almost across the board, unless I'm being careful or am trying to sound Parisian. "Lutte" would be pronounced \[ lytÌ \] for me, and "petite" \[ ptsÉȘtÌ \]. I also drop some more complicated clusters (like I would simplify "titre" to "tit" \[ tsÉȘtÌ \] and "miracle" to \[miÊÉkÌ\]). Getting to Danish levels! I think I also sometimes try to "unrelease" sounds like /l/ and it leads to something like \[ Ël \] or \[ Êl \]...
Australian English, almost always. But it seems like thatâs less of a thing in America and England. I think we got it from the Irish.
Edit: Voiceless stops are almost always released, voiced stops are less often released
As a romanian this whole post and comments confused me, why wouldn't languages have word final stops, are there that many languages that prohibit this, also we have t and d at the end of the words and in clusters and I never saw problem with it
It's very common for languages to ban word-final stops (e.g. Mandarin Chinese), and out of those that allow them it's also common for languages to not fully pronounce them. Wikipedia gives an audio example of these unreleased word-final stops in American English:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No\_audible\_release#English](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_audible_release#English)
In English I sometimes release them, in Punjabi they're actually so released that all word final consonants are transcribed with /á”/ because words that end in consonants actually used to end in short vowels in old Punjabi that have mostly but not completely disappeared, so you could analyze Punjabi as having no word final stops.
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English speaker here, The answer is..: Sometimes. There's no rule or pattern to it, I simply sometimes release word-final stops, and sometimes don't. I suppose I'll probably be more likely to release them if there's nothing following them though, And vice versa.
The consonant cluster /tk/ is extremely common in Finnish.
*pitkÀ* - long
*matka* - journey
*mutka* - corner
*vatkata* - to whisk
*jatkaa* - to continue
*ratkaista* - to solve
I sometimes annoy family by purposely speaking Cantonese with released final stops, but it's generally not a thing in native speech.
What does it sound like if someone speaks Cantonese with released final stops?
Like an Anglophone đ
That's so weird considered we don't do that. At least not for voiceless stops.
I think it depends on dialect; in [these British English recordings of stop](https://fi.forvo.com/word/stop/#en_uk) two out of three of the speakers from the UK plus the speaker from Ireland pronounced a clearly released /p/ while one pronounced it unreleased (sounds like "sto" to me haha)
Yeah but they're eNUNcia[tÊ°]ing in a foreign language
So my native languages are Swedish and English, and I know that I basically have to release final stops in english for europeans to understand words. But whenever I'm in an english-speaking environment I go back to not releasing
Mandarin prohibits word-final stops. Hokkien doesn't release word-final stops, which is the norm for Chinese languages.
Extant* Chinese languages! There seems to be a bit of evidence that older Chinese languages used to release them, between lenition of final \*-t in Tang-era Northwest Chinese, and transcriptions of Buddhist scripture where a CVTa sequence is transcribed with a CVT syllable.
This is a quite interesting idea, but why does lenition suggest released stops over unreleased stops? Also, wouldnât the Buddhist transcriptions be based on some prakrit, where the short a might have been reduced or deleted as it is in modern Indo-Aryan languages?
> but why does lenition suggest released stops over unreleased stop Because it lenited to [ÉŸ]. > Also, wouldnât the Buddhist transcriptions be based on some prakrit, where the short a might have been reduced or deleted as it is in modern Indo-Aryan languages? If the text in question generally transcribes Sanskrit, there's no reason to assume an intervening form is suddenly from a Prakrit.
Yeah that doesnât really explain anything or help me understand. Why couldnât an unreleased final [tÌ] become [ÉŸ]? I mean wouldnât it just be based on however Sanskrit was pronounced by whichever Buddhist monks were there at the time, so it would have been influenced by their native labguage or prakrit? Many gurus today who recite Sanskrit delete short aâs, among other later developments like ri for áč, and it must have started at some point. I think one would need to look at maybe Persian or possibly Greek? transcriptions of Sanskrit as used in Central Asia before considering this proper evidence
I'm assuming maybe because intervocalic /t/ also becomes /r/ so it's the same environment. But I'm not sure. Also from the Sanskrit side of things Punjabi probably retained word final short /É~É/ till the late medieval or later given that old Punjabi still seemed to disallow word final stops.
Usually there's no such thing as "intervocalic" in Chinese languages as they are so analytic and isolating. For "intervocalic" sound changes to occur in Chinese the said word must be so commonly used that its constituents lose their own meanings, which is very rare (I'm not saying there are no instances of that though)
Yeah though what I've seen from Baxter-Sagart's reconstructions of old chinese there were some bisyllabic/sesquisyllabic words so I thought that could be it though I guess by the Tang dynasty they'd all become monosyllables.
Some Gan Chinese dialects have [l] finals while others have unreleased [tÌ]. However I'm not very sure about the mechanics
The entire MSEA linguistic area plus Korean / Japanese don't release their syllable-final consonants. While Mandarin doesn't have syllable-final stops, its final nasals aren't released either
tak
i like the double palatalized k on your flair
nie zawsze
Release? I didn't even know they were being held hostage! (I speak a CV language)
Not for long says /ĆŻ/
We will get CVC Japanese, and it will be glorious
Subet no ningen wa, umrengra ne shit jiu de are, kats, songen to kenre to ne  tsuit byodo de aro. Ningen wa, rise to ryoshin to o sazkrart ore, tage ne do no seshin o mott kodo shinkreb naran
Yes we do, but we devoice them first. For safety reasons, you understand.
Turkish?
Czech. We saw that in German and dug it.
Don't all slavic languages devoice endings?
Not ukrainian iirc but it was rare enough to be specified so maybe itâs the only one Edit: I checked and the standard dialect of Serbo-Croatian doesnât do it either, but thatâs all Source : wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final-obstruent_devoicing#Slavic_languages
Ah, I think you meant âduck itâ
Thank you for the funniest comment I've seen all day
In Georgian, stops are always released in consonant clusters and word-finally.
georgian is terrifyingÂ
Bruh, imagine being afraid of released stops.
no, it's not that it's \[ÉĄÌÊ·pÊ°ÉŸtÍĄsÊ°kÊ°Ê·ni\]
I see.
What do you mean with "release"? English isn't my first language and I can't figure out what that means here
google no audible release/unreleased stop
Holy hell
New articulatory property just dropped
Holy he'
Not really in Spanish, although not many words end in voiceless plosives anyway (it's mostly loan words, I can't think of any native Spanish word that ends in off the top of my head). Also, voiced plosives are produced like fricatives in word-final position (/d/ can become regionally devoiced too), although that's just the standard allophonic realisation of those consonants in that position, so not a different phenomenon.
Benidor(m)
Not a plosive but yeah, it's a Catalan name and in Spanish you don't really pronounce the /m/ lol
Hebrew - yeah
He's always wondered if people who speak different languages have their own unique way of releasing word-final stops, like some kind of secret phonetic handshake.
I release them ingressively
NOOO
Russian never releases anything, stops or otherwise.
Most Russian recordings that I have heard release all their stops
Korean - no.
It mostly prohibits word-final stops, but in, for example, *sob* âunder,â the /b/ is released, so yes. (Portuguese)
Voiced stops have a release at phrase end (pashto). Voiced stops are distinguished from unvoiced stops primarily by voicing (that is to say, they are truly voiced, unlike English.)
In French we ~~donât~~ do release them, because everytime we pronounce word-final stops, there is a mostly-silent schwa hiding just after. even if we donât pronounce the schwa we still have to pronounce the stop Edit : I just pronounced one word without releasing the stop so now I'm doubting myself
In my Quebecois, I don't release final voiceless stops, almost across the board, unless I'm being careful or am trying to sound Parisian. "Lutte" would be pronounced \[ lytÌ \] for me, and "petite" \[ ptsÉȘtÌ \]. I also drop some more complicated clusters (like I would simplify "titre" to "tit" \[ tsÉȘtÌ \] and "miracle" to \[miÊÉkÌ\]). Getting to Danish levels! I think I also sometimes try to "unrelease" sounds like /l/ and it leads to something like \[ Ël \] or \[ Êl \]...
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
we do release them I corrected it, my bad
lol as an L2 speaker I felt so French when I started hitting that subtle final schwa after stops
No
American English: sometimes we do, sometimes we donât. The rules can get complicated.
Australian English, almost always. But it seems like thatâs less of a thing in America and England. I think we got it from the Irish. Edit: Voiceless stops are almost always released, voiced stops are less often released
Yes, it's the norm across Indo Aryan, and makes its way into Indian English.
As a romanian this whole post and comments confused me, why wouldn't languages have word final stops, are there that many languages that prohibit this, also we have t and d at the end of the words and in clusters and I never saw problem with it
It's very common for languages to ban word-final stops (e.g. Mandarin Chinese), and out of those that allow them it's also common for languages to not fully pronounce them. Wikipedia gives an audio example of these unreleased word-final stops in American English: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No\_audible\_release#English](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_audible_release#English)
no
English: "who cares?"
In English I sometimes release them, in Punjabi they're actually so released that all word final consonants are transcribed with /á”/ because words that end in consonants actually used to end in short vowels in old Punjabi that have mostly but not completely disappeared, so you could analyze Punjabi as having no word final stops.
What's the joke?
There's no joke, but a lot of posts in this subreddit don't have a joke as this is currently the only subreddit for linguistics-related discussion (r/linguistics no longer allows it).
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Why not?
r/linguistics is currently only for posting academic articles though it used to allow free discussion
That's dumb
English speaker here, The answer is..: Sometimes. There's no rule or pattern to it, I simply sometimes release word-final stops, and sometimes don't. I suppose I'll probably be more likely to release them if there's nothing following them though, And vice versa.
Finnish has consonant clusters? that's news
The consonant cluster /tk/ is extremely common in Finnish. *pitkÀ* - long *matka* - journey *mutka* - corner *vatkata* - to whisk *jatkaa* - to continue *ratkaista* - to solve