Ooh ooh ooh! For the long list of quotes for the fantasy Textkit T-Shirt:
Textkit.com: Real Goed.
I meant to write- real(ly) good
We say helluva too - dat’s a helluva loda soda you’re drinkin’.
Since I’ve been nominated as sociolinguist by nostos, I feel I’ve gotta say,
“helluva lotta soda,” not “loda.”
I first read that as “lode-uh sode-uh,” which not only sounded funny, but made me think that maybe there’s some new brand of pop I haven’t seen (or tasted). Mais j’ai été deçu.
-David
I don’t know about where you live, bellum paxque, but we voice the ‘tt’ in ‘lotta’, hence the ‘loda’.
Personally I read triple G’s ‘loda’ as I think she had intended, with the only difference in pronunciation beteen ‘lotta’ and ‘loda’ being that the unvoiced alveolar plosive [t] had been substituted by a voiced alveolar plosive [d]. Perhaps she should have written ‘lodda’ to account for that pesky ‘o’ in her non-standardised transcription 
Well, this is actually a topic of particular interest to me, mainly since I had the hardest time figuring out exactly what that intervocalic sound IS.
Here’s an experiement: see if the two underlined phrases sound the same.
I’d never laud a President for that.
There’s a lotta precedent for that.
Now, the “d” in “laud” is clearly voiced. But the “tt” in “lotta” (that’s my spelling; you’re welcome to another) is not voiced. Nor is it voiceless (as I believe the British might do). Nor is there a glottal stop (as I think a Cockney speaker might render it).
For me, it’s a tap (also called “flap”), exactly like the Spanish (untrilled) r.
http://www.ic.arizona.edu/~lsp/Canadian/canphon3.html
Flapping is the process of replacing an intervocalic t or d with a quick voiced tap of the tongue against the alveolar ridge. In both Canadian and American English, it can only occur if the t or d is between two vowels, and as long as the second vowel is not stressed. As a result, the alveolar stops in waiting, wading, seated, seeded, and capital are all flapped. Flapping can also occur if there is an r between the first vowel and the alveolar stop, as in words like barter and party.
From wikipedia:
alveolar tap: North American English “latter”
…
Alveolar flaps
Spanish is a good illustration of an alveolar flap, for it contrasts it with a trill: pero /peɾo/ “but” vs. perro /pero/ “dog”.
If you’re genuinely pronouncing a voiced d here, I’d be surprised.
Oddly enough, I have a friend who always pronounces the consonant in the situations outlined above. I tried to get her to alter her pronunciation to the tap (before realizing exactly what it was, phonetically), but she couldn’t really reproduce it. She’s from Michigan, I believe, but also lived in the Philippines. I wonder if it’s a regional variant or some type of hypercorrection?
Regards,
David
Now I don’t mean to be chauvinistic, but describing it as “Cockney” is now outmoded. I’ve heard many a West Londoner (who has never been to Bow) use a glottal stop for a “t”.
Not that I condone it of course…
I agree that it’s an alveolar tap. In almost all exaggerated American accents I’ve heard in Britain, it seems that way. However, it does tend to stay on the stop side rather than verge into the trill - though that could be its future.
About the Filipino/a; I’m sure it’s “hypercorrection” - saying it as it appears to be written. But I know nothing about Michigan, so I can’t really judge.
Agreed. For my pronunciation at least, it is in fact a tap.
Not to be too nit-picky, but tap and flap should be distinguished, at least according to Ashby and Maidment (2005):
However, there is an important difference between the two articulations. For a tap, the active articulator [in this case tongue] moves rapidly towards the passive articulator [alveolar ridge] and rapidly away again . . . For a flap, the active articulator strikes the passive articulator as it passes by.
The only example they give is in Punjabi which I don’t speak. They diagram it enough to allow me to make my conjectures, but there’s no substitution for the real thing. They give the IPA symbol for it but it can’t be reproduced on these boards 
Ya’ll are hella nerdy.
<—— with the articulating and the phoneticising and the sounding…nnnhoy…
Speaking of nerdy, I’ve somehow managed to leap past nostos in my post tally!
That’s hella lotta posts!
-David
Not only are yall hella nerdy, yaller hella funny.
My thread is helza tight!
I voted that the first sentence sounds weird. First I ever saw/heard the word was in the song Hella Good (which also accurately describes the song itself, IMO. ) I took it to mean “very”, so by substitution, “he watches very movies” doesn’t scan but “these movies are very good” does.
If I were to attempt to translate either sentence, I’d be tempted to use μάλα or σφόδρα, thus rendering the first as “he very much watches movies”. To get the intended meaning I’d have to translate the word differently in different contexts (which is not unusual after all, for example the many uses of ὡς) and go with whichever gender of πολύς matches the word for “movie”.
I must say this thread has become hella entertaining!
Reading the long linguistic diatribes just goes to show that we are all hella geeks!
Does Punjabi have a tap?
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/gurmuki.htm
That says that it has a retroflex flap.
But then again, the tap as a seperate phoneme is not recognised by IPA.
It does indeed have a voiced retroflex flap; the symbol on the IPA chart is and ‘r’ with an extra diacritic on the bottom. If you go here and click to enlarge, you’ll see the symbol at 6 across, 4 down at the to of the chart labelled ‘consonants (pulmonic)’. The symbol for a voiced alveolar tap is at 4 across, 4 down (the association with Battleship isn’t lost on me!)
The chart leads one to believe taps and flaps are the same, but Ashby and Maidment say ‘The only flap symbol on the IPA chart is [r with the thingy on the bottom]’ and make a point of distinguishing them, and give diagrams for how to produce one. Still I’m not sure that they aren’t used interchangeably in most contexts.
I read and made extensive notes on ‘an intro to phonetics’ a month and a half ago, understood it pretty well but never internalised all of the subtleties it provides. Anyway, I think this is where the confusion lies with GGG: the tap is voiced, not silent, which is why she wrote ‘loda’; bpq. wrote ‘lotta’ because it is not quite as fully articulated as the [d] suggests. So we are all not quite correct; the compression phase of the tap lasts for too short a time to be considered the (obstruent) plosive [d]; rather it is the (sonorant) but voiced alveolar tap [r, just more rounded].
Mah gawd do I feel nerdy. But if not here, where else?
(Right???)
I bow to the superior phoneticism of nostos!
-David
Bow not to me, good my bellum paxque, but to the superior phoneticism of Ashby and Maidment who gave me, forsooth, the instrument with which to practice my (quasi-)intellectual legerdemain.