Why, in American English, is the word Italy is pronounced /ˈɪdəli/ and not /ˈɪtəli/?
What is the rule that is followed in the pronunciation of Italy to make the letter t pronounced like a d? Why is the same rule not followed for Italian, which is pronounced /əˈtæljən/ or /ɪˈtæljən/?
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First two questions: The pronunciation of some American English consonants can be quite different from British English, in particular for R and T. A t in the middle of a word can be pronunced as a soft d in American English (think of bottle, cattle, etc.). See here, for example, for examples of this.
Third question: Why it does happen for Italy and not for Italian is clearly a matter of stress. If the stress is on the t, it usually keeps its pronunciation and is not changed into a soft d. Thus /ˈɪdəli/ but /əˈtæljən/. Another example is (taken from the New Oxford American Dictionary, in US English pronunciation): tautology (/tɔˈtɑlədʒi/) vs tautological (/ˈˌtɔdlˈɑdʒəkəl/), which clearly demonstrate that.
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7It may be worth mentioning the glottal stop here which is characteristic of Northern English (my native tongue). The same rules apply as you outlined, but rather than the D sound there is, in fact, no sound! – Dancrumb Feb 24 '11 at 15:11
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5@Dancrumb: Ah, but the glottal stop is just as much (or as little) a sound as any other occlusive consonant! – Cerberus - Reinstate Monica Feb 24 '11 at 15:17
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2@Cerberus: I knew someone would pick me up on whether a glottal stop is a sound or not :o) – Dancrumb Feb 24 '11 at 15:17
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@Dancrumb: Hehe, yeah, that is the kind of place we have here! – Cerberus - Reinstate Monica Feb 24 '11 at 15:19
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9The “soft” t sound of American English is usually described phonetically as a flap or tap and is represented in IPA with the “fishhook r” [ɾ] rather than [d]. – nohat Feb 24 '11 at 19:02
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@nohat: See, I said the US vs UK thing comes up all the time. ;-) – Orbling Feb 24 '11 at 19:11
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@Orbling this is a great answer that addresses the difference without being biased about it. All we need now is to rename the question to be less specific and we have a perfect question for our collection of British–American differences questions. – nohat Feb 24 '11 at 19:15
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1@nohat: Aye, good work. – Orbling Feb 24 '11 at 19:25
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@jwpat Not in the words quoted here, though: before a syllabic l or n, it is a true [d]. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Nov 14 '14 at 10:04
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Erm, stress on a /t/ ? – Araucaria - Him Mar 31 '15 at 10:31
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Not all Americans do, and not consistently.
Flap-t (/d/ instead of /t/) often happens between vowel sounds or after a vowel and before a liquid.
The t in "-teen" is always pronounced as t. As Henry mentions the reason is that flap rarely happens in stressed positions. As it doesn't happen in Italian.
Here's good explanation of T pronounced D.
Manoochehr
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3The flap rarely happens at start of a stressed syllable, as in Italian. It is more common in an unstressed syllable, as in Italy. – Henry Feb 24 '11 at 08:43
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1Consonant softening (voiceless plosives becoming voiced, etc.) is normal in human language, although it is more likely (or, probably, simply faster to occur) between unstressed vowels. Writing -- artificially crystalising pronunciation -- is not the normal state of affairs. That's why pasta e fagioli comes out pastafazool, or capicola is pronounced something like gabbagool, in many Italian dialects. (And yes, I did understand that you meant it doesn't happen in the word Italian -- I'm just using Italian words to demonstrate that it isn't an English phenomenon.) – bye Feb 24 '11 at 18:04
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@Stan Rogers: Italian dialects are not dialects of Italian; they are completely different languages. To make an example, in some places of northern Italy they speak a dialect of the Western Lombard or Eastern Lombard; in other places, they speak Ladino. – apaderno Feb 24 '11 at 20:14
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@kiamlaluno: The dialects I'm referring to are "merely" dialects of the standard Tuscan. If I had meant differently, I would have said so. (I am aware that Italy as a political entity is defined by geography rather than language.) Any natural "language" is just a collection of dialects (absent a controlling institution), and the phenomena that cause language to change from one to another is constantly at work in all of them. – bye Feb 24 '11 at 22:33
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1@Stan Rogers Capicola is not a word used in any dialect spoken in Italian, as far as I know; Capicolla is rather a word used in Canada. – apaderno Apr 21 '11 at 13:02
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(Also, dialects of standard Tuscan are dialects spoken in Tuscany. While Italian is based on Tuscan, it was influenced by other languages spoken in Italy.) – apaderno Mar 11 '22 at 17:37
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There's no /d/. It's /ɪtəli/ pronounced [ɪɾəli], with alveolar flap in the pronunciation corresponding to phonemic t. It really is helpful, folks, to distinguish between phonemes and phones for a question like this. If the schwa is lost in casual pronunciation, since you can't say a flap right next to an [l] (the tongue tip has to come back down for a flap), the flap becomes [d]: [ɪdli] (which does not happen in my pronunciation, but I've heard it).
Greg Lee
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The determination of the sound is usually in rhythm. Different English dialects have different rhythms for words, which causes letters to get assimilated, softened, and dropped.
If you pronounce the t as t instead of d in a word like butter, the rhythm will be out of sync with American pronunciations. This is the same reason Brits often pronounce literally, litch-rally or lit-rally instead of lid-erally like Americans. They don't soften their t's and the rhythm of the e is faster in British English. As a result the t sound is either emphasized or assimilated into the ch sound.
Lit Soc
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