It’s nearly Xmas, so I’m feeling like posting something imperceptibly more trivial than usual. In a sometimes effective attempt to block out the Christmas songs being hummed everywhere I go (most of all by my parents, who want to stop but can’t), I’ve been going through some of my old favorite songs.

One of these is “Me and Mia” by Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, and every time I listen to it, I’m struck by the way Leo pronounces the word forgotten in the line “call your friends ’cause we’ve forgotten / what it’s like to eat what’s rotten”. Here’s the album version of the line [at the 0:42 & 1:30 marks]

I love the way he says it, like he’s swallowing the end of the word and just barely spitting back out. And he seems to be fairly consistent in how he pronounces forgotten in this song: here’s a live version with the same pronunciation (around the 1:25 mark). Since I’ve found it such a striking pronunciation and since I’m a linguist, I figured that I could figure out what makes it distinctive.

Let’s start off by talking about the canonical American English pronunciation of forgotten, which is probably going to be something like [fɚgɑtən]. If you, like me, aren’t at home with the International Phonetic Alphabet, the basic gist is as follows. The first syllable is an f sound followed by an er sound (ɚ). That weird symbol is a rhotic schwa; the er sound is not actually two distinct sounds, but rather a single vowel whose third formant is lowered, which we perceive as a combination of a vowel and an r. This syllable doesn’t really impact the end of the word, so let’s move on.

The second syllable sets up Leo’s distinctive pronunciation of the third. The two phonemes in this syllable, [g] and [ɑ], are both located in the back of one’s mouth. For [g], you push the back of your tongue up against your soft palate, back behind your teeth. Then, to make [ɑ], you pretty much push your tongue as far down and back in your mouth as you do for any English sound. If you try overexaggeratedly saying “got”, you’ll hopefully feel what I’m talking about here. If you don’t, just trust me that your tongue is further back in your mouth than normal as you finish up this syllable.

If it helps, here's a vowel chart for California English. The vowels' positions are loosely correlated with the where your tongue in your mouth. The left is the front of your mouth, the top the roof of your mouth. Notice ɑ is in the bottom right.

And now the third syllable. Let’s start with the canonical form of it, [tən]. After jamming your tongue way back in your mouth last syllable, now you push your tongue up against the back of your teeth to make a [t], relax it a bit to make a lax vowel of some sort (possibly a schwa, but this will vary), and then push your tongue up against your teeth again to make an [n]. Or, at least, that’s what you would do if you were overenunciating.

In real-life American English, you’re going to replace that [t] with what phoneticians call a “flap” (ɾ), a quick tap of your tongue against your gumline that’s sort of a midpoint between t, d, and r.* In addition, you might not make a separate vowel+n pair, but instead, you’ll do a syllabic n, taking advantage of the ability to sustain a nasal stop like n. And that gets you what I’m going to call the “relaxed” pronunciation of forgotten.

With that as a base form, what’s Leo doing? Well, at the end of the second syllable, his tongue is way in the back of his mouth. Instead of moving his tongue all the way forward to make the t or flap sound, he uses another allophonic variant, the glottal stop. If you’re not familiar with the term, think of either a Cockney pronunciation of bottle, or the word uh-oh. There’s a weird gap in the middle of these words; the two syllables are clearly connected by something, but it’s more of a silence than a sound. If anything, it might sound like a weird gasp. That is the glottal stop, where one’s vocal folds close up and then release a brief burst of air as a little creaky pop.

The glottal stop doesn’t require the tongue to move from its back-of-the-mouth position, so when it comes time to make the [n], Leo’s tongue is further back than if he’d made a proper t or flap. When he goes to make the n sound, he doesn’t move his tongue all the way forward, creating a “retracted” n that’s located further back in his mouth than a normal n.

That’s a lot of words about something that might seem rather uninteresting — I started by saying “oh, it’s neat how Ted Leo sort of swallows the end of his word” and concluded by saying “oh, the reason why it sounds like he’s swallowing the syllable is because the syllable is further back in his mouth”. But there’re two things I found interesting in that analysis. One is that it’s kind of neat that we do have this phonetic intuition telling us that sounds produced further back than usual sound like they’re being swallowed, even if we don’t consciously notice where our tongues are when we’re making such noises. The second is that it’s a good illustration of how sounds are affected by the phonetic environment; if it weren’t forgotten, but rather the made-up word fortetten, swallowing that last syllable wouldn’t have been natural.

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*: Wikipedia has a concise but somewhat confusing overview of the way flaps work in different forms of English, if you’re interested.