# Word reduction and American T before consonant Tags: phonetics, pronunciation, ipa, american-english, stress - Score: 2 - Views: 359 - Answers: 2 - Answered: yes - Asked by: Zoltan King (405 rep) - Asked: 2015-04-21 - Site: linguistics ## Question when I pronounce the phrase "It was good" in a context like this one: Person A: How was your day? Person B: It was good. I think that "was" is reduced to wəz (with a schwa sound). The only word that gets stressed is the adjective. Am I right? [ ɪt wəz ˈgʊd ] I also think in American English, the T in "it" is held when it occurs before another consonant. It's held in the throat. It's not a sharp sound with a puff of air. Am I right? ## Answers ### Answer by Greg Lee (score: 2 [ACCEPTED]) Yes, except "it" has some stress, I think: "2it was 1good." Yes, the t of "it" is held in the throat, in the sense that the glottis is closed during the t. A term for this is glottalization (though glottalization is also used for ejectives, which have an upward movement of the closed glottis). p and k are also glottalized before another consonant (written p', t', k'). Sometimes glottalized p', t', k' are referred to as unreleased, meaning t