/ˈkɑːt.te/

@Lady @aescling yeah this one

@alyssa @aescling I couldn't have worded this better

@aescling cat it is not physically possible to pronounce two /t/ in sequence

probably you’re doing /ˈkɑːʔ.te/ ???

@aescling anyway i pronounce “ahh” as /ɑħ/

@Lady @aescling is this really physically impossible? it’s also attested in Klallam (for several non-glottal stops and affricates, including [t], though it instead geminates the glottal stop and all fricatives). i don’t see why it should be less possible than sequences of different stops? it certainly seems easy to pronounce e.g. [cæt.te] with the first t released briefly before the following one (though it is as always possible there’s some other sound sneaking in to separate them that i’m missing)

@alyssa @aescling i think that’s my take, that it’s actually /kætə̥te/, but that might be needlessly pedantic

@Lady @aescling amusingly there are well-respected phoneticists who consider gemination in general as being not a lengthened consonant but two separate instances of the consonant! (well, strictly speaking the example i have to hand died in 2009, but probably he wasn't the only one)

@alyssa @aescling yeah i think we’re definitely getting into “what physically constitutes a consonant” here (is it the stop, the release, both separately, or both together) which is not entirely settled territory

my feeling is that a stop cannot release into another stop at the same position because you’re already stopped, you have to release into something else before you can stop there again. but i fully believe that there are many linguists who would disagree on this take

@alyssa @aescling obviously you can release into a pause though (i’m not arguing against “cat tail”) so this is a bit murky and entwined with the question of “what constitutes a phonological word”