by Bragatyr » Sat Jan 5, '13, 7:37 pm
In my mind I would tend to think it would be a hard, voiceless "t", but when I really think about it I think you could probably pronounce it either way in American English. We are lazy about that intervocalic "t". I'm trying to think of proper names and foreign countries, and we do pronounce, say, Qatar with a hard "t", and even Haiti, oftentimes, but the second syllable in Qatar tends to get at least some emphasis and the final vowel in Haiti is probably a little more unusual than the more indeterminate sound in Mota. I'm thinking it depends on how you handle the surrounding syllables, and Mota would almost certainly have an unaccented final syllable. So, yeah, I imagine it could go either way.