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Happy New Year etc
This style for the date is one I
generally prefer to "1 January 2007"
coz it's closer to the way it's spoken and I have a grumpy dislike of
hearing people say things like "One January two thousand seven" to read
it aloud. Incidentally, for anyone who'd like a nice example of a very
frequently heard elision, the sequence thousand and is at
least as likely to be heard without either /d/ as /θaʊzən ən/ as with them.
Even the
usually fairly self-conscious reading aloud by weather forecasters as
often as not has no /d/ and the /n/ is about as likely to be unsyllabic
/θaʊzn ən/ as syllabic /θaʊzn̩ ən/, so then we have "compression" as well.
So I don't regard
the absence of /d/ from and
as an ordinary elision because the
weakform of and is normally,
at least nine times out of ten, heard
with no /d/ at all. It may even lead to misunderstanding if the /d/ is
fussily
added in some circumstances. Elsewhere on this website I've given the
example Joe and Ann which is
normally
perfectly clearly distinct from Joe
and Dan. People who fuss to say
a /d/ to end and lose that
distinction. See more on this website at ¶17 of the article on
Weakforms
and Contractions §4.5.
Another – and on
this occasion
topical – example some of my EFL
teacher readers may find interesting is the contrast between the
General American and General British stressings of Happy new year. While GB speakers say / 'hapi
njuː `jɜː/ (or / `'jiə /), GA
speakers, it seems, usually say / 'hæpi `nuː jɪr /. Anyway,
accept the
greeting from me. I'm pleased to record that my colleague at Re'ding
University Linda Shockey, who is American in her speech origin,
confirms my impression just quoted saying in a recent email I actually have heard people in the USA
say 'happy new YEAR', but only occasionally.
PS I have subsequently seen a film, set in the US, where a number of
people in an office exchange this greeting with each other and both
stressings were to he'rd repeatedly.
Incidentally, I'm inclined to strike a tiny
blow for spelling reform by refusing to employ the ambiguous spelling
'read' for both /ri:d/ and /red/ as forms of the verb 'to read' by
using 're’d' when that conveys the auditory form unambiguously – which
you've seen spills over into my spelling of the name of the county town of
Berkshire. By the way, that's the beauty of having a website of my own
which frees me from the necessity, which in the past I've frequently
found irksome, of submitting to editors' unwelcome rulings over matters
of spelling, punctuation etc.
The other day my
good friend Professor Masaki Taniguchi of Kochi University in Japan
delicately enquired whether it was possible that my heading to these
occasional jottings c'd possibly have been a typo (ie typographical
error). As I replied to him, it was fully intended because I thought
I'd like to head them with something a bit snappier than "Phonetic
Blog". I considered "phonblog" but rejected that as too lumpish etc. As
to "phonoblog" that seemed as likely to suggest music as speech sounds.
"Phonetblog" also sounded clumsy. So I was very unsuccessful in finding
something concise.
I fell back on the example of a curious book Our Oral Word as Social and Economic Factor by M.
E. DeWitt a no doubt wealthy New York American spinster amateur
phonetician who in that 1928 volume used the term "phonetigraph".
Eccentric tho she and it were, I found the book, which I picked up in a
secondhand bookshop, in parts quite entertaining and especially
enjoyed reading her "phonetigraphs" which were annotated narrow
transcriptions of the
speech of about sixty fairly prominent speakers of English including
John Galsworthy, Edmund Gosse, Hugh Walpole, William Tilly and Henry
Cecil Wyld. When I began myself to systematically collect information
on the pronunciations used by individual speakers I found her term
"phonetigraph" a handy one that filled a gap in the available
terminology. It was not strictly a conventional combination in that
perhaps "phonetograph" w'd've represented the more orthodox way of
combining two Greek loanwords but I became used to her usage so adopted
it. Hence my parallel combining of a root of "phonetics" with the
shortened form of "web log".
[This blog has been notably revised since its first
appearance.]
An Un-Empty Word and Linguistic Slumming
Going back to Wells blogs, one of
them (Tuesday 10 October 2006) says:
Tamikazu
Date, having just read the
section in my book English
Intonation
that deals with this point,
mentions the greeting expression How
are things?. Where
would the
nucleus occur? he asks. Probably
on the question word how? Yet don't
some native speakers put the nucleus on the empty word things?
The problem is that the nucleus has to go \/somewhere, and if all the
other words in the IP are function words then it will even go on a weak
aka empty content word. In fact, this is the usual tonicity for this
question. 'How are
\things
Actually, for reasons I cannot
explain, people like me usually violate
number concord here, and say 'How’s
\ things ”
though that
is not relevant to the intonation. (Google shows about
half a million hits for How’s things,
as against about two million for
How
are things.)"
See also the
Wells comments at his Monday 16 October 2006 blog. There he seemed to
give up on deciding what contrast was involved by the nucleus placement
in "There were a 'lot of \people in the room". I think one could imagine that the
speaker may be implying (or only just thinking, possibly even fairly
subconsciously, one can't know) something like "It
wasn't just full of furniture..."
I don't agree that the word things
is an empty word in How's things?
Things is often used in senses like possessions, equipment and most
narrowly clothes. Here it
means goings-on, activities, progress
etc. Compare How's life?
The
explanation of the violation of concord lies in what has
sometimes been called the "register" of the expression because,
as
with the stylistically similar How's
tricks?, the speaker is not using a neutral or othodox style but
a notably relaxed one usually employed to suggest things like intimacy
or marked friendliness. Using orthodox grammar, speakers generally take
the care to plan ahead to achieve proper concord but in highly
colloquial, informal, dialect or slangy styles one hears
frequently expressions like Where's
my things?
Such linguistic slumming
ranges from the very mildly
humorous or shirt-sleeves-order types to the very slangy. Grammatical
rule-breaking occurs with most items like a good'un, how
come, Howzat!, curiouser and curiouser, if it ain't
broke
don't fix it, the
biter bit, rules is rules, I says to
myself, you pays your money and you takes your choice, we was robbed,
what's the odds,
she done him wrong etc. Give
us a look is 'rough' style if only one person is involved. The words whodunnit and wannabe
belong here
too. All the above are transfers from orthodox grammar to basilectal
usages but still genuinely native English. A more unusual item that
quotes instead from the, at least putative, unorthodox usage of foreign-language speakers (praps especially Chinese) is Long time no see.
Geddit? (ie
Understand?), gone bust, swelp
me gawd (ie so help me God), unorthodox elision of /v/ in gimme and cor lumme (God love me) and of
/t/ in lemme and /nd/ in (cor) blimey (though dammit is purely orthographical). Beloved of the red-top headline writers is Gotcha ie Got you with a weakform of you that sounds pretty rough to British ears at least.
Most of these are the province only of some men and of few ladies.
The Queen's English Again
What an incredible
age we live in. I've spent what in relation to my academic's modest
income I count a small fortune over the years to be able to make and
play back conveniently recordings of interesting speakers. The Queen
has been one of the chief people that I've made extensive recordings
of. Like Professor
Jonathan Harrington, whose work we touched on at the 4th of December,
I've found the Queen's speech very fascinating. The reason for this is
pretty obvious to any student of phonetics. She is probably a unique
object of study in that we have numerous recordings of almost always
good quality extending over her whole life after her earlier childhood,
many of them visual as well as auditory, and we know in great detail
exactly what've been the influences that have shaped the kind of
English she speaks. Now anybody in the world who has an inexpensive
computer can go to the website of the British Monarchy Media Centre and
take into their machine a variety of recordings of her voice including
her latest annual Christmas Broadcast (number fifty-three!). So you can
go to your computer and hear, as often as you want to repeat them, the
things I'll say a few words about now. Questions I could imagine you
thinking
you'd like answered are as follows.
Does she sound old-fashioned? Well of course she does
occasionally show the odd slight throwback to the usages of the much
older people she was surrounded by most of the time in her youth. The
most striking one is the Victorian way she seems usually to say often in no doubt exactly the same
way as she'd say orphan. On
the other hand she sounds what you might think is surprisingly
up-to-date in that she prefers the more modern version of certain
unstressed syllables than is suggested to be most usual in our
pronouncing dictionaries. That is, she has not the sit vowel but schwa in the first
syllable of words like divide,
enormous, enough, remain,
remember etc. She certainly regularly has a slight off-glide in words like care but we don't all agree with Professor
Clive Upton who has caused the Concise
Oxford Dictionary etc to represent such words as mainly
monophthongal. And she's modern enough to have the general
monophthongal allophone in such words as shared and baring.
Does she sound posh? Not as much as
some might think. She has a version of anxiety that has three syllables
not four and the middle one is a long [a:] vowel but this isn't
tremendously marked socially. Her most consistently upmarket vowel
value is the slightly front of centre beginning to the diphthong in know. I have a feeling that it used
to be more fronted but I could be wrong and before /l/ as in old it sounds quite mainstream
General British. Perhaps her vowel in real
is a little more like the one in rare
than most people have. As to the subject of Professor Harrington's
recently reported investigations, her last sound in words like baby occurs plenty of times in her
recent broadcasts but doesn't sound at all a notably close value. It
certainly gets no heavier than usual rhythmically. Being always
unstressed it is, for anybody, less likely to be of a very consistent
quality. It isn't markedly closer in lady
of where the following vowel might induce a closer than average
value from many speakers and it isn't prolonged so as to make it very
obviously a sit-vowel value.
However, that is what it is most like, certainly not like see. It's heard at its closest in easy where many speakers are
inclined to produce a slightly closer value than their usual one by the
action of the tendency called 'vowel harmony'.
Does she sound like a Londoner? Well she is a Londoner chiefly so it
wouldn't be surprising if she did occasionally to some slight extent
show the odd London feature. I've often thought that if I were played
recordings of her speech and from them she wasn't
the recognisable individual she is, I would incline to think she might
be from London. The kind of feature that strikes me in the present
recording is her choice of vowel in the -ness ending of happiness which is the sit value not the schwa most GB
speakers, no doubt even most Londoners, have today. (She uses that vowel
in business too but in that
word it's perfectly common.) She also seems to have that vowel in the
final syllable of considerate.
I remember being struck once by hearing her say what seemed to be the
combination of close vowel and replacement of the / t / by glottal
plosive in shortly that
struck me as markedly a Londonism but there was nothing like that in
the present recording unsurprisingly for something scripted and
carefully delivered.
Tone Symbols and Tone Idioms
At the end of a
year of phonetic blogging by John Wells I've been
looking back at the remarkable range of topics he has dealt with. I see
from his blog archive that he began by referring to what he called some
"tone idioms" and I was interested to note that some of his impressions
were quite different from mine. In particular he said that "the
interjection
oops or whoops, used when you've fallen, or dropped something, or made
a mistake, can only have a rise. You can’t say it with a fall."
Maybe
because I am thinking of a slightly different meaning of the expression
from his, I can and probably most often do say it on an Alt (for
this and the other four most basic tones of English see The Recognition
of Tones on this website) ie an upper level tone. As a warning I might
also say it on the less "basic" tone I call a Drop (a high-to-mid
movement). Where I'm sure Wells and I would agree completely is that
the extended expression 'Whoops a ˏdaisy would regularly have the Alt
plus Rise pattern. The initial Alt could for me be sometimes replaced
by a Fall. Of course it’ll be obvious that any expression quoted rather
than uttered spontaneously would receive the citational pitch pattern
of Alt plus Slump (or, with only one tone, Fall). For example we are
discussing the expression 'Whoops a ˎdaisy.
Wells's second "tone idiom" was the phrase 'by the
way', used in spoken English to introduce a side issue not connected
with the main subject you were talking about before, which he said
"seems (at least for me) always to have some kind of fall (high fall,
low fall, rise-fall), never a rise or fall-rise". Here again I differ.
In for example a possibly somewhat apologetic manner `By the `ˏway
seems a perfectly ordinary way to intone that phrase and 'By the ˏway
may tend to sound excessively ingratiating or patronising but far from
impossible. That version would probably be unlikely without a tone on
"by".
When he goes on to talk about the
not-ordinary-conversational expressions Hello, Hi and See you (tomorrow) I feel he's getting into rather deep water with his
limited framework. The problem is that, as I see it, a different tonal
system operates in "remote" speech from that of normal close-quarters
conversation. When he says "You can say hello! with any tone. But its
newer equivalent hi! seems to demand a fall" he seems to be skating
over the considerable number of different senses and contexts in which
they are used. "Hello" has a much wider range of applications.
Besides the Fall to which he says "Hi" is limited it is very often to
be heard on a Drop, the tone for which O'Connor and Arnold invented a
sign (ie ↘ ) though never ventured to use it to represent remote
speech. A Drop on "Hi" would connote routineness etc. These matters are
deep waters when one considers how complexly rhythms intersect with
pitches for a variety of semantic effects.
The Queen's English's Development
This is the title of
an item that has
appeared in today's Daily Telegraph
by a Mr Neil
Tweedie who has heard of a new article in the Journal of Phonetics it seems
returning to the topic of the Queen's speech characteristics. Professor
Jonathan Harrington, who we gather is on leave from his appointment at
MacQuarie University in Australia to occupy a chair of Phonetics and
Digital Speech Processing at the University of Munich, is the source of
the piece. Much of what is said could well have been based on
Harrington et al's JIPA article of 2000. Reference is made, as if it
were new, to Harrington's team having "conducted a thorough acoustic
analysis of all [sic] the Christmas broadcasts during her reign".
Actually that article dealt with nine
carefully selected broadcasts from the 50s to the 80s and the
new work does not cover the remaining 50 or so. The "study of Christmas
broadcasts to the Commonwealth since 1952 suggests the royal vowel
sounds have undergone a subtle evolution" Tweedie says. Fair enough,
but so
have the vowels of most of us who lived through that period. Think how
odd newsreels and films from that period have sounded to us to since
the 70s. Mr Tweedie's account of what Professor Harrington
said to him deals with comments in
the new article that don't reverse suggestions in the 2000 one but
amplify them by extending examination to the vowels of certain
unaccented syllables.
He remarks that Harrington says that in 1952 the
Queen would have spoken
of "the citay and dutay, rather than citee and dutee" but these
representations such as citee
are likely to give most readers a quite false impression of how she
speaks currently. The facts are, it seems, that instead of having more
or less exactly the same sound in both syllables of a word like city, a type of quality which has
become increasingly less favoured by most speakers with the General
British types of accent over the last half century, she latterly tends
to have joined the majority who have replaced this very centralised
type of vowel with something noticeably closer to the quality of her
/i:/ phoneme of words like see.
This by no means implies that she gives such syllables the strong
rhythmic value that could be implied by the ambiguous spelling citee.
Apparently it was such an eye-catching piece of
journalism that it
prompted the editors of BBC's Radio 4 Today programme to quote from it
but it's
difficult saying in print anything about such things at all clear to
people without some knowledge of phonetic matters. Anyway, half the
piece deserts the Harrington
comments for some pretty vacuous ones by the historian and royal
biographer Kenneth Rose. He is quoted amusingly as saying "About two or
three years ago I was sitting next to the Queen at tea and she remarked
that some of her grandchildren talked Estuary. I think she was talking
about the Phillips children — but then Princess Anne always sounded a
little suburban." Not my impression of Anne, I might say.
Fascinating
to see that what I think of as the rather inept term "Estuary English"
has even caught the attention of the royals. It has been rather
discredited by recent analyses of what the term might mean. I rather
regret that John Wells took up the term and nearly gave it
respectability. He could surely have suggested a better one for the
phenomenon. It had been recognisable for over 50 years before its 1984
christening. I was accustomed privately many years before that to call
it Metropolitanised or Londonised pronunciation which better described
styles that stretched along the south coast at least as far a
Portsmouth. Londinial? Praps not. Anyway John is now enjoying a
well-earned rest in the Caribbean sunshine in his property on the
British island of Monserrat. PS Perhaps "Londonish" as a noun as
well as adjective would be quite effective especially for the types of
this accent heard beyond the immediate London region.
(This item has been notably revised.)
Refs:
Harrington, J. (2006) An acoustic analysis of 'happy-tensing' in the
Queen’s Christmas broadcasts Journal
of Phonetics, 34(4): 439-57.
Harrington, J., Palethorpe, S., & Watson, C. (2000). Monophthongal
vowel changes in Received Pronunciation: an Acoustic Analysis of the
Queen's Christmas Broadcasts.
Journal
of the International Phonetic Association, 30, 63-78.
IPA Symbols and Re-spellings in OBG
This
new BBC
Guide has several changes from previous practices by both OUP in
its general dictionaries and by the Pronunciation
Unit itself (see the now unfortunately out-of-print BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names of 1971, second
edition 1983) as regards its English modified spellings. It has now largely deserted the
original principle of retaining the ordinary spelling as
undisturbed as possible so that it is hardly likely that the new style
is as easy for readers to handle as the old one was. The advantages,
the avoidance of use of diacritics over ordinary letters and of italics
and underlining, are dearly bought. The
use of italic th for /ð/
the first sound of this is an
exception. This might better have been avoided by use of "dh" in the
way "zh" has been employed for /ʒ/ the second consonant of measure. For the representation of
/x/, the ch of loch, "kh" now replaces the
previous BBC underlined ch.
For the vowel sounds it probably rather confusingly generalises "uh"
for schwa /ə/ instead of breves
over "a, e, o" and "u" viz ă, ĕ, ŏ & ŭ; for long schwa it generalises "ur" (eg at Fermi and kirk) instead of previous
alternating "er", "ur" and "ir". It does alternate "ah" and "ar" for
the arm vowel
/ɑː/.
Another less than
happy choice is "uu" for the foot
vowel /ʊ/. This is surely somewhat counter-intuitive: "uu" has almost
never to
my knowledge been used in this way before. Henry Sweet and Peter
MacCarthy both used "uu" for the goose
vowel /u:/. So does the Simplified Spelling Society whose proposals
were thought out very carefully over a number of years by very highly
qualified thinkers on such matters including Daniel Jones, Arthur
Lloyd-James and Harold Orton. Only
the Simplified Spelling Association
of the USA (in 1947) has ever proposed such a usage. [Added Feb
07] Also unattractive
are "y" for the price
diphthong /aɪ/ and the perhaps potentially misleading bracketed "(ng)"
to indicate a nasalised vowel in eg "oe(ng) bo(ng) va(ng) blah(ng)" for
un bon vin blanc where a
bracketed
"(n)" would have better suggested, except perhaps in the fourth case,
the common
English-speaker's substitution for a French-style nasal vowel.
Bracketed "(ng)"
could well mislead some users into presuming that in eg en bloc / eŋ / was an acceptable
pronunciation for the first word.
The above re-spellings (for the
phonetically
unversed
broadcaster) precede IPA transcriptions. In these one
finds the usual consonants and one understands the way the Welsh
fricative
/ɬ/ symbol is used for the beginnings of the IPA versions of Welsh
placenmames such as those beginning with the syllable Llan-. After all, that's what major pronouncing dictionaries show in such words. However,
actually, the modified-spelling versions
beginning /hl-/ are more realistic because the nearest a
native
speaker of English can manage for such words (unless he or she is one
in more than a hundred
thousand) is the un-Welsh /ɬlan-/ with the prop of a following
non-fricative /l/ to
lean on. Such words are perfect shibboleths for detecting a person who
hasn't acquired Welsh in infancy. Another bit
of likely misplaced optimism is the suggestion that any but a tiny
handful of broadcasters are going even to be aware of the existence in
German of a palatal fricative leave alone use one.
One notes
too that the vowel symbols adopted are the new modernising
"improvements" of the non-EFL arm of the OUP. In particular the
representation of the cry
diphthong as /ʌɪ / was surely a misjudgement that should not be
continued with. It's true that MacCarthy alone idiosyncratically used
it (though never except alongside /ʌʊ/) but Gimson had /aɪ, ɑʊ/
for the
pair of dipthongs of mice/mouse
which he converted to /aɪ, aʊ/ for the EPD in the interests of
simplicity. If the new OUP style had been /ʌɪ, ʌʊ/ it would have
seemed
unnecessary but just about tolerable; however,
/ʌɪ, aʊ/ must surely strike those who respect the IPA
recommendations
for the use of its cardinal vowels as perversely the wrong way round
for the first symbols in the two diphthongs.
Wells has expressed a
similar view: "Upton's notation implicitly identifies the first element
of price with the vowel
quality of cut -- an
identification that accords with the habits neither of RP nor of
southeastern speech (Estuary English). His choice of [ʌɪ] is really
very unsuitable." (Wells 2001) "IPA transcription systems for English"
(first versions on Wells's personal website but printed in) P[honetics] G[roup] Bulletin 9,
3-8 Santiago, Chile (editor H. Ortiz-Lira).
See also on this website "IPA vowel symbols for British English in
Dictionaries" §10. [PS
I've just noticed (26 March 07) that the BBC regrettably-internal-only
data base doesn't use the above-discussed OUP re-spellings system.]
The Bleck Hendbeg Problem
John Wells's
interesting comments today on "the
institutionalized
perception in central and eastern Europe that English /æ/ is to
be mapped onto a variety of the local short /e/ (phonetically [ɛ]) and
not onto the local short /a/" have inclined me to offer some more
examples of the way that the traditional German pronunciations of many
of their loanwords from English and of English placenames produce
awkward ambiguities for them. They are likely to have no distinction
between the pairs
Addison/Edison,
Alice/Ellis, Alison/Ellison, Campbell/Kemble, Dan/Den, Maddison/medicine, man/men, Saxton/sexton etc and come close to saying
belly-dancer when they mean
ballet-dancer. (The late Princess
Margaret used in her old-fashioned style to say
ballet in very like the way in which she must have
pronounced
bally).
Other
traditional German versions of English words they once naturalised may
suggest to the English-speaker strange spellings like
Kenterbury, mennidger and
hendikep for
Canterbury, handicap and
manager – the latter two
items taken into German use and spelt with /ɛ/ in pronouncing
dictionaries of the German language. In the circumstances it's no
wonder that so many German learners of English have had problems with
the English
ash vowel. I knew
a number
of British EFL teachers who
comically referred to the problem as the "bleck hendbeg syndrome".
I attribute this phenomenon to the fact that in the
nineteenth century the Germans led the world in EFL studies and that it
may have partly at least spread from their example. It was in response
to the demand from German EFL teachers that the very first phonetic
textbook dedicated to EFL use was produced by the great Henry Sweet. It
was published by Oxford University Press in 1885 and was written in
German and called
Elementarbuch des
Gesprochenen Englisch. It was so keenly appreciated that within
five years a translation of it into English had to be issued as
A Primer of Spoken English.
The
nineteenth century "received" pronunciation that Germans copied had a
much closer value for ash than we have now and varieties of it
persisted among very many speakers until the 1940s. A popular British
actor of the day, Robert Donat, acknowledged that he put great effort
into replacing his native Mancunian ash with a more "receivable"
version. Such a close ash can be heard in many British films made
before the fifties. Some of them excite incredulous mirth in people
today. Americans still have on average closer values than the General
British accent typically has.
By the way, I wish John had given us some examples
of the Irish use of a fricative for "intervocalic coda /t/".
[He has done so
now 15 Nov 2006.]
The Pronunciation of ESCHEW
Harking back to John Wells's
blog of 9 Oct 2006 on the
pronunciation of the word eschew,
one notes that the great OED records
for eschew the 14th
century spellings esshue
and eshew and
in the 16th century escue.
The pronunciation of the verb eschew
as /ɪˋʃuː/, like (one form of)
issue with
reversed stress, has certainly existed for a long time despite its lack
of recognition by British dictionaries. (The OED pronunciation of its
first syllable is given only as /es-/ but the original editor for E was
Henry Bradley who had other similar Northernisms.) The OED 16C spelling
escue seems to be early
evidence of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate
Dictionary's entry of a subvariant form /e`skjuː/. The word has perhaps
not been universally heard in conversation but it has been well
known in written English. Some of the great Bible translators used it,
notably Wycliff 1388 (2 Tim ii 16) and Tindale (Corinthians 2 viii 20).
It also occurred in Shakespeare (1598 Merry Wives v. v. 21). However,
the King James 1611 avoided it in favour of shun and the 20C New
English Bible shunned it in favour of avoid.
More interesting perhaps is the question of whether the esh /ʃ/
versions can be dismissed as ordinary sound change. Wells's blog said
"I’m not sure ... that it is right to speak of the affricate having
‘become’ a fricative, as if this were an ordinary sound change. (This
switch doesn’t apply to any other words, as far as I know.) Rather,
/ɪsˈtʃuː ~ eˈʃuː/ is a lexicophonetic ‘alternation or ‘transfer’".
Indeed that is what I had been inclined to think at one time but I'm
having second thoughts about the matter. I wonder, amongst other things,
whether one has been overlooking the fact that some folk among the many
who don't have /`stʃuː/ for the second syllable do use /`ʃuː/ for it
and even may sometimes have a double esh /ʃʃ/ which easily becomes a
single one for those who tend to perceive it as an everyday word.
After all there can be no doubt that many have /ʃʃ/ instead of /stʃ/ in
the very common word question
and I think many may have a weakform of
that word with a single /ʃ/. I doubt if I really agree with the Longman
Pronunciation Dictionary categorisations of the /ʃ/ variants of
mischance and mischief as un-“received” and I
think discharge and
Eastcheap are probably in the
same category. My problem with my
uncertainty of how far we're dealing with "ordinary sound change" in
some sense is compounded with contemplation of what may well have
happened centuries ago to words like action, section and diction (a
change which incidentally German speakers of English often might be
said to "overlook") and what has been happening within the past century
(I should say more extensively in American than British usage) to words like
actually, factual, and intellectual and to architecture, fracture,
lecture and structure.
The "<âHAPPY (final) vowel
I've received a charming
letter from a colleague in Belgrade,
Biljana Čubrović,
who writes:
"So far we have not taught our students how/when to use the symbols for
the happY vowel and thank YOU vowel. This year we have introduced new
curricula (in accordance with the Bologna declaration) and I thought it
was a very good moment to restructure the English Phonetics course as
well. Could you possibly refer me to some literature/practical
exercises in connection with these two symbols. I am also interested in
who first noticed the change and when that was?"
My reply for the moment is, it's not a matter to worry about in
teaching except to perhaps discourage a very strong rhythmic treatment
of final -y etc. I've never
thought that a very close approximation to
a particular pronunciation model is advisable as a goal. I'm very happy
to hear anyone sounding as if their native language wasn't English as
long as I feel they don't actually seriously distort English words. I
think that using English needn't, even shouldn't, sound as if you're
impersonating a particular English speaker ie it's possible to have
"too" good an accent. Most EFL users don't seem to me to have much
trouble with the final vowel of happy.
I've only found it very striking from the occasional native speaker of
German.
As to who first noticed the change and when that was, it's a long
story. I wrote a rather lengthy article about "Happyland
reconnoitred:the unstressed word-final-y vowel in General British
pronunciation" for Studies in the
Pronunciation of English (ed.) Susan
Ramsaran. London: Routledge pp 159-67 in 1990. The first two and the
last three or so
pages of this article (see Section 3 Item 2 on this website) mounted a
challenge to the Wells suggestion that
a relatively close but rhythmically weak final -y had been a fairly
recent development in 20th-century non-dialectal British pronunciation
notably
by a quotation from the 1780 Dictionary of the English Language of Thomas Sheridan (father of the
playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan and educated at Westminster School
in London) at p.165. I cd equally have cited John Walker's Critical Pronouncing Dictionary of 1791.
As to the corresponding weak /u/ of thankyou
etc, I feel rather
critical of the way current pronunciation lexicographers handle that
topic but it had better wait till another blog. [Postscript: this
promise was fulfilled in my blog 011 of 3 Jan 07]. This Website has
a short section (# 23) on "The unstressed word-final -y
vowel" in the article (Section 7 Item 4) on The Central Northern Non-Dialectal
Pronunciation of England".
English Dental Fricative Fronting.
I'm have such pleasure reading
John Wells's
fascinating blogs that I'm finding it hard to resist joining in the
discussions. Today he comments on the topic of English Dental
Fricative Fronting.
I can confirm most of what he says
from my own observations and shd
like to add that, after about forty years of residence in central
northern England, I have frequently noticed individual speakers with
fronting of their theta [θ] to [f], including many years ago an elderly
man who was cutting my hair who, when I very gently referred to
that peculiarity of his, plainly showed himself to my surprise
completely unaware that his speech was different from other people in
that respect.
On the three directions in which dental fricatives may go in English,
John rightly says French speakers tend to sibilation to [s, z].
One can add to this that some French native speakers may use [f] for
English /θ/. I remember for instance noting in the 80s that a French
actress Cécile
Paoli† who appeared in various English-language tv
films (well known on British television from the series Sharpe, Bergerac and Holby City) regularly used [f].
Oddly enough French borrowings of the English words "Thatcher",
"thriller" and "thug" seem to begin usually with /t/.
Any French word used in English with the spelling "
th" is almost
always to be heard with /θ/ by even the most sophisticated
English-speakers eg in
absinthe,
(crême
de) menthe, Pathé, pathétique, Lenthéric, Thermidor, Rothschild. In America and here too
Thoreau and
Theroux etc
, though plainly of French
extraction, also always have theta /θ/ for their "
th".
Although mainstream
English-speakers regularly exhibit
un-fronted dental articulations for their "
th"sounds, they quite often
may be heard to use stops rather than fricatives especially in strongly
emphatic utterances. Those who have a copy of one of the best-ever
British tv film dramas,
Brideshead
Revisited, may hear Diana Quick as Lady Julia produce a strong
dental plosive at the beginning of "
Thank you for your advice, doctor"
in its final episode. And anyone who might have the first of the
treasurable
recordings that J. D. O'Connor & G. F. Arnold made of their
controversial but stimulating
Intonation
of Colloquial English (long out of print except in Japan) may
hear the same beginning to "
Thank you" after the context "
Will you have
a drink?". An understandable context for such a delivery.
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