Archive 31 of JWL Blog

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Pronunciation Lexicography

Accents in HAPPENINGS

The specific kind of ‘happenings remarks’ here described are expressions which could be replies to questions such as ‘What’s happening?’ or ‘What’s happened?’ or What’s going to happen? or similar ones such as ‘What’s the matter?’ or ‘What’s being discussed?’ They are characterised by usually containing intransitive verbs and they take a form in spoken English which is very characteristic and not necessarily paralleled in other languages in regard to placement of climax tones (aka tonics). The predicates of these verbs are perceived by speakers as of lower semantic charge than their subjects and thereby denied the accentuation they usually have in other kinds of expressions. This exhibits an attitude that need not be considered illogical and therefore doesnt seem to require that they should necessarily be classified as idioms yet it is uncharacteristic of many other languages and consequently offen presents problems for speakers of English as an extra language.
 
These special types of ‘happenings remarks’ are not easy to define with complete precision. They were first really well identified and discussed, as ‘Event Sentences’, by Alan Cruttenden in 1986 in his book Intonation. That term, which he hasnt used agen in his re-casting of Gimson’s Pronunciation of English, is conveniently concise but it has some slight drawbacks. One is that event isnt as neutral a term as one could wish. As OED sez, it’s “In mod[ern] use chiefly restricted to occurrences of some importance”. Another is that whether they are exactly full sentences or only clauses isnt of material significance.

Exampes are:  The `phone’s ringing. The `kettle’s boiling. My `watch has stopped. The `cat’s been sick. The `milkman’s coming. I’ve got a `job to do. The `telly’s not working. The `power's off. The `baby’s crying. This `lamp’s not coming on. The `dog’s got out. The `boss wants you. Our `guests have arrived. A `thief must have taken it. The `toast’ll burn. Your `house is on fire.(You’d better be careful because) the `floor’s uneven. His `grandfather's died.

The sentence or phrase has to have a content-bearing subject eg not the kind of anaphoric word found in sentences that begin with pronouns or other unspecific words. A remark like There’s a policeman at the door might be emphatic enough to be There’s a po`liceman at the `door but wd more usually be accented as There’s a po`liceman at the door.  There’s someone at the door wd usually be There’s (ˈ)someone at the `door and virtually never *There’s `someone at the door. That wd only be feasible if it took the unusual form of a contradiction as There’s (or more emphatic'ly There `is) `someone at the ˏdoor. (Such a sentence might sound rather unfr'endly unless the effect of the Fall on someone were to be softened by a Rise on door.) For more on this topic, besides Cruttenden’s book, see §3.30 “Events” in J. C. Wells’s English Intonation (2006).

An Idiosyncratic Pronunciation

In his “Linguism” blog of 18 October 10 Graham Pointon remarked:
“[In]... In Our Time, (Radio4..14thOctober)...Tim Blanning, Emeritus Professor of Modern European History at Cambridge University...used the word protagonists...pronounc[ing] it /prəˈtædʒənɪsts/. I wonder if he also says /ænˈtædʒənaɪz/ and /ænˈtædʒənɪst/. This is a pronunciation not given by any of the current pronunciation dictionaries, but I wonder if, being an eminent scholar, he is setting a trend for the future?”

This is such a totally unexpected version, with so many comparable words like agony, paragon, octagonal etc all totally regular, that I imagine it’s a complete idiosyncrasy. The reason for its being so I guess is what I referred to in my Blog 049 when I sed “It often becomes difficult not to slip back from time to time into using some unorthodox version of a word one internalised on the basis of a .. guess at its sound value from an ambiguous spelling met with before one had noticed it being pronounced differently by others”. It wd certainly be int'resting to learn whether the single occasion that I, at least, heard him say that word in that way represented a regular usage or an atavistic recurrence of a long-suppressed habit. If it were the latter it wd be a phenomenon I’ve observed in my own speech. Some people may wish to retort that there are clear analogies to guide one how to say such words which are usually patently loans from the classical languages but I’m afraid the pattern is muddier than they may think. Many highly educated people tend to be misled by presumed analogies.

Some items from OED tending to muddying of the picture:
callipygous (kælɪˈpɪdʒəs, -paɪgəs).  ODP has only /ʤ/ for both GB & GA
digoxin only /dɪ`dʒɒksɪn/ “[f. dig(italis + t)oxin.]”
hegemony (hiːˈdʒɛmənɪ, ˈhɛdʒiːmənɪ,ˈhiː-; or with g hard) 
gibber (dʒɪbə(r), gɪbə(r))
gibberish /ʤ-, g-/
gibbon  Only with /g/ tho from Fr gibbon /ʒibõ/ not *guibbon.
gibbous (ˈgɪbəs) “[f. L. gibb-us hump + -OUS...The guttural (g) in this and the related words is     contrary to the ordinary rule for the pronunciation of Latin derivatives
    but there is no evidence that (dʒ) was ever used.]”
giga- prefix (dʒ-, gaɪgə; dʒ-, gɪgə)
gimbal /ʤ-, g-/
gynae only /g/
gynaecology /g-, ʤ-/ OED2 1989. Murray in 1900 only recognised /ʤ-/.
hegemony (hiːˈdʒɛmənɪ, ˈhɛdʒiːmənɪ, ˈhiː-; or with g hard)
longitude /ʤ-, g-/
mortgagor /-dʒ-/ only
obligor is shown with only /g/ except that in 1902 after the spelling -geor Murray added /-dʒ-/

Other items that contribute to muddying of the picture:

Albigensian LPD  /ʤ-, g-/
algae EPD, LPD  /ʤ-, g-/
analogous LPD /g-, ʤ- / EPD and OED /g/ only
calcareous /k/ only but I’ve he'rd tokens of /kalsɛːriəs/
Celtic very well known with /k/ and /s/
Figes (= Figgis /g/) /ʤ/
fungi LPD & EPD /g-, ʤ- /
Gengis (Khan) LPD, OALD /g-, ʤ- / EPD /ʤ-, g-/
Gimson LPD & EPD /g-, ʤ- /
Gillian EPD & LPD /ʤ-, g-/
legislation only /g/ but I’ve he'rd tokens of /legɪs-/
pisces LPD /ˈpaɪsiːz, ˈpɪsk-.../
Sigismond LPD /g-, ʤ-/
suffragan OED2 and EPD only /g/ but LPD has “Δ” ie equivalent to “Don’t say it with /ʤ/ if             you don’t wish to be disapproved of by numbers of people”.
veganin only /ʤ/ LPD. So also OED “Trade term”.  (No “etymology” offered).

Non-seriously:
In Jabberwocky I suspect Lewis Carroll me'nt /g/ for both
gyre & gimble but /ʤaɪə/ is to be heard for gyre
When I was a young wartime trainee infantryman I was drilled by a very unsophisticated corporal who told us to keep our bodies “/rɪgɪd/”!

The historical researches of phoneticians in the 19th century showed how ancient Greek and Latin differed greatly from how we’d come to pronounce them. When it led people to revise their habits a good deal of havoc was caused! The above examples are no dou't far from an exhaustive list.

PS My thanks to Graham  Pointon for drawing my attention to mortgagor. 

English Transcription Editor

Kraut's English phonetic blog
has responded to a request for a longer sample of the working of the “English Transcription Editor PhoTransEdit” which is a free Windows “tool” that takes written English copy in regular orthography and converts it into phonemic transcriptions in the most popular version of IPA used in the EFL world offering either British or American pronunciations. All you have to do is to enter the text to be transcribed.
The passage provided by Kraut was about 150 words of dialogue between a host and his/her food-faddist dinner guest. One’s reminded on seeing it of Dr Johnson’s remark to Boswell about a woman preacher:  "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." It wou'd be amazing, of course, if it were done perfectly but it ambitiously makes a remarkably good shot at the job. Numeric'ly more of the imperfections are false rhythmic indications than anything else. The most serious problems are failure to recognise certain grammatical categories. The vertical bars where  someone completely stops speaking (which I’ve drawn attention to by inserting ——) are completely superfluous. Here’s the transcription followed by some line-by-line comments:

1.| də teɪk ˈsʌm.θɪŋ mɔː | ðæts nɒt ɪ.ˈnʌf
There’s failure here to discriminate between the common weakform most usual for “do” and the strongform essential when the word is a command needing its strongform /duː/. We note from the start that the IPA authorised low dot is used to convey syllable divisions as in EPD, not the LPD unorthodox spaces. They arnt much use and even quite superfluous where a stress mark coincides, as at enough. The stress markings seem to be phonological rather than phonetic (ie as far as they suggest intonation tonological rather than tonetic): notably there are no stress marks where rising elements of Fall-Rise tones are highly probable to be the speaker's choice of intonation — one of the great disadvantages of showing only stresses and not intonations.
 2. tu kiːp ə bɜːd ə.ˈlaɪv | —— wel aɪ wəʊnt bi
There’s failure here at “to” to discriminate between the weakform /tu/ used only before vowels and the other weakform /tə/ used only before consonants. Intonation notation wdve been much more useful than mere stresses. Anyway, it misses the fact that, altho it might be that a speaker wd only have one stress in this first of these two phrases, it certainly wou'dnt be on alive but on bird. Won’t rather calls for a stress mark.
3. ˈhæ.vɪŋ ˈe.ni miːt | aɪm ə   
4.ˌve.dʒɪ.ˈteə.rɪən | ju nəʊ  | —— əʊ | wel | də
Vegetarian with medial /ɪ/ is what EPD prefers; with /ɪ / not /i/ in its ending -ian, it follows neither EPD nor LPD. LPD has /ə/ medially ie /ʤə/ which wdve been my choice too as rather more mainstream GB (General British). Same comment on do as in line 1. As Oh is indicated by the vertical bar following it to be rhythmically independent it must have a stress mark. The bar before you is inappropriate: it obviously begins an intonational tail. The one after know is superfluous becoz the speaker has changed.  Well either requires a stress mark or removal of the rhythmical-break bar after it.
5. həv mɔː ˈve.dʒɪ.təb.l̩z | mɔː
There’s failure here agen to use a strongform for imperative have which shdve been /hӕv/. EPD and LPD are in agreement that the medial /ɪ/ in vegetable is only a minority usage in modern GB which indeed usually lacks the syllable that the /ɪ/ constitutes. This cd well also be a confusing of GB and GA usages.
6. pə.ˈteɪ.təʊz | wʊd ju laɪk | —— wel | aɪ
The bar after potatoes is unsuitable becoz would you like is clearly a tail to a tone. Well is indicated by the vertical bar after it to be rhythmically independent. It’d praps be better with a stress mark or with the bar removed.
7. dəʊnt ˈjuː.ʒə.li iːt ˈstɑː.tʃi fuːdz | aɪm
8. ɒn ə ˈdaɪət | ju siː | —— aɪm ʃʊə ju dəʊnt
EPD and LPD are in agreement that the more usual current GB form of sure is /ʃɔː/. Probably GA confusion agen. You see shd not be preceded by a bar: it’s a tone tail.  A stress mark at sure wd be much more likely than not: as it stands it indicates a quite extr'ord'nrily long prehead.
 9. niːd tu bi |  aɪ ˈəʊn.li wɪʃ aɪ wəz əz
Need badly needs a stress mark. Comment on to as for line 2. A stress on I wd be more normal than what we have.
10. slɪm əz ju ɑː—— | wel | aɪm nɒt ˈrɪə.li
You badly needs a stress mark. See the comment on well at line 6.
11. ˌəʊ.və.ˈweɪt | əv  kɔːs | bət aɪ də ɪt fə
The first bar isnt really appropriate. Do needs a stress mark and as a non-auxiliary main verb it shou'd have its strongform /duː/.  
12. maɪ ˈhelθs seɪk |—— əʊ | ɪz ðɪs jər əʊn
Because Oh is indicated by the vertical bar after it to be rhythmically independent it’d be better with a stress mark or with the bar removed. Own wd most offen have contrastive stress.
13. aɪ.ˈdɪə  | ɔːr ə ju ˈfɒ.ləʊɪŋ jə ˈdɑːk.tərz
Idea needs to be followed by  a bar to indicate a rhythmic break: otherwise linking /r/ wd be the natural GB usage. Following as transcribed is three syllables not two. Doctors is completely inappropriate being simply the General American pronunciation of the word.
14.ˈɔː.dəz | ——ˈæk.tʃuə.li aɪv ˈne.və biːn ɪn
Actually isnt mainstream GB as shown. LPD conveys the normal form slightly better than EPD because the latter’s presentation is too condensed. A version with medial /u/ rather than /uə/  wd be acceptable but wou'dnt be necessarily commoner than one with /ə/.
15.ðə ˈhæ.bɪt əv ˈse.tɪŋ mʌtʃ stɔː baɪ
Store needs a stress mark.
16. fɪ.ˈzɪʃ.n̩z | ——əʊ | pə.ˈhæps | jə laɪk
Comment on oh as at line 12. The weakform used here of you’re and praps also in line 13 tend to suggest fast or casual enunciation: they’re more usual in GA at average tempo than in GB.
17. prɪns tʃɑːlz ˈɪn.tə ɔːl.ˈtɜː.nə.tɪv
 Charles without stress suggests hurried delivery at best. A bar to slightly break the rhythmic flow wdve been better after Charles. Comment on (in)to as for line 2.
18. ˈmed.sn̩ | ðen |
Then in this sense is normally rhythmically enclitic not independent as the preceding bar indicates.

In my opinion phonemic transcription is an excellent exercise for advanced EEL students but I deplore imposing on them the complexity of the simultaneous extra task of displaying prosodic features as well as phonemes. So I always set for transcription passages with the prosodies provided in the form of simple tonetic markings never merely stresses — which are undesirably ambiguous. With very advanced students I have sometimes set the task of adding tonetic indications to passages in ordinary orthography but it’s quite difficult for many of them and needs a fair amount of preliminary guidance to be practicable and profitable.

Prosodic Problems for EEL

John Wells on We'nsday the 6th of October returned to a topic that has much exercised him in the past, what he’s accustomed to call “intonation idioms”. He has been discussing these in his Phonetic Blogs since 2006 the first year of that series. On this occasion he turned to some more or less exclamatory phrases beginning by saying “Imagine you’re a non-native speaker. You want to perform a dialogue that includes this exchange:
A: Let’s have another drink.  B: Now there’s a thought!”

He complained that the ‘rules’ he gives his EEL (aka EFL) students for the predicting of appropriate prosodic patterns of what one might call not very colloquial, plain, common types of spoken English won’t work for such things, saying
My ideal is to supply EFL learners with an algorithm that enables them to predict with confidence an appropriate spoken intonation pattern for any written fragment of dialogue.
I certainly sympathise. I’m as much given as he is to encouraging ambitious students who want to aim at such a goal as he has in mind but I wonder if we’re being too optimistic in hoping to help them learn such things effectively by tuition. The ones who make advances in such a difficult area seem most offen to do so not from the inevitably very limited hours in which they receive teaching but from immersion in large amounts of conversational activity with native speakers, copying not theorising, as some of his commenters have suggested.
 
Anyway, in my opinion his unsuccessful students owe their problems, with especially these exclamatory types of expressions, as much as anything to insufficient knowledge of lexical matters such as the ranges of meanings of the words involved. These must surely be largely what cause his students to assign to them the unsuitable prosodies he mentions. Of B’s response above he sed “The meaning of the whole is also idiomatic: something like “What a good idea!” To my mind he might just as well say that “What a good idea!” is an idiom. The only reason, one presumes, he’d not want to call it idiomatic is because that expression uses phraseology more commonplace, less exclusively conversational than the wording of the other. He wou'dnt consider “What a clever dog!” to be idiomatic but he does want to classify “There’s a clever dog!” as such. One is less ordinary than the other but they can both take exactly the same variety of prosodies. That a phrase etc is commonly and widely used by speakers of a language surely doesnt mean that it’s an idiom. Some relevant definitions from OED  are the following:

Idiom: a peculiarity of phraseology approved by the usage of a language, and often having a signification other than its grammatical or logical one.
Now: Used at the beginning of a clause, or question, or elliptically in a question, with emphatic or rhetorical force. eg Now to sum up...
There: Pointing out a person or object with approval or commendation, or the contrary. Also in anticipatory commendation of the person addressed eg There’s a fine horse! all skin and bones.
Those who’d like to read more on this kind of topic might like to look at some of my other blogs such as especially 007 which, by an unfortunate glitch, at the moment has to be accessed by putting "Tone Idioms" into the search box at the he'd of my home page, 152, 155, 191, 212, 214, 218, 219. 

Less noted Assimilations

At §4.4 ⁋⁋1-8 on this website I’ve given a brief account of the assimilations I think it’s worth EEL (English-as-Extra-Language) users paying attention to. Here I mainly want to make a few observations on some assimilations that occur in English speech that arent much commented on. The kind of assimilation I’m concerned with here is (not allophonic but) the process in which a phoneme is converted into a different phoneme under the influence of a nearby segment. At least since Joseph Wright’s 1888 translation of a Comparative Grammar of Indo-Germanic Languages by Karl Brugman, the anticipative types have become widely known as ‘regressive’ assimilations and those in which the converted phoneme follows the influencing one known as ‘progressive’ assimilations. I prefer to use the simpler terms “pre assimilations” and “post assimilations” (not employing hyphens since the ‘prefixes’ are functioning adjectivally).

In the context of nearby segments like /ɪ/ and~or /ʧ/ etc the weakform /əz/ of the verb form has is offen weakened to /ɪz/ eg `This has been very ˏnice /ðɪs ɪz biːn veri naɪs/ and /wɪʧ ɪz i teɪkən/ 'Which has he ˋtaken? Such items havnt received mention in Gimson or Cruttenden but Jones’s remark in his Outline of English Phonetics 1932 onwards §849 (v) that it’s “not uncommon to hear” items like /wɒt ɪ ju `duːɪŋ/ and /ˈgəʊ ʊ`weɪ/ for What are you doing and Go away still holds good.

Some at least quite common pre assimilations not recorded by lexicographers include /`ӕpsəluːt/ absolute, /`ӕvvətaɪz/ advertise, /ə`niːθθətɪst/ anesthetist, /ə`lettrɪkl/ electrical, /`hɒspɪdl/ hospital, /`mӕŋnɪfaɪ/ magnify, /`rekədnaɪz/ recognise. (The way historical Bethlehem /→ betləm → bedləm/ became bedlam is an intriguing parallel to this development of hospital which, pacē the British lexicographers, is currently the predominant GB usage.)  Common post assimilations include /ɪnnə`vɪʤuəl/ individual (Cf the Jones 1932 Outline at §847 vi), /`əʊnni/ only, /`meɪnni/ mainly, /`sɜːtn̩ni/ certainly. (Incident'ly the weakforms  /əʊni/ and /sɜːtni/ are extremely common).

Students are sometimes inclined to display common assimilations in making phonemic transcriptions to such an extent as to be rather wasting their time since the occasions on which failure to make an assimilation produces an unnatural sounding result are not numerous — certainly not as important a consideration as avoiding the unnaturalnesses consequent upon failing to use weakforms normally employed by native speakers. There’s nothing in the least unnatural about using non-assimilating pns of words like /sʌnbri/ for Sunbury. Even intra-family not markedly casual speech doesnt necessarily involve use of large-scale use of assimilations. People ord'n'rily in speech that isnt at all formal or markedly self-conscious easily recognise when they hear median price that it’s not medium price and Sumburgh that it’s not Sunborough.

Mostly GB speakers say sandwich as /sӕnwɪʤ/ but some, chiefly the more self-conscious, may say /sӕndwɪʤ/ or /sӕndwɪʧ/. Not uncommonly, but not particularly casually, they may say /sӕmwɪʤ/. One sometimes hears /sӕŋwɪʤ/ but mainly from demotic speakers. Yet agen some say /sӕnwɪʧ/ but praps usually pluralising it as /sӕnwɪʤɪz/.

Among less common pre assimilations is the type with conversion of /θ/ to /s/ as in both sides /bəʊs saɪdz/ a phrase which was eg regularly so uttered by a BBC chief Parl'mentry reporter for some years whenever he said “both sides of the House”. Another unusual one is a new OED entry (2004 with its earliest British quote for 1937) Howzat /haʊ(z) `zӕt/ with pn given with a /z/ elided and an aitch included tho five out of seven of its illustrative quotations show it spelt with no initial aitch. This is chiefly known not as an item of conversation but as the prompt even urgent cry to a cricketing umpire requesting him to give his judgment that the batsman is “out”. Its usually very rapid enunciation accounts for the dropt aitch customary even among the educationally sophisticated.

Free Spelling

Questions on Commands

Tami Date asked these questions on the 25th of September 2010: my comments in brackets.
As far as I know, the following type of commands [I wou'dnt call them a type of command only a choice of wording] are never taught in class here in Japan. If Japanese teachers should see them in teaching material, they would be perplexed. [Surely only becoz they’re unfamiliar expressions.]
(1) `Oh, `my. `Oh, `no. `Oh, `my. ˈWhat did I `do? `Please be a `dream. `Please be a ˏdream.   It’s [a] `nightmare.
(2) [The chime goes off at the door. Praying.]  ˈBe Reˎbecca!  `Be Re`becca!
(3) [The phone rings]  `Please be ˎRandy. [Talks into the phone] Hel  ́lo?
Japanese teachers would think they are ungrammatical structures because let + the prop subject it are missing. I was wondering if they were the kind of things that American teenagers today are likely to utter... [Prob’bly not very common either side of the Atlantic. I’m not at all sure.]
 I think they should be rephrased as follows: [Only if you merely want to make them “easier”.]
(1)  `Please let it be a ˎdream. (2)  `Let it be Reˎbecca.
(3)  `Please let it be ˎRandy. Similarly, school-grammar-wise,
(4) is also not adequate, is it? [Tami’s sense of “adequate” isnt clear to me.]
(4) [A small boy shouting up to the sky] (from a cartoon)
I said“ `Snow!” Come `on, `Snow! `Snow!"  ˈOˏkay, then. `Don't snow! ˈSee what `I care? [Without hearing how it was spoken, the question mark is a bit dou'tful.]
(5) I `like this ˏweather. ˈLet’s have it fo`rever!
...if a student says or writes in your EFL/ESL class, "Please be fine tomorrow!" what would you do? Would you accept it..? [Hard to say with no context. If s/he’s looking up at the sky (to God) it’s no dou’t okay.]
By the way, with respect to (1')〜(3'), will the be-verb be accented or not?
[With no context of the previous climax (final) word being strest: No!].

The prosodic notations I’ve inserted above are all likely but some alternatives are possible. It’s prob'bly true that commands (presumably addressed to God) beginning  “Please be...” are less common and more colloquial than ones beginning “Let...” but they are grammatically commands so get the same stress-and-intonation treatment. Plain commands usually have (fully) falling climax tones; polite or pleading ones usually have finally (not very) narrow low rises. “ `Please be a ˏdream ” cd suggest a change of tone to pleading. The two full Falls on the second “ `Be Re`becca!” can suggest increase of urgency. By the way, the exclamation “My!”, which is a euphemistic substitute for “My God!”,  goes back to before Independence,  tends to sound old-fashioned if used at all in the UK. Can’t say for the US.

PS Tami has elucidated “adequate”. He me'nt what I’d prefer to term “advisable or suitable for EFL adoption”.  On my “Without hearing how it was spoken, the question mark is a bit dou'tful” he commented “Sorry. It was an oversight on my part. I’ve checked the cartoon.  I should have written "See what I care!" ” He has also sent me a copy of the cartoon where I see that four words I gave maximum tonetic stress to were italicised in the captions: `Snow!ˈOˏkay, then. `Don’t  snow! ˈSee what `I care? I `like this ˏweather. ˈLet’s have it fo`rever!

Rational Spellings

On the fo'rteenth of this munth John Wells in his blog referred to “the issue of spelling reform” after reading in his newspaper an unorthodoxly spelt “memorial tribute”. He remarked “In the absence of any official rationalization of spelling, people are more and more doing their own thing”. Praps that was a shade optimistic but it’s true that the universality of texting has braut that subject more into the popular consciousness than it has been for many a long year. He went on to mention the American spelling-reform advocate Melvil Dewey (1851-1931) and to give us a link to an int'resting sample of his rationalized spelling of over 1600 words in the form of an extract from his “Dewey decimal classification and relativ index for libraries” made available online by the Spelling Society.

Among the Society’s current objectives are “to prepare a graded set of proposals for relating word-forms more predictably to speech-sounds”. Their precursor the Simplified Spelling Society in its book New Spelling presented in the first half of the last century an excellent fulfilment of that aim, a publication they now no longer promote. They also wish “to persuade the public, opinion-formers, policy-makers and relevant agencies of the need for and practical possibilities of reforming English spelling”. There’s nothing much about their structure or history at their website but John has been their President at least in the past. He certainly gave them a cracking good lecture on English accents and their implications for spelling reform which you can read at his home page. I’ll bet it dampend the enthusiasm of their less clued-up following. 

I’m not at all an advocate of spelling reform not because it’s undesirable but because it’d be utterly impracticable to attempt it. The late twentieth century developments in information tec'nology made it more than ever obviously a futile goal. What I do advocate is tolerance for unorthodox but rational spellings (praps especially by s'coolchildren) and rejection of the fetish of consistency and of the tyranny of editors. What I found int'resting in the Dewey extract was that it produced a quite cumftably readable selection of rationalisations whose lack of complete consistency didnt make it at all unacceptable to a tolerant reader. Here are some of the things its text did:
It let traditional unstrest vowels stay eg sistem, simbol, literary, every  with no use of  schwa or elisions except for the form givn.
It dropt final e from ar, wer, eaz, becauz, infinit, relativ, simpl, singl, hav, valuabl, languaj,     and servis tho not from more, whose, private.
It modified alredy, erly, hed, insted, lern, welthy, spred but kept great, year.
It modified eaz, uzed, confuzion but kept “s” in is, business, result, shelvs, involvs, givs, present, thousands.
It kept any, many, -tion  eg sugjestion.
It simplified many double consonants at eg actualy, aknowlej, adition, clasify, colection, cripld, tel, les, stil, wil, necesity, posibly, wholy, quik but not at allow, approximate, assume, correspondence, matter, difficulties, committees, immense, essential.
It had partial differential use of i and y eg myt (for might), applyance; sistem, miriad but kept final -y eg in erly.
It had group but could, would became cud,wud.
It had sumthing, dun (ie done), yung but work, wonderful, none, one, other, money, doing.
It had skeme for scheme; s for c in convinst, servis, novis; f  for ph in eg pamflet.
It had j for g in aknowlej, chanjing, paje, urjent, advantaj, hinjes, larjly, orijinal, rejister.
It had known but nemonic (ie mnemonic).
It had enuff, myt but sought.
The suffix -ed became d (eg involvd, clasifyd) or t (eg increast) or remaind when syllabic (eg antiquated).
John’s blog ended
“It would certainly, I think, be advantageous to abolish the -e not only in love but also in have and give... It would be nice, too, to be able to distinguish liv (verb, lɪv) from live (adjective, laɪv).” Yes, and /riːd/ frm /red/, both “read”, and on and on from those.
There’s nothing stopping him letting himself make those nice distinctions — in his blogs at least — whenever he feels like it! If people often saw sophisticated, well-informed scholars like him breaking the stranglehold of tradition in favour of plenty of rational spellings it just might stop them bullying the general population into pretty senseless conformity to so many nonsense spellings.

The GB pronunciation of ONE

 
The John Wells phonetic blog of the 15th of September 2010 entitled “ONE” mentioned something that I hadnt noticed hitherto in the excellent 2006 re-named “Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary” (formerly simply the “English Pronouncing Dictionary”) by Daniel Jones and subsequent editors, now listed as at its 17th edition. At least in this latest version, it indicates a second British pronunciation for the word “one” viz /wɒn/ (the same vowel as in on). With commendable consistency it also lists this type of variant at the entries once, none and nothing.

Of course Daniel Jones was perfectly aware of such versions as in use by very large numbers of perfectly well educated speakers in midland and northern England but his policy was not to include markedly regional usages which these certainly are. The present policy for EPD is, it’s true, formulated somewhat differently as “more broadly based and accessible ... the pronunciation of professional speakers employed by the BBC as newsreaders and announcers on BBC1 and BBC2 television, the World Service and BBC Radio 3 and 4, as well as many commercial organisations such as ITN”. I’ve been for many years a regular systematic observer of a very large proportion of such broadcasters on all these channels and I consider these newly-admitted usages to be completely unusual — that is to say he'rd from none but an extremely small number of the speakers described. If that list had also included presenters of a wide variety of programmes and weather forecasters etc the situation wd not have been so clear.

The point at issue is not any suggestion that CEPD shd not include these four items but that it is by doing so in danger of misinforming especially its major public in the EFL world. They are very acceptably also included in the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary but there the reader is clearly informed about the limitations on their currency. Even the Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation, which has included in its very arbitrarily selected “model” avowedly ‘northern’ variants of bath, chance etc with the hat vowel, refrains from admitting these four items. Forms like /wɒn/ are rather sporadically distributed. For example I’ve lived in one Yorkshire village for over thirty years and mainly hear there from born-and-bred Yorkshire people who don’t have /wᴧn/ either /wən/ or, mainly from demotic contacts, /wʊn/. The form /wɒn/ is very familiar to me from other Yorkshire, notably Leeds, people but not usually he'rd in this precise locality.

I suppose it cou'd possibly be that the CEPD editors have been influenced by comments by Wells such as “there is a trend towards a preference for wɒn over wʌn (or for some perhaps wʊn, wən — anyhow, STRUT) in BrE, in no age group does it reach 50%”. But readers of Wells’s accounts of his self-selected group of speakers on whose evidence he bases his undou'tedly int'resting statistics are claimed neither to be representative of the British population nor to be exemplars of the most regionally neutral variety of English pronunciation (namely “RP” which is an equivalent label for what Roach & company call ‘BBC pronunciation’ and I prefer to designate as GB ie ‘General British’) which Wells’s text in the main records. This problem I hope will be resolved in the next edition of CEPD by the employment of such a device as a prefixed “N” to indicate that the form listed has only a more northerly currency in England.

PS 2017: The suggestion just made seemed to have been noted at CEPD because in the next i.e.18th edition of 2011 there appeared immediately after the entry ‘one’, from which the northern variant had been removed, a prominent column-width six-line note in a pink-background box stating that the  removed pronunciation“cannot yet be recommended as representative of the accent described here”. Identical clumsy boxes were inserted also at the other three words we mentioned.

BlogRoll

• DCblog (David Crystal)
• John Maidment
• Linguism (Graham Pointon)
• John Wells