PhonetiBlog

There seems to be a bug in at least one version of Safari (v2.0.4) which causes it to crash when displaying my Home page. If you experience this problem, please use Firefox instead.

Readers who need explanations of any of the abbreviations used may find them at Section 1 of the Home Page.

RSS Feed

Archive 27 2010-04-16 to 2010-05-10 (#270 to #261)
Archive 26 2010-02-16 to 2010-04-13 (#260 to #251)
Archive 25 2009-12-25 to 2010-02-13 (#250 to #241)
Archive 24 2009-11-22 to 2009-12-23 (#240 to #231)
Archive 23 2009-10-06 to 2009-11-19 (#230 to #221)
Archive 22 2009-09-12 to 2009-10-05 (#220 to #211)
Archive 21 2009-08-04 to 2009-09-11 (#210 to #201)
Archive 20 2009-06-09 to 2009-07-26 (#200 to #191)
Archive 19 2009-05-07 to 2009-06-06 (#190 to #181)
Archive 18 2009-04-04 to 2009-05-05 (#180 to #171)
Archive 17 2009-02-23 to 2009-03-30 (#170 to #161)
Archive 16 2009-01-21 to 2009-02-07 (#160 to #151)
Archive 15 2008-12-03 to 2009-01-18 (#150 to #141)
Archive 14 2008-09-14 to 2008-12-01 (#140 to #131)
Archive 13 2008-08-08 to 2008-09-12 (#130 to #121)
Archive 12 2008-07-07 to 2008-08-02 (#120 to #111)
Archive 11 2008-06-10 to 2008-07-04 (#110 to #101)
Archive 10 2008-05-03 to 2008-06-07 (#100 to #091)
Archive 9 2008-03-30 to 2008-04-17 (#090 to #081)
Archive 8 2008-03-18 to 2008-03-28 (#080 to #071)
Archive 7 2008-01-20 to 2008-03-17 (#070 to #061)
Archive 6 2007-11-30 to 2008-01-14 (#060 to #051)
Archive 5 2007-07-22 to 2007-11-28 (#050 to #041)
Archive 4 2007-06-15 to 2007-07-20 (#040 to #031)
Archive 3 2007-02-23 to 2007-06-14 (#030 to #021)
Archive 2 2007-01-03 to 2007-02-21 (#020 to #011)
Archive 1 2006-11-01 to 2007-01-01 (#010 to #001)

Accentual Idioms

This summer period is the time of year when for most of my working life I’ve been accustomed to teach on summer courses. Looking over the materials I intend to use this year, I wondered agen what advice I cd give the people I’m tutoring about finding information on one of the topics I’d be raising with admittedly very advanced students. This was the matter of what one may call “stress” or praps more precisely “accentuation idioms” or if you like “tonicity idioms”. In these phrases the tonic (or “main”) stress falls not in the usual place ie on the last content (ie non-grammatical) word but on some earlier content word. These anomalous accent placings are so unpredictable and incapable of being judged by simple logic that it seems fair to call them “idiomatic”.

Limiting myself to expressions that most educated English-speakers wd be familiar with and avoiding anything that might strike one as at all merely literary, I selected mainly at random ten expressions to turn up in the current editions of the three outstanding EFL-oriented dictionaries conveniently available online namely the Oxford and Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionaries and their rival of only one year the MacMillan Dictionary. The idioms were, according chiefly to the headwords under which they were found:

`axe to grind, have an
`flesh creep, make one’s
`game away, give the
`head on one’s shoulders, have a good
`hair stand on end, make one’s
`house on fire, get on like a
`pretty kettle of fish
`land lies, see how the
`fish to fry, have other
`spoon in one's mouth, born with a silver

I’m pleased to say that I found all of them in the two “ALD” works and most of them in the MacMillan which came off slightly less successfully to my surprise coz my general impression of it is that it’s extremely good at listing “Phrases”. I’ve given them above in order of their earlier-than-predicted-tonic words. That was the good news. Now here’s the bad. None of these online dictionaries gave readers any clue that they were irregularly stressed. And altho all three dictionaries very valuably provide audible spoken pronunciations, the MacMillan being the most generous about collocations (eg giving pronunciations not only for ‘private’ but also for ‘private detective’) phrases dont seem to get such treatment. It wdve been a perfectly simple matter for each of them to indicate these irregular accentuations. In this respect the Oxford ALD gives the unfortunate impression of having gone backwards in these online versions. In 1974 all these expressions were supplied with appropriate stress markings. This was something I introduced into that dictionary, as its first Pronunciation Editor, at that third edition. One must also add that in the preface to the fourth edition as issued in 1989 it was claimed not exactly appropriately that “as a new feature[sic] ... a full treatment ... of stress idioms” was being included. And very well done it was by Dr Susan Ramsaran who similarly de'lt with all our selected examples but the last two. Happily I understand from its present Pronunciation Editor Michael Ashby that this policy has been fully maintained in the printed text and that the representations in the online edition have not deliberately had their stress marks removed from them.

Falling plus Rising Tone Combinations

The latest questions Tami Date has come up with show him quoting from Peter Roach’s English Phonetics and Phonology. This is arguably the best of the few EFL textbooks that provide descriptions of English phonology that pay real regard to the needs of the reader with an enquiring mind. The examples he refers to appear on page 141 of that book. The versions I give are very slightly different transcriptions from the originals. Their use aims at helping to make the points I wish to convey and at avoiding quoting Tami’s slightly ambiguous transpositions of the original tone markings. Here are the sentences along with versions of the comments and contexts Roach gives:

(i)This response might be sed in conversation on hearing someone’s name; ‘him’ has much greater prominence than in the parallel version and is not possible in a weakform:
A: John Cleese is a very funny actor.
B: əʊ `jes. aɪv `siːn ˏhɪm
(ii) The word ‘seen’ is given the greatest prominence, ‘him’ very much less. This is quite likely to sound as tho the speaker might have some reservation or something further to say:
A: Have you seen my father yet?
B: aɪv `ˏsiːn ˳ɪm (bət aɪ ˈhӕvnt hӕd ˈtaɪm tə ˎtɔːk tw ɪm)
The O’Connor-&-Arnold-style notations are a way, if one feels one needs it, of indicating that at the Fall-Rise tone the fall is associated with the accented word ‘seen’ but makes it clear that its rise only occurs at the unaccented word ‘him’. Tami comments “... to most non-native-speaker readers of the book, I suspect that the first example will be a matter of puzzlement. They may even wonder what’s wrong with Oh \yes ｜Ive \seen him. They would probably wish that the author had explained, or made some comment, about the seemingly contrastive accenting of the pronoun him, but actually there is nobody else to contrast him with in the context. So, what attitude can be read into Oh \yes ｜Ive \seen /him ?”

Roach is with clarity making a staightforward point about the presence of two tonics in one of the two similar sentences and not in the other. Tami’s concern we see is not to comment on that point but to raise semantic issues that Roach hasnt set out to discuss there. Anyway in his remarks Tami’s tending to overlook the very important fact that you dont need a specific verbal context to explain why a speaker expresses something in a particular way (cf §8.1.7). The speaker may simply have in mind other actors who may not have been seen. It may also be here very possible that the speaker cd have a (slight) preference for avoiding the finality of a fall. The prosodies of loudness, rhythm, firmness of articulation, overall pitch range, vocal quality, tempo etc cou'd all enter into the matter but even with all those neutral a fall cou'd tend to rather be felt as cutting short the topic from lack of int'rest or worse.

I give students as exercises on prosodic matters various ordinary-conversation-type dialogues to read aloud. The advice I find myself most often inclined to offer them is “If you’re in any dou't about sounding perfectly agreeable, you shd end your sentence with a (not extravagantly wide) rise”. It’s important to remember that the very rudiment'ry indications of intonations that teachers quite reasonably use as useful tools for representing pitches (and thereby no less than those, rhythms) are very blunt instruments. I’m afraid those of us who teach EFL users about intonation matters too offen fail to make these limitations clear. We tend to end up appearing to exaggerate the value of what we offer and sometimes inducing unfortunate inhibitions. I find that hardly any of the countless EFL speakers I’ve conversed with have disconcerted me by their intonations even if the prosodic strategical procedures they adopt dont necessarily give rise to very common native-speaker patterns for the situations involved. I’ve no problem whatsoever with any EFL user not sounding like an exact copy of a native English-speaker: quite the opposite in fact. Incident'ly I think the topic of the differences between British and American tone usages is a negligible one for EFL students. More at Section 8.4.

What say you?

Absent thee from Rhoticity a While

Today John Wells has a blog on the word “rhotic” which he introduced into the literature of phonetics in an unpublished paper in June 1968 (p. 56 of Progress Report of the Phonetics Laboratory of University College London as OED precisely details for us). He ended the article with: “Some people did not like my coinage. But it’s too late now. You’re stuck with it”. This prompted commenter Lipman to query: “What are people's reserves about it?” to which he replied “I think jwl was one who disliked it. (If so, I'm sure he'll explain.)"

Another commenter “Kraut” kindly, before I cou’d stirr myself into doing so, explained for me: “It's not that JWL strongly dislikes the term 'rhotic' but that he prefers to describe accents on a scale from high rhoticity or low rhoticity. See his post to an entry to the blog by Graham Pointon at
http://www.linguism.co.uk/language/intrusive-r”

John Maidment, after that remark that Kraut referred to which was a comment added to a Pointon Linguism blog, sed “A very sensible policy which I shall adopt”. So I shall look forward to seeing him recommend it in his excellent SID (Speech Internet Dictionary). I’ve never felt “stuck with rhotic” because I’ve never used it simply because it doesnt fit my usual purposes so well as the wording I prefer to use. After all, my usage is another Wells coinage anyway. There’s more detailed explanation of my reasons for that preference at my Blog 123 which was prompted by John Wells’s celebration of the fortieth anniversary of his coinage of “rhotic” in 2008. The Billy Clark, whose comment on today’s Wells blog asked about more Wells coinages, may like to look at my blog 127 in the same archive as 123.

The Spelling th

In a recent (29 June 2010) blog commenting on the word “brothel”, John Wells suggested that the exceptionality of its current pronuncation was revealed by a note of Murray’s in 1883 in the NED (OED1). This note was, as I read it, essentially about the word’s semantic development and didnt seem to be particularly relevant to its pronunciation. He was certainly right in saying that the value of the th in the word is anomalous but, in considering why it shd be so, it’s worth remembering that the word brothel is in modern times very much a book word. The earliest OED quote for it in its current sense was 1593. Tho it clearly ultimately descends from Old English its exact precursor has not been found in OE texts. It occurs in no translation of the Bible by the way.

The digraph th is of course a completely ambiguous spelling that might equally stand for /θ/ or /ð/ in modern English. However, by far the greatest number of words containing the spelling th have it for /θ/ not /ð/. Word-initially OED records well over 7000 items beginning with th all of which except about two dozen have it as /θ/. Word-finally it has about 4500 ending th almost all of which have /θ/ for it. Word-medially we have a number of very common words with /ð/ but still the majority have /θ/. People’s “notional” value for th has fairly unsurprisingly become /θ/. It seems to me clear that brothel has in consequence acquired a spelling pronunciation which has replaced the more phonologically regular development it formerly exhibited and still does across the Atlantic to an extent.

The claim at p. 55 in his 1991 article in the Transactions of the Philological Society by Peter J. Lucas, “No Modern English word of native origin has medial /θ/” was no dou't quite justified except in relation to this one word brothel which of course makes it outstandingly anomalous as John Wells pointed out. We may disregard the Scottish words bothy and drouthy. We must of course also disregard such highly unconventional coinages as the forenames Eartha and Youtha (also Yootha). Altho the name Ethel had an OE origin, it didnt have the regular development thru from OE to PresentE but died out and was “artificially” revived. Bertha is of German provenance.

We’re familiar with unhistorical pronunciations that some people adopt for their surnames using /θ/ in Blyth or Smyth etc. This process of some users of a name refashioning its pronunciation but others maintaining the traditional value is to be seen with placenames like Atherton and many others which may be he'rd with medial /θ/ as well as /ð/. It’s a very familiar phenomenon that shifting of populations leading to arrivals of numerous new inhabitants outnumbering the old population at a spot have me'nt that many placenames thruout England have seen their traditional word-of-mouth versions supplanted by ones that have been re-modelled by newcomers re-interpreting the traditional spellings.

As to brothel even as recently as 1917 in EPD1 Daniel Jones gave the /ð/ pronunciation in first place. However, he omitted it altogether two decades later. In 1797 Walker’s Critical Pronouncing Dictionary gave only the /ð/ form with no reference to any disagreement among the many authorities he regularly referred to; and still by 1845 Beniowski agreed. For American usage Funk & Wagnall in 1914 and the 1961 Webster gave a /ð/ subvariant; so did Kenyon & Knott; and so do Merriam Webster online and the Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation. We seem to be seeing the same process at work with the word booth which was never recorded as /buːθ/ by Jones or Gimson excepting in the latter’s 1991 recension by Ramsaran. It’s not in OED1989 but is in ODP, LPD and EPD in all as subvariant. Compare bequeath now subvariantly having /θ/ tho in NED (OED1) in 1887 Murray recorded only /ð/ and smithy for which Craigie in 1912 likewise gave only/ð/. A number of words like broth, cloth, moth and oath also show various degrees of tendency to replace earlier /ð/ forms with /θ/ ones.

Once Dubitable Items

I was slightly startled yesterday by seeing a mis-spelling in the subtitles to a dramatisation of a silly P. G. Wodehouse Jeeves story I was casually idly watching mainly out of indolence. Any subtitles available I like to have displayed for a variety of reasons one of which is to observe this sort of thing. This spelling, surely one of the more venial of the numerous orthographical gaffes to be observed, took me suddenly back to what I guess were my early teens. At this time I was aware of the existence of the word “indubitably” but I was unaware that I had a very mistaken idea of how it was spelt. For probably quite some time I was afflicted by no dou't that it was pronounced /ɪn`djuːpɪtəbli/ and consequently under the delusion that its written form was *“indupitably”, somehow failing to connect it with words like “dubious”. Anyway “indupitably” was exactly how it turned up on the tv screen last night. As it happens it’s an excellent extreme example of variation in the length of an English vowel phoneme. The one-size-fits-all currently predominantly used British transcription of the English vowel of boot, goose, lose, rule, voodoo etc is of course /uː/ with its permanent “belt-and-braces” length mark. When I see GA and GB transcriptions given side by side with these colons in one and not in the other I always feel it tends to give many people an exaggerated impression of the length differences between GA and GB vowels. I don’t suggest that there arent any differences at all but GB as well as GA certainly has plenty of vowel length variations. I therefore personally prefer the economy of (simple phonemic) transcriptions that dont have the superfluous colons.

As is well known, immediately before sharp (fortis) consonants within the same syllable English vowels in both GA and GB are normally considerably shortened. Shortening also regularly takes place when a vowel occupies a syllable followed immediately by one or more enclitic weak syllables. In indubitably both of these circumstances obtain even to the extent of the probable maximum possible of three completely weak following syllables being involved. These factors taken together appear to maximally reduce the length of the /uː/ allophone in ordinary speech. So we neednt be surprised that, since the major clue that indicates to the hearer whether the bilabial consonant is /b/ or /p/ in such a context isnt what degree of vocal vibration, if any, is to be detected but the length of the vowel preceding, there may well on occasion occur complete neutralisation of the [b/p] contrast and people may well feel that they hear /p/ rather than /b/.

A couple of other of my youthful verbal misconceptions occur to me. One was that for years I knew a word for an only vaguely understood unpleasant bodily affliction that I he’rd as /`ӕpsəs/. I was aware of such things only as affecting others so it was a word that rarely drew my attention but I remember taking it for granted that it’d be spelt *“apsus” with that perfectly convincing appearance of having been spelt so in its presumed original Latin form. Meanwhile I also came across a term for another very vaguely perceived medical condition which I he’rd as /`ӕbses/ and which I could recall seeing in print as “abscess”. I’ve very little idea of how long it was before the shocked realisation came upon me that I was merely hearing two rather different pronunciations of one and the same word. The common features of the framework were /`ӕ-s-s/ the differing ones were /p/ versus /b/ and /ə/ versus /ɛ/. If it surprises anyone that /p/ was to be he’rd in this word for <b> one may point out that, despite the lack of enthusiasm of the pronunciation lexicographers to record most of them, for at least two generations many words spelt <abs> and <obs> are constantly to be he’rd with either pre assimilation to /ӕps-/ and /ɒps-/ etc or post assimilation to /ӕbz-/ and /ɒbz-/ etc. For example the form /ˈӕpsə`luːtli/ of “absolutely” is extremely common. I recorded a sparing dozen such <abs-> forms in my 1972 CPD.

A final misprision I may confess to was that in my tender years I knew of a word /pə`tɜːb/, which I wd gaily have spelt *“peturb”, a mistake that, had I been a higher-rhoticity English-speaker, one cdve expected me not to make. I also knew, from my reading, of the existence of a word <perturb> that I think I probably thaut of as /pɜː`tɜːb/, which is what LPD3 records as a variant pronunciation of that word, given after /pə`tɜːb/. I imagined it had a somewhat different meaning. It was quite disillusioning when I realised that no dictionary listed a word *“peturb” !

Voiceless-to-Voiced Pre Assimilations

Regular readers will know that I’m an avid follower of John Maidment’s blogs. He surprised me the other day by saying “Why the word [gooseberry] should be pronounced [ˈɡʊzb(ə)ri] [is] a mystery. And why is the word raspberry [ˈrɑ:zb(ə)ri] ... so pronounced? ... The voiceless to voiced assimilation in these two words is not found post-lexically in English and the only other word that I can think of (at the moment) where a similar change takes place is husband.” He cdve considered the other goose derivative gosling /`gɒzlɪŋ/ or cobweb.

I shd be inclined to say exactly the opposite of what he claims. If an English word involves an <s> followed immediately by a voiced consonant I expect it to be /z/ by default and I automatic'ly tend to wonder why it’s not so when I find an exception. It’s a notable regular feature of English as opposed to many other languages. This is easily demonstrated by looking at the way people “instinctively” pronounce new acronyms when they appear. Examples are ASBO, Asdic, ASLEF, Aslib, Nasdaq, /`ӕzbəʊ, `ӕzdɪk, `ӕzlef, `ӕzlɪb, `nӕzdӕk/ and WOSB /`wɒzbi/ etc. Consider how English place-etc names with vowel+s+voiced consonant are pronounced with /z/ usually unhesitatingly even if unfamiliar eg as Disley, Frisby, Isbister, Kesgrave, Osgerby, Oswestry, Wisbech ie /`dɪzli, `frɪzbi, `ɪzbɪstə, `kezgreɪv, `ɒzgəbi, `ɒzwɪstri, `wɪzbiːʧ/. John has Mousehole /`maʊzl/ in his backyard.

Of course there are exceptions but they include various Celtic names and words that have preserved memories of versions current before the voicing tendency kicked in. This is why we have both /wesli/ and /wezli/ for Wesley even tho it’s no longer spelt Westley. Only a minority of us use /z/ in mistletoe no dou't for the same sort of reason. There’s a similar reason for /lesli/ being used by some, chiefly in the US, rather than /lezli/ for Leslie or Lesley. It also accounts for the difference between the US /ӕzmə/ and our /ӕsmə/ for asthma. The reverse seems to be the case with crescent, Brits favouring /`kreznt/ but few using /z/ in the US. Neither GB nor GA has assimilated the /s/ of isthmus /ɪsməs/. Neither of us has assimilated basin /beɪsn/ either — but jazzfans’ll know that the New Orleans street has /z/. Glasgow chiefly has /z/ nowadays in the UK but old John Reith was inclined to terrorise BBC speakers who didnt use his prescribed form with /s/.

When we borrow from a number of languages we convert their [s] to /z/. That’s what we do for Basra, Casbah, Dresden, Duisburg and Oslo /bӕzrə, `kӕzbɑː, drezdən, `duːzbɜːg & `ɒzləʊ/. Some people with gross ignorance of the workings of language have been reported by the BBC Pronunciation Unit as preposterously taking offence at /z/ used in words like Muslim. That habit’s been with us for centuries. I wonder if I’m right in presuming that many of the Ancient Greek words we’ve borrowed in such quantities may’ve had [s] when they came to us, eg cosmos, presbyter, Pelasgian. The word rhythm has apparently mainly assimilated to [ð] from an earlier [θ]. And so on.

Northernisms of Sorts

I’ve just received a query about intonation which candidly wasnt worth discussing here. The questioner referred me to two books on the subject. The first thing he drew my attention to was something on page 73 of John Wells’s English Intonation (2006) where the expression I was askt about was paired with another which caut my attention because it struck me as not a very common one to be he'rd from speakers with General British accents. It was this (in my preferred tone symbols):
He’ll beˈvery ˎangry, | will my `ˏbrother.
I’m not saying a GB speaker wd never use such an expression but I’d wager that the use of that latter type of tagged phrase, with its reversal of subject and verb, is a great deal commoner over some of northern England than it is elsewhere. To me it sounds a bit rhetorical rather than just ordinarily conversational.

The other book I was referred to was Paul Tench’s Intonation Systems of English (1996) where at page 82 there occurred the example
I saw ˎ John | ˏyesterday (or yesterˏday)
at which its bracketed alternative exhibits a stressing of the word yesterday that I shd think is far commoner over northern England than it is anywhere else in the English-speaking world. EPD does give that stressing of its last syllable (lexically yester`day) as a variant possibility but I can’t concur with that judgment. ODP doesnt include such a variant and LPD3 positively excludes it from "RP" with its § sign.

The other northernism that these two items tangentially braut to my mind concerns spelling only. Educated people in or from the north of England normally use spellings that are exactly the same as those employed by most other English-speaking communities excepting the USA. However, if I got a letter from an unknown person who chose to employ the alternative spelling inquiry inste'd of the predominant one enquiry, I shd be strongly tempted to guess it was from a northerner. I think praps northerners may be inclined to prefer the less common alternative spelling because they associate the spelling enquiry with the pronunciation /ɛn`kwaɪəri/ which you might think they’d use. However, tho the northern preference for strong vowels in many unstressed prefixes in words like employ, encourage, engage, enjoy, entrust etc is well known [cf 7.1.4 §4], enquire and enquiry dont seem to be begun with /ɛn-/ in the north so often as these others. I suspect this is becoz /ɪn`kwaɪəri/ better correlates for them with the spelling inquiry. Public notices which say /ɪn`kwaɪəriz/ in the north seem more offen to be spelt as Inquiries rather than as Enquiries which latter seems to be the more usual form in the south. The reason spellings like enquire arnt much used in the US may be in part due to the fact that their variant `inquiry so positively has strong /ɪn-/ and never /ɛn-/.

Bradley in the OED in 1891 sed “The mod[ern] Dicts. give inquire as the standard form, but enquire is still very frequently used, esp. in the sense 'to ask a question' ”. Murray in 1900 gave at inquire (in-, ėnkwəi^ə·ɹ) in the now obsolete OED1/NED style which one presumes me'nt what we may these days transcribe as /ɪn, Ɨn`kwaɪə(r)/ to convey that it usually begins with /ɪ/ but may also be he'rd with a value intermediate between [ɪ & ə]. Bradley, who was braut up in the north, seems to have felt reluctant to suggest that this word beginning with the letter “e” wasnt pronounced accordingly. The only pronunciation (enkwəi·^əɹ) he gave for enquire, ie /ɛnˈkwaɪə(r)/, was simply retranscribed when the OED1/NED pronunciation was converted to OED2’s IPA style. The entry will no dou't be reconsidered when the ongoing OED3 revision gets to it.

A Question on Stress Patterns

Tami Date has a query about what he refers to, I’m afraid rather questionably, as “the stress pattern of the idiom [sic] 'one day' ”. He quotes from a textbook he’s been reviewing the following:
“(1) "I have a dream. *One *day my four little children will not be judged by the color of their skin..."
(2) "I have a dream. *One *day the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood."
and he comments
In both cases, one day is heard to have double stress, which is the opposite of the generally accepted stress pattern (i.e. single stress: *one day) as mentioned [sic] in Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, for instance. In the same unit of the textbook, however, the 'normal' pattern is heard as in:
(3) Sun Mi's parents always tell her to be kind to others. *One day she was sitting in the train. She saw a woman and a baby.... ”

It’s a pity that Tami cdnt let us hear what he he'rd but the first thing one has to say is that his assumption that there is a “generally accepted stress pattern” for the phrase “one day” simply can’t be upheld. It’s perfectly reasonable for a textbook or a dictionary to quote an expression in commonly he'rd or typical stressings but it’s not at all justifiable to assume that other stressings are impossible or even unusual. It’s perfectly possible for a speaker at various points in a discourse to stress both words of One day or the first only, or the second only or neither or even to utter them so that their stress values are both completely ambiguous. If anyone cares to listen to the famous Martin Luther King speech the book quotes from, it’s readily available on the Web, and it shows him varying the stressings of his repetitions of the phrase very naturally and reasonably. In such emotive oratory an even wider range of choices may be he'rd than one can expect from ordinary conversation.

The most important factors that operate as one chooses stressings are the verbal contexts and the contrasts the speaker feels it necessary to make. The third example Tami quotes from the textbook, referring to it as “the 'normal' pattern' ”, he represents with the really unlikely-looking pattern of stress only on the first of the two words that begin the sentence “One day she was sitting in the train.” By the way, an asterisk to identify a strest syllable isnt a very satisfactory device. By far the best way to discuss these patternings is to represent the phrases with simple pitch indications. The very simple such symbols used here are explained here on this website.

Finally he added:
“I was wondering if the same phenomenon was likely to happen to other idioms [sic] such as some day.” These common collocations I shd prefer not to be called idioms: they’re perfectly ordinary sequences. Their words have some of their ordinary meanings. Translated word-for-word into most other languages their meanings wd be perfectly transparent. Typical intonations for them wd be `These ˏdays... `Some ˏday... The nearest thing to an idiom in what he asks about is One of these days... which isnt usually strest on these unless the expression is being spoken markedly emphatic'ly or a contrast with some other days is highlighted. It usually has much the same function and meaning as ˈOne ˏday... and receives the same range of intonation patterns.
Some of the matters discusst above are considered at Accentuation on this website.

A Question on English Intonation

I recently received the following slightly surprising enquiry:
I have always pronounced the expression That's right with an intonation High Head on That's and Rise (low to mid) on right. [ˈThat’s ˏright] However, I have at the same time always been aware that many native speakers (both British and American?) use a different intonation, i.e. Low Head on That's and Fall (mid to low) on right. [ˌThat’s ˎright]. Is my intonation wrong? Would you suggest that I should change my intonation for this expression in conformity with others, or would you say that both are acceptable?

This query was from a fr'end of many years with whom I often exchange emails mostly on linguistic topics (my email software records my receiving 95 from him in the past lustrum) but this was the first I ever remember receiving about a prosodic usage of his own. I shd mention that he’s a native speaker of Japanese. I shd call his phonetic performance in English perfect. That’s to say, tho it leaves me in no dout that his mothertongue is not English, there is nothing about his spoken English that I can ever recall having distracted me by any of its phonetic features away from what he was communicating to me. He is a skilled phonetician and he seems to be able to switch effortlessly from the British type of accent of my conversations with him to an equally authentic sounding General American style. I only discover'd this as-it-were by accident when I was running a conference he was attending and it happened that an American scholar found himself at the last minute unable to join us but sent us a copy of his proposed script. My fr'end agreed to read it to us on his behalf and intriguingly but perfec'ly appropriately chose to read it with completely natural sounding American pronunciation.

Anyway my surprise at his question was that he shd ask my opinion on a prosodic matter when I felt that his English sounded always so fluent and effortless that I’d expect him no more to ponder his choice of an intonation in spontaneous speaking than I wou'd myself. Of course the tone sequence he has felt that he has normally used in the past has certainly been the one that in my opinion most GB speakers wd be likely to use on most occasions when intending to produce a normally fr'endly effect. I’d be surprised if it weren’t fairly common in GA usage too tho praps remarks I seem to remember which suggested that Americans generally favour high he'ds less than GB speakers do may well apply here. So my ans'er to his question was certainly that both are completely acceptable intonations.

However, one has to add a caution. Just as the representation of pronunciation made a notable advance when phonemic transcription became a widespre'd tool, so did simple notations for the pitch patterns of speech become a valu'ble device for the analyst and teacher. Yet these two taken together dont even nearly fully convey all the most important features of spoken language. The effects that a speaker produces by choices of tempo, voice quality, loudness, pitch range etc and their admixture offen have much more force than the simple pitch patterns they accompany. Also context both verbal and situational may well count for a great deal on the effect a speaker produces. What one can say is that, other things being equal, a not-very-high rising tonic in the sentence in question is likely to produce at least a slightly more cordial and/or cheerful effect than a descent to the speaker’s lowest ordinary range. In Section 8 of this website more discussion of this topic may be found. A main theme of its fourth item will be seen to be that one must be on one’s guard not to over-estimate the importance of the contribution of pitch patterns in the speaking of English and its teaching.

Hist'ries of Some Contractions

Murray (see Blog 160 about him) the principal editor of OED1 supplied on “I’m” in 1899 only the brief one-line entry “I’m (əim) colloq. contraction of I am”. That entry had no direction to where the full form was de'lt with (in contrast with the usual thoro'ness with which cross-references are given in OED) and none of the usual OED quotations of its use, nor the dating of its first appearance, nor provision of any variant spellings in which it’s been found (it was offen Ime or I’me in early Modern English). The form am had no entry of its own at all. The Victorian Henry-Sweet-style phonetic notation “(əim)” is what today phoneticians show with IPA symbols as /aɪm/ (save in the Upton-instigated notation of recent OUP publications). The IPA’s alphabet hadnt been devised when Murray chose his symbol set for NED which was OED’s earlier name at anyrate till 1895. However, at the beginning of NED’s dozen colums on the verb to be there was “contr[action]. 6- 'm (I'm) in verse and familiar prose” with a first quote from 1647. Webster 1961 and later have no entry for I’m. Nor has Google.

Turning from the first person singular to the corresponding plural contraction we’re we find no OED entry for it at all, leave alone listing of variant spellings to which it was subject in early Modern English. In Wells, Stanley & G. Taylor (1986) William Shakespeare The Complete Works Original-Spelling Edition Vivian Salmon had an article on ‘The Spelling and Punctuation of Shakespeare’s Time’ in which she drew attention (at p.xlviii) to “forms like w’are, y’are [&] th’are” as precursors of the present contractions we’re, you’re and they’re. Helge Kökeritz in his invaluable 1953 volume Shakespeare’s Pronunciation (at p.180) sed “Are had two pronunciations: the old stressed form with ME ā, that is, [ɛːɹ] in Shakespeare’s time, which rhymes with care, compare, dare, fear, here, prepare, rare, swear, where, unaware, and the restressed form with ME ăr, rhyming with car, scar, star, war.”

It’s more than likely, then, that at one time the common early spelling w’are reflected the use of [ɛːr] in speech. The orthodox view, as one may safely presume from the total absence of any indication to the contrary, is of course that the contraction of we are to we’re has, in exact parallel with the uncoalesced verb form are, totally lost its earlier value of /wɛ(ə)/ (accompanied by a final /r/ until the latter eighteenth century). It’s my conviction, based on over half a century of constant close observation, that the reverse is true. I even feel inclined to claim that for the past century or more the predominant General British pronunciation has been not the /wɪə/ of all dictionaries and descriptive phonologies but the type /wɛː(ə)/. There’s hardly any other word that from GB speakers (unlike some regional accents and Jamaican English etc) alternates GB /ɪə/ with /ɛə/. Those GB speakers who may use the latter value in the only examples I can think of, namely real and its derivatives like really and realise. When people pronounce really as /rɛəli/, making it a homophone of rarely, they tend to sound conspicuous ie ‘cultivated’ (posh) or ‘refained’ (old-fashioned posh). By contrast, use of /wɛː/ (or /wɛə/) for we’re has never been remarked on or for that matter noticed by anyone known to me. I didnt hesitate when I commended /weə/ as one of what I considered to be the two suitable GB pronunciations for adoption by EAL users in my OUP Concise Pronouncing Dictionary of 1972. No-one has ever commented to me on its unique inclusion in that dictionary.

Similarly I dou't that the pronunciation of they’re as /ðɛə/ (rather than at least one of its likely earlier forms /ðeɪə/, a version explicitly not recognised as “RP” in LPD with good reason) is due solely to the smoothing and consequent loss of the medial [ɪ] of the triphthong /eɪə/ as is no dou't true of their. It seems quite likely to’ve descended largely from the loss of the vocalic portion of they in its being coalesced with an early /ɛːr/ pronunciation of are. Current GB usage has more than just occasional weakforms of they’re as /ðə(r)/ eg as in /ðər ɔːl `raɪt/ they’re alright and /ðɛ(r)/ eg as in /ðɛr `ɒf/ they’re off, pacē John Wells who goes out of his way in LPD to say “There is no RP weakform” of they’re. Also /wɛə/ for we’re has quite common GB weakforms which seem to’ve escaped the notice of all the pronunciation lexicographers, even the editors of EPD and LPD, excepting only Clive Upton who in ODP rightly includes the weakform /wə(r)/ as a British usage. It actually also has the other fairly common GB weakforms /wɛ(r)/ as in /wɛr `ɪn/ we’re in and /wɪ(r)/ as in /wɪ `faɪn/ we’re fine and even an occasional “re-strest” variant /`wɜː/ as in /`wɜːr ɔː ˏraɪt/ we’re alright.

Alleged Mouth Mayhem

It’s usually Graham Pointon who fulminates about pronunciations he hears from media people but this time it’s John Maidment here a couple of days ago. I greatly admire John as a phonetician but I feel he’s far too hard on ordinary folk who dont have his gifts. I also from time to time think presenters or others shdve made a better shot at pronouncing something or other but my sympathies in the case of the four Chinese names he quotes are entirely with the speaker he criticises. The Pinyin system of transcribing Chinese names now so generally adopted (which I presume was what his speaker was reading) is a minefield of misleading indications for the ordinary English-speaker. How is the non-specialist to know whether i or u are to be syllabic or approximant, or t to be /t/ or /d/, or a to be /ӕ/ or /ɛ/ or whether u is to be spoken in an English context as /əʊ/ or /ʊ/, or that e shd be a back vowel? (I think /ʤ/ is a very reasonable shot at [dʑ] by the way). No wonder they favour spelling pronunciations that better correlate with how the words involv'd appear in print or maybe, even if they try to remember the “correct” interpretations of the perverse spellings, come to grief. Or praps they feel they’ve got better things to do than worry about such matters.

John ended his self-confessed “rant” with a go at the distinguisht BBC News presenter Mishal Husain for pronouncing Machynlleth as “/mӕkɪnləθ/”. I he'rd her on the occasion he referred to and noticed that she’d slipt up slietly on the rather misleading spelling of the Welsh y but otherwise found her version pretty undistracting and in no genuine danger of causing any confusion. John must, with his passion for “accuracy” in the rendering of exotic names, be thrilled when he hears her refer to Al-Qaida with a [q] or say [æfɢænɪ`stɑːn] for Afghanistan. Graham tends to rant agenst her for these but I find that she says them so smoothly and unobtrusively that I suspect most lissners hardly realise that she’s used an exotic sound. I find I usually sympathise with people who tend to pronounce forren names as they first le'rnt them in childhood.

My sympathies are also with speakers who fall foul of the absurd but all too faithfully followed BBC tradition of falling over backwards to use counter-logical pronunciations of places or of people who persist in using grossly unsuitable spellings for their names. The country as a whole doesnt give two hoots for how the Duke of this or the Earl of that cares to have his name pronounced. If he wants to persist with an ambiguous or perverse spelling let him put up with consequences. The BBC kowtowing policy has no dout been a legacy of that ghastly old snob John Reith who had a ridiculous veneration for “good” families. One has to acknowledge that Daniel Jones and various succeeding pronunciation lexicographers have been very reddy to indulge our curiosity as to how the nobility say their names by including generous amounts of data on that topic in their works. Unlike Graham I was very pleased when Earl Spencer in 2000 gave in to the pressure to accept a reasonable pronunciation /`ɔːlθɔːp/ for Althorp which his family traditionally pronounced as /ɔːltrəp/ and are welcome to continue to do so amongst themselves. I look forward to doing many more rants along these lines.

The Pronunciation of Spouses

The re-occurrence in the news in recent days of the word spouses has revived the memory of a blog by John Wells on the fifth of November last year referring to a discussion between Harriet Harman (today the acting leader of the British Labour Party) and the distinguished journalist and tv presenter Andrew Marr, in which Wells sed, “both used the pronunciation ˈspaʊzɪz for spouses (pl) ... I think that most people pronounce this word with a voiceless sibilant at the end of the stem, ˈspaʊsɪz.” He suggested that these two speakers might either (i) .. say spaʊz for the singular noun or (ii) .. say spaʊs in the singular, but switch voicing for the plural.” He went on “Many dictionaries do record spaʊz as a possibility for the singular noun, although EPD ... is not among them. I would be pretty confident in saying that in BrE at least it is very much a minority preference.” This, except for “very much (a minority),” is what OED3 currently records as British usage. It also matches OALD and of course LPD3. EPD, since Roach and co. took over in 1997, has omitted any mention of the form /spaʊz/. From the same stable so, unsurprisingly, does the Cambridge ALD. And the free online MacMillan Dictionary. The editions of EPD for which Jones was responsible (1917-1963) never listed any form but /-z/. Gimson in EPD of 1972 gave an /s/ form but only in second place; so did my CPD. So did OED2 in 1989. So do the current OALD and the American Heritage Dictionary. Going back to 1914 the /z/ form was the only one Bradley gave in the OED. In the 19th century and earlier Walker in 1797 and others seem to’ve had only /z/. So it looks as if the /s/ was a fairly recent development but I agree that it’s now predominant in the singular.

Wells added “explanation (ii) seems to be more likely”. Support for this view was evident when the BBC’s Mike Sergeant a day or two ago ended one sentence of a report with “treat each other as /spaʊzɪz/” and began the very next sentence with “He sed he didnt treat Mr Lundy as /spaʊs/”. Also the well-known presenter John Humphrys on different occasions in the 29th of May Today programme on BBC Radio 4 cd be he'rd to use those two forms. Additionally, Tim Bowyer sez for the singular only /spaʊs/ but for the plural “/spaʊzɪz/ or /spaʊsɪz/” in that order at his “Howjsay” website (on which see my blog 247). Wikipedia’s anonymously compiled “Wictionary” gives /spaʊs/ and for the plural only /spaʊzɪz/. The actor Gary Watson in the part of George Vavasour in The Palisers, the 1974 BBC drama series based on Anthony Trollope novels spoke the plural noun abuses with /-zɪz/.

The suggestion that this variation has come about on “the analogy with house haʊs — houses ˈhaʊzɪz” I’m not happy with. The further comment “Although house is the only stem in s which switches voicing for the plural in this way, the "minor rule" involved applies to a fair number of stems in voiceless fricatives at other places...” I don’t find convincing. The examples offer'd to back it up like the leaf/leaves alternation don’t seem fully relevant. More comparable, I suggest, are vocalic segments followed by /s/ which are similar to the /aʊ/ diphthong. When such segments precede /-ɪz/ plurals there’s no evidence of any tendency to convert the /s/ to /z/. Consider the numerous words like bases, braces, cases, faces and spaces. And fleeces, leases and pieces. And ices, prices and spices. And uses, juices and nooses. Perhaps some kind of “rule” such as he posits does seem to be operating in varieties of educated Scottish English where we hear final /-zɪz/ in many words such as basis, diagnosis, fibrosis, sclerosis, oasis and tuberculosis.

When Wells sez “The alternation is better supported in noun-verb pairs, where the noun has s but the verb z: use, abuse, advice/advise, loss/lose, spouse/espouse as well as house” the trouble is they arnt exactly comparable. His final comment was “It would be unusual for an exceptional pattern (minor rule) to be extended to new vocabulary items.” It would indeed but that is not what I think is happening here. The process I believe we have is the same as has happened with r-linking. This is often referred to as if it were a matter of new insertions but that description only properly fits the unhistorical occurrences which Daniel Jones dubbed “intrusive”. Most r-links are not insertions but retentions. I shd say that people have largely replaced the older singular /spaʊz/ thru the influence of the analogy of the common words grouse, house, louse and mouse. On the other hand most people havnt done the same thing with the plural prob'bly because there’re virtually no examples of a plural ending /-aʊsɪz/ and the plural of house (unlike lice and mice) actually matches the traditional plural of spouse.

The words spelt merchandise etc

When on the 17th of May John Maidment blogged that he was “surprised to see the word merchandize used as a noun and so spelled, suggesting that at that time (mid-1800s) it was pronounced with a /z/” I wanted to comment on his remarks but there was too much to say to do it on the spot. So now better late than never here goes. There was some confusedness about what he sed but that’s no great wonder: this item is very liable to cause confusion both as to its spelling and its pronunciation. I’m saying “item” because really two words are concerned, a noun and a verb. John continued “I certainly have /s/ in this word and LPD agrees with me.” Yes but LPD3 gives (the noun-only as spelt with <s>) merchandise with /z/ first and /s/ second. It gives an additional spelling with <z> but only for the verb (ie merchandize) at which it has only the pronunciation /z/. The current 2006 EPD surely has a confusing misprint at the noun. Presumably intending to reverse the previous 1997 order of /z/ before /s/ the printer appears to have added “-daɪs” to give a second (abbreviated) version in mistake for “-daɪz”. Neither EPD nor LPD gives any (different-from-GB) US pronunciation for the noun. They agree on the pronunciation of the verb showing only /z/. ODP gives an entry for the noun with <s> and puts /s/ first and /z/ second in giving its opinion on British practice but reverses that order for US usage. ODP also gives a second he'dword entry merchandize for the noun with British and US pronunciations ordered as at its <s> spelling. This does prompt one to wonder just how commonly UK speakers might use /s/ for forms of the verb. OED has no he'dword merchandize understandably because that’s an unetymological spelling but praps it shd now recognise it, in view of its present currency, at least to the extent of giving it a main entry with a cross reference.

John’s blog continued “OED gives both spellings and both pronunciations and, to complicate matters even more, gives a spelling ending in -ice.” As we’ve sed, the spelling merchandize is only listed in OED as a variant (not a he'dword) and is so from ME (the Middle English period) as a noun and only from the 15th century as a verb. At the verb merchandise it is true that a variant spelling in -ice is listed but it is clearly indicated as only current from ME to the 16th century and there is certainly no merchandice he'dword. So it’s not quite fair to suggest that OED is complicating matters.

Finally John sed “It doesn’t seem possible from the OED entry to figure out when the /aɪz/ pronunciation fell out of favour, if in fact it did.” If it has become the less favoured British usage for the noun then only OED3 and ODP (both presumably attributable to Upton) and, if I’ve guessed right, EPD lend support for that view. What is quite clear is that the use of /s/ for the noun is a fairly recent development, only becoming common in the middle of the last century, and that the /z/ version is still at least common for the noun as well as the verb. Neither Jones nor Gimson ever listed the /s/ form during their handling of EPD nor did I commend it to EFL users of GB in my CPD of 1972, tho I gave it there as a $ variant. It certainly wasnt included in the OED by Bradley in 1906 and it looks as if all earlier authorities such as John Walker’s Critical Pronouncing Dictionary of 1797 gave only /z/ for both noun & verb.

There’s a special problem with the verb because, tho Bradley in OED1 rightly classified it as archaic in 1906, Burchfield seventy years later listed new uses of it which were apparently US innovations that came along twenty or so years after Bradley’s entry. So OED accordingly now identifies as archaic only those senses which Bradley covered. Those who employ the new commercialese usage all seem to have only /z/ for the verb. The pattern of /s/ for the noun and /z/ for the corresponding verb is found in various English words. On that topic see on this site Section 4 § 5 ¶¶ 24 & 25. See also Section 3 § 1 ¶25a for GA/GB comparisons. Scottish English varies quite a bit in its /s~z/ distributions. In one word at least there’s something of a parallel in some Scottish usages to what’s happened in GB to merchandise. Various educated Scots speakers have many words with /z/ that have /s/ in GB. Among these are some (including the two former Labour leaders John Smith and Gordon Brown) who’ve been observable as pronouncing sacrifices as something like /`sakrəfaɪzəz/. OED has recorded earlier <z> spellings for the verb by writers in England including a quotation from the great seventeenth-century poet John Donne.

Replacing an Outdated Term

I cdnt help noticing the derisive gloss by John Wells last month on the term “RP” adding “aka Standard Southern British English or SSBE, the modish term at BAAP last week”. This trend he refers to as “modish” is no dou't due to the widespre'd great respect for the 1999 Handbook of the International Phonetic Association. Like me, tho not necessarily for exactly the same reasons, John evidently doesn’t favour the expression ‘Standard Southern British English’ whether or not abbreviated to SSBE. In 1970 in his article ‘Local accents in England and Wales’ in the Journal of Linguistics Volume 6 No. 2 (pp 231-252) he referred to phoneticians and some other linguists as “using an established but less than happy term, ˈReceived Pronunciationˈ”. And in the following year in, Practical Phonetics, (written jointly with the speech training expert Greta Coulson) sed “The pronunciation used in this book is ... SOUTHERN BRITISH STANDARD (also called RECEIVED PRONUNCIATION or RP...”. Yet in his prodigious 1982 Accents of English he remarked rather sweepingly at p.10 that the “non-localizable accent of England is what phoneticians refer to as Received Pronunciation (RP)”.

I regret that he passed over in 1982 and agen in 1990 at the first publication of LPD the opportunity to adopt a better name for the accent for which he has continued to use the so obviously unsuitable even politically “incorrect” term “Received”. His great distinction as an authority wdve made it very likely that a fresh term from him wdve soon become generally accepted. When Peter Roach ably took on the updating and re-design of the Jones EPD in 1997, he very rightly chose to ‘abandon the archaic name “Received Pronunciation”’ but his choice of a replacement, altho it had the virtue of being readily comprehended and easily remembered, had disadvantages that were agenst its wide acceptance. The scholarly world have plainly not espoused it and, tho there’s no complete consensus, a trend to increased use of SSBE and its unabbreviated alternant has during recent years become apparent.

This trend is clearly attributable to the influence of the IPA Handbook’s co-editor Francis Nolan. Greatly as I in general admired his work on that book, and tho I’m glad that he eschewed the term ‘Received Pronunciation’, I can only deplore his insertion into this official IPA publication of the highly controversial term ‘Standard Southern British (English)’ and its cumbersome abbreviation. It appears nine times within the the book’s first 38 pages and no alternative occurs in the whole book (somewhat by contrast with its 1995 draft). Introducing the term he proffers the disclaimer “where ‘Standard’ shd not be taken as implying a value judgment of ‘correctness’ ”. This is playing Humpty Dumpty with words. The OED at the entry “nonstandard” gives with a specific attribution to its use in “Linguistics”, the definition “Containing or designating a feature which is especially associated with uneducated usage.” The use of ‘standard’ is indisputably associated with what is authorised or official. The OED defines it principally as applicable to “A definite level of excellence, attainment, wealth, or the like, or a definite degree of any quality, viewed as a prescribed object of endeavour or as the measure of what is adequate for some purpose”. The implication of using the term “standard” of pronunciations unavoidably categorises all but a tiny percentage of the UK population as employing ‘non-standard’ speech, a category which incident'ly certainly includes Nolan and myself.

There are two requirements that are important for a definition of what at one time most of us were party to accepting shd be labelled ‘Received Pronunciation’. The first and really essential one is that it shd be as far as possible completely unmarked geographically. The other is that it shd also be as far as possible unmarked sociologically. Certainly for the vast numbers of users of British English as an additional language there can be no gain in adopting any UK regionalisms. Nor is there any advantage for them to employ any socially conspicuous forms whether “posh” or demotic. Thus both the key words of ‘SSBE’ are open to serious objection. Daniel Jones wd appear to have bitterly regretted his early use of the term ‘standard (pronunciation)’. Nolan, in his int'resting 1999 article ‘The Shifting Sands of English Pronunciation’, sed his view ‘differs from a common view which refuses [sic] to locate RP geographically’. He admitted to what he called ‘the slightly iconoclastic view.. that RP is firmly a variety of the South East’ on grounds he gave that were unfortunately far from convincing. In respect of localisation a more reasonable description wd seem to be that it is most densely represented in the southeast of England where it originated but, although it’s thinner on the ground the farther one goes from its area of origin, it nevertheless may be heard all over Great Britain even from some people who have not spent substantial parts of their formative years away from their childhood locality.

Since my decision in 1972 to reject the labels ‘Received Pronunciation/RP’ in favour of General British/GB I’ve seen no suggestion for a replacement that has made me at all inclined to revise that judgment. The alternative I’ve met with of which I most approve has been “Non-Regional (British) Pronunciation/NRP” as introduced by Collins and Mees in their Practical Phonetics and Phonology (2003, 2008). However, I don’t consider it a positively better substitution and for me personally it has the admittedly trivial problems that its abbreviation has a slightly unfortunate echo of “RP” and that, for something put to such constant use, a two-letter abbreviation is more convenient than a three-letter one. Some account of the history of this terminology may be seen on this website at Section 7 Item 3.

Memories of Language

A member of an American-based group, largely composed of university teachers concerned with the English speech performance of non-native users of English, wrote recently, replying to a question asking “How are .. spelling rules learned without being taught?”, “If kids aren't taught to spell at all, then I don't see how they would know how to arrive at the right spelling, other than through long experience with the visual forms. ” Well that’s exactly it. I think we le'rn to spell by seeing how words are spelt, rememb'ring them, copying them and treating new items on analogy with them. I’m these days asserting my independence in that sfere at least in my emails and blogs. One curious observation I’ve made about the subtitlers of British tv is that they regularly ignore a rule mentioned in the discussion that provoked the remark quoted above when they come to words like 'policys'.

He sed too: “I can remember seeing that reading amounts to mental speaking ... [A] German book on how to learn languages ... claimed that the text is mentally "spoken". I know this is true of me ...”. I find I too have much the same reaction. I seem almost always to mentally hear what I’m silently reading. I even tend to apologise to myself for silent slips of the "tongue". These are of course slips of the mind that the tongue may or may not implement. He added that to “those who send back [to a proof(-)reader] "an NRA member" changed to "a NRA member" because "N is a consonant" ... I had to explain .. that L, M, N, R .. are "words that begin with vowels" ”. This helps to explain to me how offen I’ve felt people get these 'wrong'. By the way, when I read phoneticians who write about "a /r/" or "an /r/" I offen wonder if they’d read aloud [ə (ʔ)r̩] or [ə rə] or [ə ʔɑ(r)] in the first case or [ən (ʔ)ɑ(r)] or [ən (ʔ)r̩] in the second etc.

He continued: “[A] proofreader suddenly became disturbed by the word "coworker" and began claiming it nonsensically says "cow orker". Of course, the fact [is] that people are not confused by the spelling, and that there's no such thing as a "cow orker" ... [and] she had looked at this word .. thousands of times ... and it had never bothered her, but one day .. she went wacky with it for a few weeks. A few weeks later, it didn't bother her anymore.” Incident’ly if a low-rhoticity speaker sez “car-worker” it can sound exactly like the non-existent but suggestive “cow-irker” that she may've just possibly been troubled by the thaut of at least subconsciously.

Perhaps this is one case where the US prefrence for solid spelling for such compounds over hyphenation produces a problem for them we Brits dont suffer from. I wdnt expect the solid spelling to be used in a British publication. The OED lists no alternative spelling to “co-worker” which is the form appearing in all three of its illustrations of the term’s use. We dont usually favour the hyphenless spelling “cooperate” either. I have to confess to a milder problem of that kind. I find very occasionally that I can look at a perfectly ordinary normally spelt word of only a few letters and suddenly I can’t believe that that’s what its spelling really is. I find then that I have to look it up to put my mind at peace.

Another memory-based reaction I find offen occurring to me is that, seemingly absolutely out of nowhere, I suddenly think of some melody or other. I suspect that more offen than not I'm recalling a pitch pattern so much as a rhythm. Maybe the particular melody that occurs to me is taken out of my mental store of rhythms (and melodies) because it’s still on top of the pile from having been most recently he'rd or perhaps it may be selected because of its being a favourite. Just today I (silently) re'd a name on a shop that had the rhythm [ dɑː də dɑː də dɑːɑː də]. The tune it braut to mind was one I hadnt he'rd for a long time but it was a favourite. Its four level-pitch syllables were followed by a fall from above their level. (It was the beginning of Duke Ellington’s Drop Me Off at Harlem.)

“Inogolo” on Spoken Names

I’ve been looking at something entitled mysteriously “inogolo” describing itself as “the practical, easy-to-use website devoted to the English pronunciation of the names of people, places, and miscellaneous stuff [sic] ... a searchable database of names with both phonetic and audio pronunciations in English. Browse names alphabetically or by tags. Check out the growing number of helpful pronunciation guides”. This, repeated as “Search dozens of name pronunciation websites on the internet with one convenient search” [sic], is disappointingly not a re-direction to guides of various sources but to fifteen separate lists (average length 100 items or less) that Inogolo alone provides under a dozen rather inappropriately broad headings including Geography, Food & Drink, Government, Religion and Society. Clicking on “Resources” at the top of its title page did on the other hand take one to a modest such list of a dozen books.

Its own main list contains plenty of int'resting items I’ve enjoyed browsing thru. There’s fortunately a slot where you can enter any name you want to ask for the pronunciation of. Naturally I first put in their own odd name “inogolo”: that drew a blank. I cd find at that point no clue to the authorship of the website. Further on, after I’d begun to ponder over the matter of there being no sign of human participation, I suddenly re'd “The pronunciations given here are, as best as [sic] I can determine, the common usage in American English. I have not tried to reproduce pronunciations with Italian accents”. Next I tried some random items including Eyjafjallajökull. The response to that was “The name Eyjafjallajökull will be added to the list of names being considered for addition to the inogolo website. Please bookmark the site and come back soon”. As I continued I found, something that wasnt mentioned up front, that the transcriptions “assume an American english [sic the non-capitalisation] accent”.

Okay, I like finding out how they say various names in American English. So I tried Palacios and found [pə`lӕʃəs] which surprised me and shows you you can never be certain what happens to Spanish-derived names in the US. Then I tried Tuskegee which they gave as an easily interpretable \tuh-SKEE-gee\ and sounded as predicted /tə`skiːʤi/. Then I tried McDonalds which came up as \mik-DAHN-uhldz\. That was fine too even tho I didnt believe that all or even most Americans begin it with /mɪk/. Anyway you’ll’ve gathered that they follow the gen'ral US practice of using their own clumsy re-spelling system not IPA. Continuing to browse I clicked on “Pronunciation Guide to the Names of Dogs”. I thaut it’d be good to see if they had Fido and Rover but it turned out to be a list of about 150 dog breeds. I noticed that some were underlined and others not. I think I worked out what that signified when I fancied seeing and hearing what they made of the Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever. No underlining me'nt no pronunciation for the entry! Nevertheless it was int'resting to le'rn that the verb toll in the sense ‘decoy’ which has dropt out of general usage in the UK survives in the US. The Americans, to judge from “inogolo”, must be rather good at pronouncing dog-breed names as one presumes from seeing none of them marked with the red bullet used liberally elsewhere to denote “commonly mispronounced” items.

The feature of this site that most attracted my attention was its offer of audio renderings of the names. I listened to at least half a dozen, usually far more, from each of the fifteen sections. All I he'rd were spoken with reasonable non-artificial clarity by the same male with a mainstream-type General American accent. At just one entry I found a native-sounding speaker illustrating the Dutch form of Van Gogh. The GA one /vӕn `goʊ/ was as expected the only other version. The speaker’s only non-mainstream usage I noticed was /njuː/ instead of /nuː/ at New Orleans, despite the notation \noo OR-luhnz\, New Jersey etc. The mechanism for getting the audio isn’t quite smooth but once you’ve got the name you can repeat it easily. One type of occasional discrepancy between notation and sound occurred eg at Baruch where the capitalisation of its first syllable \BAR-rook\ signals it as the main stress whereas one hears [ˈbɑː`ruːk] with the accent actually on the second syllable. The same thing happen'd at Augustine /AW-guhss-teen/ with audio [ˈɒːgə`stiːn] and Bvlgari \BUL-gair-ree\ sounding [ˈbʊl`gɛːri]. Another less important mismatch occurred occasionally eg at Guadalajara where the transcription is \gwah-dah-lah-HAH-rah\ which wd sound very fussy but, more naturally, the speaker actually sez [ˈgwɑːdələ`hɑrə].

I found practic'ly no offers of information on how the entries might be pronounced in other parts of the world so I was puzzled when I once came across “Quotation marks ("xxx") enclose a whole word pronounced as in American english”. There were only US versions of Birmingham and Los Angeles. One wondered why a second version \GLAHZ-go\ was provided for Glasgow (with no audio). At Greenwich as well as /`grenɪʧ/ we get /`grɪnɪʤ/ which latter is presumably taken to be the current usual British form. In the odd French entry we see traces of the common lexicographer’s delusion that English speakers can copy the French so precisely as to produce no alternation of strest and unstrest syllables eg at Sauvignon Blanc \so-vee-nyo(n) blah(n)\ in which no syllables are in capitals. The speaker sez something like [ˈsoʊvinjɑ̃ `blɑ̃ː]. Most of the information this site provides is very satisfactory. Only in one or two odd cases do we find anything really strange: I suspect that Chile as \CHEE-leh\ faithfully spoken as [`ʧiːlɛ] and Hawaii as [hə`wɑːʔiː] are not “the common usage in American English” but pretty rarely he'rd versions. EFL users may find this unusual site usefully fills many gaps left by general dictionaries which so often omit names.

Linking and intrusive r's

That great national treasure-house of English words the OED, an abbreviation so well known that it’s usually superfluous for anyone writing about the English language to apologise for not spelling it out in full as the Oxford English Dictionary, as most people will know is compiled “on historical principles”. This means that it lists each word or expression not, as is usual for popular dictionaries, giving priority for the user’s convenience to the most common senses in which it’s used, but listing first its earliest known meaning and at the same time supplying quotations of its use starting with the earliest known example. Turning up OED’s treatment of any linguistic term I usually look forward to finding out who was the person who originated it. When I came recently to look for ‘linking r’ I found this:
linking r: a letter r in word-final position that is normally pronounced before a following vowel but is silent before a following consonant (as in far, far away).
1950 J. S. KENYON Amer[ican] Pronunc[iation]. (ed. 10) 164 Observe that linking r is the use between words of an r that is spelt and was formerly pronounced. Ibid. 165 Linking r is sometimes omitted in Southern British. 1956 D. JONES Out[line of] Eng[lish] Phonetics (ed. 8) xxi. 196 When a word ending with the letter r is immediately followed by a word beginning with a vowel, then a r-sound .. is usually inserted in the pronunciation ... r inserted in this way is called ‘linking r’.

The Jones EPD3 of 1926 had at p. xvii the heading "XIX r-Linking" followed by “The phenomenon of r-linking requires special attention. It will be recalled that the sound « r » is often inserted at the end of a word when the word immediately following it (in connected speech) begins with a vowel.” This seems highly likely to be the first use of the term in print.

When I came to look in OED for the rather unfortunate but very widely used term intrusive r I was surprised to find no similar entry for it at the word intrusive. However, a direction to such an entry appears at “R” so we can take that to be the promise of a comparable entry to be seen when the revisions of OED3 get round to it. I suspect that this term too was coined by Daniel Jones. He actually had to admit that he found himself using such an /r/ in the idea/r/of it. None of his predecessors appears to’ve used the term. Alexander Ellis apparently used the much less objectionable term ‘euphonic r’ in his Early English Pronunciation of 1889. Henry Sweet called it the ‘hiatus-filling r’ in 1910 if not earlier (see The Sounds of English p.62); he’d referred to the phenomenon at least as early as 1890 (Primer of Spoken English p. viii). The problem with ‘intrusive’ is that, having gained some popular circulation at least, it sometimes tends to be interpreted as a purist value judgment. The terms “unetymological” and “unhistorical” /r/ have been used but they’re praps a little too polysyllabic to be much favoured. The term “epenthetic” seems to be reserved for insertions that arnt phenomena of connected speech such as the /t/ which is he'rd in some people’s pronunciation of mince as /mɪnts/ or the /d/ that appeared in the Middle English pronunciation of thunder. Anyway, as to the question of when it first appeared in print, the earliest will prob'bly turn out to be the Jones Outline third edition of 1932 §760 if §274 of Ward’s Phonetics of English was new in 1939 and not reprinted from the 1929 edition. Praps someone with access to a copy of Ward’s rather rare first edition of 1929 (or second of 1931) can tell us. More on this topic may be seen here especially §8.

BlogRoll

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