February 7th, 2010
Here are the results of a tiny bit of research into the disappearance of centring diphthongs in General British English that I talked about in my post He sticks his neck out again.
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I was watching a television programme the other night when I suddenly realised that the presenter was producing an awful lot of [ɪ:] sounds, where I would have [ɪə].
The presenter, Dan Snow, pictured to the left, was born in 1978. I decided, through the marvellous BBC iPlayer, to investigate just how consistently he used a monophthongal realisation. The series is called Empire of the Seas and I watched the first 30 |
minutes of the first episode, which, if you’re interested, you can find here. In the section I watched there were 38 occurrences of words which in a phonemic transcription using the current de facto standard symbol set would contain the vowel /ɪə/. Dan Snow had [ɪ:] for every single one of them.
I thought it would be a good idea to compare this result with the speech of someone slightly older. I came upon this page, which contains the text and sound file of Earl Spencer’s speech at the funeral service for Princess Diana in 1997. Earl Spencer was born in 1964. The speech is only just over 4 minutes long and contains only 10 occurrences of the target. The speaker uses [ɪə] for all of them.
Of course, the samples are very small, and the speech is scripted and very probably rehearsed, so no very firm conclusions can be drawn as yet, but it seems worthwhile looking into this further. I should add that I excluded the small number of occurrences where the target appeared immediately before /l/.
Posted in Phonetics | 8 Comments »
February 4th, 2010
Rant alert
Today was one of my Oxfam volunteering days. I usually go into Penzance on the bus, but it was a nasty drizzly day and I didn’t feel like standing at the bus stop, so I drove in instead. When I reached the car-park, I found I did not have enough change to pay for 3 hours (£3.30, the robbers!), so I paid for 2 hours (£1.60) and went back later to pay for the extra hour (£1.20). Having done so, I suddenly realised that the total I had paid for 3 hours this way was only £2.80. Now if that makes sense, I am a little green frog from the planet Zog.
Hyla japonica (Japanese tree frog)
Used under a Creative Commons Licence: Kropsoq
Posted in Rants | 1 Comment »
February 3rd, 2010
Consider, if you will, the phonetic term labialised. A labialised consonant, in my book, is one which has lip rounding/protrusion simultaneous with an articulation which has a greater degree of stricture — this means, in effect, a plosive, affricate, fricative, lateral or nasal. So, in English for example, the initial consonants of two, chew, soup, loose, noose etc. are likely to be labialised because of co-articulation with the following rounded vowel (if indeed the vowel has lip-rounding, which is becoming less and less the case these days). A phonetic transcription would record this labialisation as [tʷ sʷ nʷ] etc.
Now please consider words like ruse, rude, roof. Surely the same sort of thing is going on, isn’t it? Lip rounding is being anticipated during the articulation of the [ɹ]. So we have a labialised voiced postalveolar approximant and we can write [ɹʷ]. Er…just a mo. Is the stricture of [ɹ] more radical than that of the lip-rounding? Well, in most accounts of primary/secondary articulation you will find that the answer is no. What we have in the words listed above should really be classified as a double articulation — a labial-postalveolar approximant to be precise, just as [w] is classified as a labial-velar approximant and [ɥ] as a labial-palatal approximant. We don’t have a symbol for a labial-postalveolar approximant. May i suggest….
Or maybe I should get out more…
Posted in Phonetics | 5 Comments »
February 2nd, 2010
The image above comes from a paper by Henry Jenner entitled Traditional Relics of the Cornish Language in Mounts Bay in 1875 published in The Transactions of the Philological Society. Jenner, along with the surprisingly named Rev. W. S. Lach-Szyrma, the vicar of Newlyn, visited some old people in Newlyn Parish and in Mousehole to record the scraps of Cornish remembered by them.
Jenner chose to use Glossic, one of a number of transcription systems developed by Alexander Ellis, to record the pronunciations of the words he heard. Here are Jenner’s transcriptions of the numbers 1-20, as remembered by members of two different sets of informants, both of Newlyn, John Kelynack and his wife, and Mrs Soady. Mrs Kelynack had learned the words from her father, John Tremethack, who died in 1852 aged 87, which means he was born in 1765, making him a contemporary of Dolly Pentreath, purportedly the last monoglot native speaker of Cornish. Dolly died in 1778.
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The Kelynacks |
Mrs Soady |
| 1 |
on |
on•un |
| 2 |
doo |
deu |
| 3 |
trei |
traiy |
| 4 |
paj |
paj•u |
| 5 |
pemp |
pemp |
| 6 |
weth |
eth |
| 7 |
saa•yth |
saa•yth |
| 8 |
eith |
eith |
| 9 |
noun |
nou |
| 10 |
deg |
deg |
| 11 |
ig•nak |
ig•unak |
| 12 |
dau•dhak |
dau•dhak |
| 13 |
tau•dhak |
tau•dhak |
| 14 |
bizwau•dhak |
bizwau•dhak |
| 15 |
pemp•thak |
pemp•thak |
| 16 |
wedh•ak |
wedh•ak |
| 17 |
saa•ydhak |
saa•ydhak |
| 18 |
ei•dhak |
ei•dhak |
| 19 |
noun•jak |
noun•jak |
| 20 |
ig•uns |
ig•uns |
I don’t know what the • signifies. If it is meant to be a syllable divider, it is certainly used rather inconsistently. The numbers 11-19 show some interesting alternations.
Many thanks to Michael Ashby for sending me a PDF of the Jenner article.
Posted in Cornwall and Cornish, Phonetics | 3 Comments »
January 29th, 2010
| On my way to the Penzance Oxfam shop to do my bit of volunteering each week I often pass the only remaining cinema in Penzance. It is called the Savoy. It opened in 1912 and and is the longest continually running cinema in Britain.
As I was passing the other day, there was a group of young men looking at the posters of the current offerings. One said to the others: “That’s a good one, I think. Shall we watch it tonight?”
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The Savoy Cinema, Penzance
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A few weeks ago, I was on the bus, again going to Oxfam, and I overheard a snippet of conversation between two women. Again they were talking about the cinema and one said to the other: “Oh, I haven’t watched that yet?”
Both of these utterances struck me as distinctly odd. I would have said see instead of watch. I certainly watch a television programme, but I see a film at the cinema, or a play at the theatre. The young men were definitely Cornish, but the woman on the bus came from the West Midlands, judging by her accent. Is the usage of these two words changing?
Posted in Languages | 1 Comment »
