Hallowe'en

credit: rhinestonearmadillo.typepad.com

Hallowe'en (or Hallow-e'en or Halloween, pronounced /ˌhæl əʊˈiːn/ in General British) is literally taken from All Hallow Eve(n). The word even is a poetic and dialectal but otherwise fairly old-fashioned word for evening. The apostrophe in the spelling Halloe'en indicates the omission of a letter - here <v>. There aren't many words in English, by the way, which signal the omission of a letter (or two) by an apostrophe. I won't go into apostrophes - just a few examples may suffice: Jack-o'-lantern, sou'wester, fo'c'sle, ha'penny, 'cause, isn't, O'Leary etc.

Hallow is derived from Old English (= OE) hāliȝ meaning 'holy'. One of its inflected forms is hālȝa. This developed into halȝa (shortening before Cs). The <ȝ> was pronounced [ɣ] before back vowels in OE times; in unstressed syllables this sound became an u-like vowel, and later on probably due to the preceding [l] a diphthong containing an [u] as its second element - written <ow> - came into existence. According to OED the word hallow was little used after 1500 (see date chart):

Hallowe'en seems to have Celtic origins according to Nicholas Rogers (2002), Halloween, OUP . In the medieval Irish calendar the festival of Samhain (pronounced /saʊn, ˈsɑːwɪn, ˈsaʊən/) was celebrated to mark stock-taking, the yearly harvest, to greet the imminent winter etc. Rogers continues: 

It was also a period of supernatural intensity, when the forces of darkness and decay were said to be abroad, spilling out from the sidh, the ancient mounds or barrows of the countryside. To ward off these spirits, the Irish built huge, symbolically regenerative bonfires and invoked the help of the gods through animal and perhaps even human sacrifice. (12)

So it was basically a non-Christian, heathenish festival. And what is it today? Ask me not!

The Two Ronnies - four candles (3)

Here's the second section of Four Candles:
B: [ɡɒtniˈplʌɡz] {= got any plugs}?
C: [plʌɡs] {= plugs}?
B: Yeah.
C: [wɒʔkaɪndəplʌɡs] {= what kind of plugs}?
B: A rubber one – [ˈbɑːfrʊm] {= bathroom}.
C (shows two different bath plugs): What size?
B: [ˈθɜːʔiːn] {= thirteen} amp.
C: It’s electric plug, electric bathroom plugs you call them in the trade. Electric bathroom … (inaudible). (puts one plug on the counter.)

Two things are worth mentioning here:
- th-fronting and
- glottal replacement.

TH-fronting is found widely in England; it's also a feature typical of the Cockney accent.
With th-fronting /θ, ð/ become /f, v/. In a blog entry of the 1st of November of 2006 John Wells reports on a short survey:

As we know, in England the dental fricatives /θ, ð/ are on their way out.One of our second-year BA Linguistics students, Sam Wood, reports some interesting findings about TH fronting in London. He carried out a small-scale Labov-style survey in three London department stores, and found that the use of [f] rather than [θ] in third (floor) correlated not, as expected, with the speaker’s social class, but rather with ethnicity. Salespeople categorized by their appearance as black (= of African descent, including West Indians) used [f] in 40% of cases, those judged to be white (= European) in 31%, east Asian (= Chinese etc) in 17%, and west Asian (= Indian etc) in 13%. The pronunciation [fɜːd] rather than [θɜːd] also correlated, much more highly, with (estimated) age: it was used 80% of the time by those judged to be up to 20 years old, but 33% or less by all older age groups. So in London the sound change seems to be being spearheaded by young blacks.
The fact that it was the blacks who came out as most likely to use TH fronting is all the more striking given that in Caribbean and African English the tendency is to replace dental fricatives not by labiodental fricatives but by alveolar plosives. 

Many German speakers tend to sibilation to [s, z] (as do the French) and they often get knotted tongues when it comes to pronouncing s-th-clusters.


Glottal replacement (or glottalling) is increasingly heard particularly in British English. Ronnie Corbett uses the glottal stop to replace the /t/ in what and Barker replaces it in thirteen. The glottal stop as an allophone of /t/ is found in syllable-final positions after vowels or sonorants.

a letter that can give you an 'ell of an 'eadache

'Arriet: "Wot toime his the next troine fer 'Ammersmith?“
Clerk: "Due now.“
'Arriet: Course Oi dawn‘t now, stoopid, or Oi wouldn‘t be harskin‘ yer!“
This joke appeared, if I remember correctly, in Punch.

Dropping one's aitches - a cardinal sin for many -  was and still is a shibboleth of seemingly incorrect pronunciation. Hundreds of thousands of native speakers of English eschew the /h/ consistently, many more omit its pronunciation most of the time. Although harm and arm, hand and and, heart and art become homophones, we still understand those people due to the redundancy of language. Many people living in England believe that dropping one's aitches is a sign of low education - a social stigma. The presence of /h/ in word-initial position is believed by many people to be related to educatedness and its lack to lower class and ignorance. For a detailed description of this socio-phonetic phenomenon see Lynda Mugglestone's book Talking Proper of 2003 (2nd ed.).

credit: Richard Howell

Heir, honest, honesty, honour, hour are pronounced without /h/ by almost every Brit and American with at least a decent amount of education.
With hotel usage is devided: LPD 3 lists both pronunciations - with and without /h/, as does EPD17; ODP withholds the h-less pronunciation. OED 1989 has both versions with the h-less one marked 'old-fashioned'. OED online in its draft revision of 2010 indicates /ˌhəʊˈtɛl/, /hə(ʊ)ˈtɛl/ only (obviously under the influence of Clive Upton).



Historical is sometimes pronounced without /h/ when preceded by an as in
- an historical novel,
- an historical account,
- an historical outline.

The pronunciation of the letter <h> is changing as well. LPD3 indicates /eɪʧ/ as the standard General British form and marks /heɪʧ/ as "BrE [= British English] non-RP". In his opinion poll the author John C Wells found that 24% of the British English speakers born since 1982 prefer /heɪʧ/; so it seems to be spreading.

Have, has and had as auxiliaries frequently lose their /h/ in colloquial speech as do the pronouns he, his, him, her in unstressed positions.

There are other droppings such as
w-dropping (or wyn-dropping),
yod-dropping,
r-dropping,
s-dropping and - not to be forgotten -
bird dropping.
This list is far from being complete!

dramatis personae

One of the readers of this blog indicated to me that it would be a good idea to show the pronunciation of the literary term 'dramatis personae', which I used in my blog on the sketch Four Candles. I'm only too happy to comply with this request. 

ˌdrɑːmətɪs/ˌdræmətɪs/drəˌmætɪs pɜː/əˈsəʊnaɪ/pɜː/əˈsəʊniː

'Dramatis personae' is, of course, Latin and means 'persons of a/the drama'. It's a fairly formal and technical term referring to the characters of a drama. I used it in a jocular manner in my blog on Four Candles.

The Two Ronnies - four candles (2)

This is the first part of the sketch:
Scene: An ironmonger’s shop
Dramatis Personae:

• Ronnie Corbett (= C) as shopkeeper
• Ronnie Barker (= B) as customer
• Mr Jones

Stage directions are set in italics; my glosses are between braces.

(B enters the shop)
B: [fɔːkændls] {= 'fork handles' is what B wants}.
C: [fɔːkændls] {= 'four candles' is what C understands}?
C (gets 4 candles): Here you are, four candles.
B: No, [fɔːkændls] {= fork handles}!
C: Well, there you are – four candles!
B: No, [fɔːkændos] {= fork handles}! [ʔændls] {= handles} for forks!
(C gets a fork handle.)
C: […] fork handles.

The misunderstanding mainly rests on h-dropping, so that /hændl/ becomes [ʔændl]. The /l/ in 'handles' sometimes sounds almost like an [o], which would illustrate l-vocalisation.

Here's a link to the video clip in its full-length version.
(Suggestions/improvements are welcome!)

The Two Ronnies - four candles (1)

credit: www.tomcl.co.uk

The sketch I'm writing about was first aired by the BBC on the 4th of September 1976. There are two versions actually - an earlier one played and recorded in front of a very quiet live audience and a later one, which had been re-written, and acted in front of a much noisier audience. The sketch was handwritten by the late Ronald ("Ronnie") William George Barker (1929-2005) under his alias George Wiley. The original title was "Annie Finkhouse". The script begins like this: "An old ironmonger’s shop. A shop that sells everything — garden equipment, ladies’ tights, builders’ supplies, mousetraps, everything. A long counter up and downstage. A door to the back of the shop up left. The back wall also has a counter. Lots of deep drawers and cupboards up high, so that R. C. [Ronnie Corbett] has to get a ladder to get some of the goods that R.B. [Ronnie Barker] orders. (Please discuss)  [sic]
(R.C. is serving a woman with a toilet roll. He is not too bright.)"

The two main actors are Ronald ("Ronnie") Balfour Corbett, who is one of the finest British sketch comedians, and Ronnie Barker. Corbett plays the shopkeeper and Barker is the customer. The acquired title of the sketch is "Fork Handles" or "Four Candles". It's under this title that you can find the video clip in the Internet. (My thanks to John Maidment for drawing my attention to it).

The sketch is phonetically interesting, and I should like to make some comments on the sketch in future blog entries.

chameleonic pronunciation (3): for instance

In normal colloquial General British the phrase 'for instance' is pronounced /fər ˈɪn(t)stən(t)s/. In case you want to sound pedantic, say /fɔːr ˈɪn(t)stən(t)s/. In casual, rapid speech it may become /fr ˈɪns(t)əns/, and in very casual enunciation it may be reduced to [frˈn̩s(t)n̩s].

an elevator controlled by Scottish English

If you like Scottish English and want to have a good laugh you might wish to watch this clip. (My thanks to James Kirchner). But I must warn you: the language is very explicit at times. The clip is unseemly for squeamish people. If they insist on watching it, they should have 'sal volatile' ready.

The clip is taken from a comedy sketch show called Burnistoun, which is a fictional Scottish city. The two gentleman are Iain (what else!) Connell and Robert Florence.

chameleonic pronunciation (2): create

The verb create and forms derived from it may undergo yod dropping in General British. Thus we might get /krieɪt/ -> /krjeɪt/ -> /kreɪt/.

credit: www.harpercollins.com

Jeremy Hunt, Nick Clegg and Gordon Brown (my thanks go to Jack Windsor Lewis for drawing my attention to Mr Brown's pronunciation of create) are speakers who fairly regularly drop the yod in this verb. Until recently we've had three swallows to make an estival yod-dropping. A few days ago I stumbled upon a 'royal swallow' - Charles Philip Arthur George Windsor, better known as His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales. Prince Charles recently published a book entitled Harmony. A separate audiobook is available with recordings of the voice of the prince. Sample tracks can be founded on the Internet. At one point he says: "For many years I have been working to create effective partnerships between the private, public and non-governmental organisation sectors, [...]." Create is pronounced /kreɪt/ in this sentence.
The yod-droppings observed could have been caused by sentence rhythm and speed of enunciation. Four swallows don't make a sound shift. In other words, we have to wait and see what happens in the near future, but maybe it's an edging towards a complete loss of yod.