Friday 2 March 2012

new edition on the (distant) horizon

Routledge advertises the 3rd edition of Practical Phonetics and Phonology by Bev Collins and Inger Mees. Here is what Routledge says about the new features:
New features of this edition include: new readings by Peter Trudgill and John Wells; a section on English orthography; an appendix of websites dealing with phonetics and accents of English; revised and updated activities and examples. The accompanying CD now includes: British Estuary English and New York English.
It seems I copied the announcements for the 2nd edition. Sorry for that! Here's what I found on the 3rd ed.:
Section A: Introduction 1. English Worldwide 2. Phoneme and Allophone 3. Connected Speech and Phonemic Transcription 4. How we Produce Speech 5. Consonant Possibilities 6. Vowel Possibilities Section B: Development 1. Phoneme and Syllable Revisited 2. English Consonants 3. English Vowels 4. Features of Connected Speech 5. Stress and Rhythm 6. Speech Melody Section C: Exploration 1. Accent Variation – General American 2. Accents of British Isles 1: England 3. Accents of British Isles 2: Celtic-Influenced Varieties 4. World Accent Varieties 5. Pronunciation Change: Past, Present, Future 6. Teaching and Learning a Foreign Language Section D: Extension 1. RP – R.I.P? David Abercrombie 2. Attitudes to Accents Daniel Jones 3. Pronunciation Worries David Crystal 4. Helping the Deaf to Hear Dennis Fry 5. Making Computers Talk Peter Ladefoged 6. Covert Associations of Speech Sound Steven Pinker 7. Using Phonetics to Fight Crime Maurice Varney 8. The Rise of ‘Upspeak’ Barbara Bradford 9. How Children Learn the Meaning of Intonation David Crystal.  

To be published 1st January 2013 (chuckle!).
The hardback edition will sell like hot cakes for £70.00 (gulp!).
credit: www.texasbasstackle.com

Re: "British Estuary English". Have I missed something here? Are there Estuary Englishes other than the British chimaera? (This comment refers to the second ed.)

11 comments:

  1. As you rightly say, Estuary English is a chimaera, and like all non-existent things can non-exist wherever it likes. I am intending to write a 500 page monograph on Guatemalan Estuary English with a projected publishing date of 1st January 3013.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. 1.) I didn't know you had such intimate relations to Guatemala.
      2.) Nor did I know you've worked out how to become immortal.

      Delete
    2. I read somewhere, following a link from John Wells UCL site, that Alexander Ellis refused to recognise the speech of the Thames Estuary area as a regional variant, it was just bad English. But something happened in the meantime. At school in the 1950s, in a lesson English dialects, we were told we spoke Estuary English. That made us sit up, our bad English had a posh name. But it didn't help. A few years later my air force CO exploded "University? You can't even speak !xyz! English".

      What came to be known as Estuary English a few decades later most likely
      refers to the home counties generally, what Gimson called Southern British English in the 1960s (see your blog of 27 Feb), i.e. the growing number of those who never shifted to acquired RP.

      But that morning at school in the 1950s, was that a chimaera? Being born at half tide with both feet in the water? It's back to bad English again, I suppose.

      Delete
    3. Now - that is very interesting what you tell us about your teacher having used the term EE in the 1950s! David Rosewarne claims to have coined the term in 1984 in an article for the TLS. What's the name of that teacher?

      Delete
  2. @Kraut: "What's the name of that teacher?" I strongly suspect he's no longer with us so we can't ask. What we really need is where did he see it? He must have read something some time before. The definition of the area was the same, the Essex and Kent sides of the Thames, extending eastwards.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Oh - what a pity! Maybe, there are some heirs that could be contacted ...
      Did he use any written material in class which could give us a clue?

      Delete
    2. That was a generation of teachers who'd had their university studies interrupted in 1939 and finished after 1945. What would they have read about English dialects? No point in speculating, does anyone know?

      Delete
    3. Was it at grammar school your teacher talked about dialects?

      Delete
  3. Hi, Peter!

    "New features of this edition include: new readings by Peter Trudgill and John Wells; a section on English orthography; an appendix of websites dealing with phonetics and accents of English; revised and updated activities and examples. The accompanying CD now includes: British Estuary English and New York English."

    These contents are already present in the 2nd edition...

    What I can tell you about the new edition is that it'll have an article on the phonetics of Italian which B. Collins and I. Mees have co-authored with me.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Congratulations, Alex! The book by Collins and Mees is part of the series 'Routledge English Language Introductions'. I wonder how the phonetics of Italian fit into the book.

      Delete
    2. At the end of the book there is a section on the pronunciation of Spanish, French, German, and (in the new edition) Italian...

      Delete