Friday 28 March 2014

'angry' Ken Livingstone

One of my followers in a comment on my blog post of the 11th of March writes that he's heard Ken Livingstone pronounce angry as [ɛəŋgri] with a word-initial diphthong, whereas another commentator believes the initial sound to be of a fairly steady-state type. In case you have no access to the sound file in question, here is a snippet. KL says (and mind the glottal replacement in get, which becomes [gɛʔ]): "[...] or get angry or unpleasant [...]".

 credit: BBC

5 comments:

  1. To my ageing ears KL actually says "or get angry or unpleasant" and I would transcribe his pron. of the first vowel in the word "angry" (in an ever so slightly narrow transcription) as [æː].

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  2. John, I bow to your matured ears.

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  3. I concede that I was wrong on this point. I interpreted his pronunciation as akin to a common English SQUARE vowel of ɛə but, when you slow it down, I can hear that it's a bit more open than that.

    At 1:07 in this video, you can hear Nigel Farage use a similar vowel in "standard".

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