smoothing

I wrote a blog post on smoothing here and here. I'd like to add another post on this topic. The BBC presenter Shari Vahl on the 28th of this month in the BBC Radio 4 programme You & Yours said:

Shari Vahl (credit: RadioTimes)

In 2015 the Care Act will merge health and social care in the biggest reform of its kind in sixty years.

Paul Carley believes he can hear a difference between the two versions of the word care. He writes (on Facebook):

The first 'care' has the [ɛə] variant (though not by any means the most extensive off-glide), the second has the [ɛː] variant.

I listend to the two words myself several times: I can convince myself to hear an offglide in the first version, but then after a while I am certain it's a monophthongal [ɛː] just like in the second version. This is not unusual if and when the differences (should they exist) are so minute and if it's a sound track most likely compressed in quality for the purposes of the internet.

Listen for yourselves (you're going to hear Care1 and care2 in a row, first at normal speed and then slowed down by 30 per cent):

Even slowing down the playback speed doesn't convince me thoroughly.
Next I looked at the spectrograms:

care1 (= Care Act)

care2

Not much of a difference, is there?

When's Chewsday in LPD and EPD?

credit: burnspetfood

I checked various editions of both EPD and LDP to see when the pronunciation of Tuesday as /ʧuːzdeɪ, -dɪ/ was first 'licensed' by the respective (and respectable) author(s).

LPD1 (1990) has it as a second entry indicating it's a "variant derived by rule" (p. xxviii).
EPD14 (1977) does not show it as a variant but EPD15 of 1997 does¹.

Go on chewing then!


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1 Thanks to Jack Windsor Lewis for checking!

Jon Arvid Afzelius, Engelsk Uttalsordbok, (1909)

source: http://sok.riksarkivet.se

This is to inform the phonetic community that Jon Arvid Afzelius's dictionary "A concise pronouncing dictionary of English" ("Engelsk Uttalsordbok" is the Swedish title) is now available online as a pdf version. Go to this site and click "Klicka här för att ladda ner filen".

order, please!

Paul Carley spotted yet another interesting phonetic feature. It illustrates nicely that phonetic processes have to operate in a certain order to lead to a particular result.

Kamal Ahmed (credit: BBC)

First, listen to how the BBC business editor Kamal Ahmed pronounces the word 'strength' in this sentence (repetitions of words and hesitation sounds are omitted):

[...] we are less worried about the strength of European banks than we were earlier.

Does he say /streŋkθ/? - No, he doesn't
It's rather /strentθ/. The /t/ is particularly difficult to hear, so I slowed it down by 30 per cent for the last two snippets.

Now which processes are needed in which order to make the change from /streŋkθ/ to /strentθ/ plausible?
1. Delete the /k/.
2. By regressive assimilation the /ŋ/ becomes /n/ due to /θ/.
3. An epenthetic /t/, which is dental, is inserted surrounded by dental /n/ and /θ/.

How to pronounce 'population'

LPD3 offers this pronunciation for the GB version of population:

EPD18 has this entry:

Both dictionaries have a yod as onset of the second syllable. Now listen to Bishop Richard Harries and General Sir Nicholas P Carter using this word without yod.
Bishop Harries says this

[...] up to 60% of the population

and this:

[...] 15% of the population at the time

General Carter, head of the British Army, says:

[...] but I'm absolutely confident that the majority of the population in central Helmand will be secured by Afghan forces.

Thought for the Day as a phonetic treasure trove ..

... well, at least sometimes.
Here is the text of the Thought for the Day broadcast on the 10th of October, 2014 by BBC Radio 4.

The plague that swept through Europe in the middle of the 14th century may have killed some 200 million people, up to 60% of the population. Even as late as the 17th century the great plague in London was responsible for 100,000 deaths, 15% of the population at the time. Indeed for most of human history it was assumed that plague, along with pestilence, war and famine was just one of the things we were stuck with. Now, however, we take it for granted that epidemics, like the Ebola outbreak, which has so far killed nearly 4000 people, can and should be controlled. With the advent of scientific medicine in the 20th century we work on the assumption that we can eventually discover the cause of a particular disease and find a cure for it, and that with proper public health measures we can in the meantime control its spread. There could be no bigger contrast between the attitude of almost every previous age and our own. We believe the responsibility is ours. The ball’s in our court. It’s not predetermined, it’s not fated. It’s down to us. We can do something about it.

There was a time when this line of thought seemed a threat to a religious view of life - at least to some people. They believed that the more it was our responsibility, the less it was God’s and vice versa, as though we were two actors competing for the same stage. But that is not how it is. The Bible is clear from the start that we human beings have been given real responsibility. Indeed that is what it means to be created. It is to be given a life of our own, to make something of, and a world to help shape. What’s so different about our time with its scientific medicine and the ability to take safeguarding measures on an international scale is our larger capacity, our greater responsibility.

And some reported words of Jesus seem particularly salutary:
Where someone has been given much, he said, much will be expected of him; and the more he has entrusted to him the more will be demanded of him.

From a Christian point of view God not only holds the world in existence, he works in and through human beings at all levels, especially those who seek to respond to human need. And I think especially of that woman doctor in Nigeria, Ameyo Adadevoh, and her small staff team at an ordinary family clinic whose quick thinking managed to stop Ebola spreading from a patient they had diagnosed, so far limiting deaths in Nigeria to only 7. Four of the dead are health workers, sadly including Dr Adadevoh herself. Our choices, at both a political and personal level, literally make all the difference.

Bishop Richard Harries (credit: wikipedia.org)

The speaker is Bishop Richard Harries.
He was born in 1936, educated at Wellington College, Berks. He went to Sandhurst and after having been transferred to the reserve of officers he read theology at Selwyn College, Cambridge. Further details on his military and church career can be found in the internet.

The speech I'm going to write about seems to have been scripted.

I intend to write several blog posts on this speech because it illustrates several interesting features of (written-to-be-)spoken English. Some - though not all - of these features are recommendable for EFL learners to incorporate into their pronunciation habits.

For this first blog post I've highlighted the word "plague", which appears three times in the text. First, you hear each variant embedded in a short phrase and then the word in isolation.

It's interesting to note the variation in the articulation of the consonant /l/ and the qualities of the following diphthong. Moreover, the Bishop does not audibly release the word-final /g/.

unetymological r-liaison / intrusive r / epenthetic r

In my blog post of the 1st of October this year I drew your attention to two of the many finds made by Paul Carley. They were about epenthetic r or intrusive r or unetymological r-liaison. There's a nice, succinct description of this phenomenon in the 3rd ed. of Practical Phonetics and Phonology by Collins and Mees on p. 124.
As the authors rightly state, the /r/ pops up mostly after word-final /ɑː ɔː ə/ and after diphthongs ending in schwa. The majority of cases involves the vowels /ɔː, ə/, less often is the /r/ heard after words ending in /ɑː/.
Our reliable phonetic phenomena spotter and rapporteur Paul has recently come up with two examples of unetymological r-liaison after a PALM vowel (i.e. /ɑː/):

1. "[...]to do the cha cha ch /r/ isn't it."

2."It's a 7-foot grand piano made by Yamaha/r/ * uhm It's'n amazing piano."

This second snippet seems to be less straightforward because I hear the /r/ and next a /z/ followed by a very brief hesitation sound and then, finally, the "it's'n" is uttered.

weakform of something

In LPD3 the pron of something as /sʌmɪŋ/ is described as casual; EPD18 doesn't indicate any weakform for it. Paul Carley with his truffel-spotting ears discovered a recent sample of this weakform. It was used by the philosopher etc. Raymond C. Tallis

credit: www.3quarksdaily.com

in a BBC Radio 4 speech titled "The Waiting".
Here's the phrase: "Indeed, a story could be described as something that is withheld."

progressive/perseverative assimilation

Here are two snippets of a BBC Radio 4 interview with a 93-year-old gentleman by the name of Bob Lowe¹. The general topic is loneliness.

credit: BBC

Listen closely to how Mr Lowe pronounces the phrases " [...] and I know all those [...]" and "[...] and in that way [...]". Can you spot the progressive assimilations?

Answers to my questions will be added at a later time although I don't think you need them or do you?

There's another sample of perseverative assimilation to be heard in the sentence "Nearly all those stories are given to us by other journalists" uttered by Ian Hislop¹ in a speech on the malpractice of journalists - the so-called Leveson inquiry.

And here's yet another one pronounced at a fairly slow tempo. Victoria Coren Mitchell¹ says this:

[...] you've chosen this to be quite an early question [...]

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¹My thanks to Paul Carley for digging up these samples.

r-liaison

I'm sorry if I'm boring you with my repeated analysis of Canon Tilby's radio broadcast. Today I'd like to look at her use of r-liaison (aka linking r). (I won't go into unetymological r-liaison/intrusive r.) Canon Tilby is a speaker of GB - an accent of low rhoticity.

We find three possibilities in her address. A word ends in the letter <r> and

1. the following word begins with a glottal stop plus vowel; no /r/ is pronounced;
2. the following word begins with a vowel; no /r/ is pronounced though the two words are linked;
3. the following word begins with a vowel; the /r/ is sounded.

ad 1) "[...] a strong sense of their ʔown desirability [...]."

ad 2) "The undercover journalist was working fo(r) a Sunday paper [...]."

ad 3) "[...] a psychic space where desire and fear play themselves out [...]."

In total there are 12 phrases in her address in which r-liaison would be possible. Out of these eight phrases contain a word-initial glottal stop (= case 1). Case 2 appears only once and proper r-linking (case 3) is to be heard three times. The large number of glottal stops, which prevent r-liaison, is probably due to the fairly formal speech style unless it's a general habit of hers.

an infelicitous implosion

There are roughly 200 English words ending in the letter sequence <-sion> - from abrasion to vision. This ending is pronounced either /-ʒ(ə)n/ or /-ʃ(ə)n/. Is there a rule behind this? Look at this list:

abrasion - accession
adhesion - aggression
collision - aversion
conclusion - convulsion
decision - declension
elusion - emulsion
implosion - impression
infusion - intension
lesion - mission
etc.

The first word of a pair always has /-ʒ(ə)n/, the second always ends in /-ʃ(ə)n/. The rule is quite simple (at least theoretically): If the letter preceding the <-sion> represents a vowel, it's always ezh (or yoghurt if you prefer the latter term), a consonant letter (silent or not) leads to /-ʃ(ə)n/. (See also Jack Windsor Lewis's website, section 4.5).

Listen to Canon Tilby's way she pronounces the word implosion in this sentence:

"If when an invitation comes, you find yourself scheming your way to turning your fantasy into reality you run the risk of implosion."

 None of the big three pron dictionaries records a variant with esh.

a classic case of degemination?

credit: blogjam.name

Degemination, as John Maidment describes it in his Speech Internet Dictionary (= SID), is the

"[...] change from a geminate (long) sound to the equivalent single (short) sound. [...] An example is the pronunciation ˈpraɪ ˈmɪnɪstə instead of ˈpraɪm ˈmɪnɪstə."

Consequently, a geminate is a

"sequence of two identical sounds."

Canon Tilby in her Thought for the Day of the 30th of September pronounces the following sentence:

credit: Christ Church, Oxford

"In Christian spirituality this is a classic case of failure to resist one of the universal temptations."

I highlighted the phrase in which a word-final /k/ and a word-initial one abut. Pronounced as a geminate plosive the hold stage would be longer than that of a singleton. Listen to the whole sentence and then to the phrase "classic case" in isolation. After this decide if it's an instance of degemination:

Is it an easy decision to make? BTW, the hold stage is ~94ms long. For comparison I've cut out other phrases containing a word-final /k/ pronounced by her (hold stage durations in parentheses):
1. public life (~48ms)

2. comic story (~95ms)

3. public interest (~38ms)

4. psychic space (~66ms)

5. risk of (~56ms)

The longest hold stage is that of the /k/ in comic stage. This and the auditory impression rather indicate degemination. What's your opinion?

sound sequences - 1

I'd like to come back to the 'Thought for the Day" broadcast of the 30th of October. The speaker was the Diocesan Canon Angela Tilby (see also here). At one point she said:

He’s not, of course, the only one who’s lived to regret a moment of wild indiscretion.

Listen to the sentence and concetrate on the consonants at the word boundary between "course" and "the".

Does she say /kɔːs ði/ or is it /kɔːs si/?. I think it's the latter rather than the former.

Canon Tilby used the word 'only' three times in her address. Here are the three instances:
1. He’s not, of course, the only one who’s lived to regret a moment of wild indiscretion.

2. It is only when the opportunity appears to realise those unlived fantasies that we have to make a choice of whether to pursue them or resist.¹

3. Not only does your private world collapse in a highly embarrassing way but your outer world is ruined too.

It's the weakform /əʊni/

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¹ Thanks to Alex Rotatori for the hint to this.

consonant cluster reduction #2

Paul Carley inspired me to write another blog entry on consonant clusters (the previous one is to be found here). How does one pronounce the plural form of month - /mʌnθs, mʌntθs, mʌnts, mʌnʔs, mʌns/ - or what?
Listen to this extract from the morning news of the 2nd of October on BBC 4 (Paul, our truffel-finder, spotted it; the speaker is the International Development Correspondent to the BBC, Mark Doyle):

If the disease [Ebola] continues at current rates a million people across the West African region could die within months."

 Here is the whole sentence plus repetitions of months:

How does Mr Doyle pronounce months?Which of the above-mentioned variants does he use. The choice is actually between /mʌnts, mʌnʔs, mʌns/.
Let's look at the waveform first:

/mʌ/ ~ 100 ms
/n/ ~ 74 ms
pause ~ 58 ms
1st aperiodic low volume signal section ~ 39 ms
2nd aperiodic higher volume signal section ~ 160 ms.
The pause section seems to represent the hold stage of an epenthetic /t/ in /mʌnts/.

Could the speaker also have said /mʌns/? In that case the waveform would have looked something like this

and sounded like this:

Not much of a difference, is it?

FLEECE and KIT vowels

Cruttenden writes in his latest edition of GPE on p. 113 that a "short /i/, i.e. a vowel nearer in quality to the long /i:/, rather than /ɪ/ is now the norm in GB finally in words like lady, slopy, happy, donkey, prairie." True as it is, there are always speakers who do not comply with it.
Paul Carley, our phonetic tracker dog, (Paul, no insult intended!) has dug up some interesting examples which are worth being preserved¹.
The speaker is the Diocesan Canon Angela Tilby from Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford.

credit: Christ Church, Oxford

In her Thought for the Day she uses "fantasy" once and "fantasies" twice:
1. "Most of us have Walter Mitty moments; flashes of fantasy in which we enjoy unlimited power, riches, success or sex."
2. "If when an invitation comes, you find yourself scheming your way to turning your fantasy into reality you run the risk of implosion."
3. "It's only when the opportunity appears to realise those unlived fantasies that we have to make a choice of whether to pursue them or resist."
4. "Being completely humiliated by the exposure of your own fantasies is a terrible ordeal but it is also a moment of opportunity."

You first hear the whole sentence, next the word in isolation and then the final syllable only.









What you clearly hear - at least this is what MY ears tell me - is that  fantasy1 and fantasies3 and fantasies4 rather display the quality of the KIT vowel in their final syllables, whereas fantasy2 is pronounced with the quality of FLEECE.

Paul has an explanation for the KIT vowel quality in fantasy1: "I think the cut out bit of fantasy 1 includes a bit of the following 'in', and that's why it sounds a bit like KIT."

In the case of fantasy2 the cotext of the word is slightly different. The next word ('into') also begins with a KIT vowel; however, there is a speech pause before it. So it seems more likely that the speaker has a FLEECE quality before and a KIT quality after the pause.

Canon Tilby's speech contains additional words with the happY vowel, e.g. society, desirability, story, Mitty, recently, only, really, opportunity, spirituality, respectability, highly, any, completely, integrity. But I won't examine these.


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¹ BBC Radio broadcasts are usually available online for seven days only.

consonant cluster reduction

Here's another of Paul Carley's finds. 

 It's about word-final cluster reduction. You may be familiar with the phrase 'King George VI' and the problems that may arise at the phrasal end when it comes to pronouncing it. To make thinks worse, try to say 'King George VI's throne'. Don't hold me liable for any knots in your tongue. What do speakers do to avoid this? Well - they cut corners, i.e.they discreetly delete one of the post-vocalic consonants in /sɪksθ/. Which one?
On the 26th of September on BBC Radio 4 the speaker introduced the six o'clock news by saying:

It's six o'clock on Friday, the twenty-sixth of September. Good morning! [...]"

 Listen to my snippet!

Did you spot the glottal stop as well?

... say how old ...

On the 29th of September Paul Carley from the University of Bedfordshire

credit: Bedfordshire University

drew our attention to an instance of r-liaison (aka intrusive r) in the sentence "[...] and I wouldn't like to say how old our oldest player is" said by a North-East female speaker in a BBC Radio 4 interview. The /r/ pops up between "how" and "old". Listen to this extract. You first hear the complete sentence, next "say how old" at normal speed and then twice the same section slowed down by 38 per cent.

Here’s another sample dug up by Paul: David Cameron in a speech to the UN said this:

“Isolation and withdrawing from a problem like ISIL will only make things worse.”

Listen to the word highlighted in red:

There’s no letter <r> leading speakers into temptation.