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| 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:
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| care1 (= Care Act) |
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| care2 |
My first impression was that the two "cares" had the [ɛə] variant. Then it seemed to me that the second one was [ɛː] but only after listening to it while thinking of a monophthong – I'm tempted to resort to the phantom theory.
ReplyDeleteEmilio, the first one is the one I'm not so sure about: The second formant has a bit of a fall at the end, but then the speakers voice goes down.
ReplyDeleteI must say I'm a bit confused. I think I find both examples similar to this:
Deletehttps://translate.google.com/?hl=es#en/es/care
and quite different from this:
http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/care_1
Stretching the topic a little bit--
ReplyDeleteBetween the traditional diphthong group [ɪə] and [ɛə] and the monophthong group [ɪ:] and [ɛ:], I think there's an intermediate "inglide" stage: [ɪᵻ~ɪɘ] and [ɛɐ~æɐ], i.e., gliding toward inner tongue positions without involving opening or closing that centering glides do. That, I think, is what we've hearing most often from British English speakers since the latter half of the last century, but then I'm only an EFL learner.
I can't help feeling that the picture is of Winifred Robinson and not Shari Vahl. They seem to get a bit tangled up in Google image searches. Who was the actual speaker?
ReplyDelete