Tuesday, 11 November 2014

smoothing #2

"Investigators are trying to find ou what caused a serious fire in a cooling tower of a power station."1 This is a sentence read by Sarah Montague, BBC news presenter, on the 20th of October this year.

Listen to the sentence and concentrate on the words in red.

Sarah Montague (credit: BBC)

If you are an EFL learner, you might want to make a recording of your own version of this sentence. Then compare it with Ms Montague's and concentrate on the vowels in these three words. Does she pronounce fire as  /aɪə/ or /aə/ or /a:/? What about the other two words? Do YOU pronounce them with a diphthong plus schwa or even with a monophthong? Try to imitate the way she pronounces them. Needless to say that you do not have to pronounce these and similar words like that, but it's a nice exercise.

Besides: Can you pronounce the initial phrase "[i]bvestigators are trying to find out" at a similar speed? Try this as well.







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1My thanks go to Paul Carley
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2 comments:

  1. JWL13 November 2014 at 11:23

    Nice example of the naturalness of smoothing of GB triphthongs even in a situation that can't be called casual.

    ReplyDelete
  2. JWL13 November 2014 at 14:57

    Nice example of the naturalness of GB triphthongs smoothed in a situation that cdn’t be called casual.

    ReplyDelete

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