Othello's ejective

I considered myself lucky when I watched a 1965 film adaptation of Shakespeare's Othello with Laurence Olivier as Othello and Maggie Smith as Desdemona, because I believed (maybe wrongly) to have found a renowned English actor using an ejective plosive in a Shakespearean drama.
Act V, Scene 2 contains a dialogue between the two actors with these lines:

OTHELLO
     By heaven, I saw my handkerchief in's hand.
     O perjured woman! thou dost stone my heart,
     And makest me call what I intend to do
     A murder, which I thought a sacrifice:
     I saw the handkerchief.
DESDEMONA
     He found it then;
     I never gave it him: send for him hither;
     Let him confess a truth.
OTHELLO
    He hath confess'd.
DESDEMONA
   What, my lord?
OTHELLO
   That he hath used thee.

Listen to the clip and concentrate on the last but one word:

Here's the word "used" with the word-final ejective (?) again:

What do you think? Ejective or no ejective?

George Orwell as sociophonetician

George Orwell

Most people know George Orwell from his dystopian novel 1984. But he also was a political writer and published essays on English culture.

 It was by mere chance that I found these two quotations, the first of which is take from the novel Coming up for Air written in 1939:

The second one is to be found in an essay with the title "The English People", written in 1944, but not published until 1947. Among other things Orwell writes about steps towards greater democracy in England. Here is his description of the third step:

Doesn't this sound - at least vaguely - like an anticipation of the concept of Estuary English?

There might even be a link to what Sidney Wood writes in his blog about a personal experience he had at school:

Of course, he [= Rosewarne] couldn’t know that our English language master had already told us at school in 1950 that our dialect was Estuary English. It seems I’d been speaking Estuary English for 50 years before Rosewarne coined the expression. Perhaps it was our English master who coined it, or perhaps he’d read it somewhere. If so, it would be exciting now to know where.

Happy New Year

I wish you all a lot of health and phonetic inspiration!

more in the bu'et?

This a continuation of an earlier blog posting on the description of glottal stop usages.

Eugene Howard Babbitt in his 1896 publication on The English pronunciation of the lower classes in New York and vicinity mentions the usage of the glottal stop in the New York accent on p. 8:

Jespersen in his book Fonetik of 1897-1899 makes this comment on p. 299:

 Joseph Wright in his 1905 English Dialect Grammar briefly mentions the fact that in some Scottish dialect areas intervocalic /t/ is replaced by the glottal catch:

In his Modern English grammar, vol. 1 (1909), Otto Jespersen writes this:

Jespersen distinguishes between glottal reinforcement and glottal replacement. Besides /t/, the two other voiceless stops are mentioned as well.

In 1913 William Grant publishes his Pronunciation of English in Scotland. On p. 30 we find this observation:

Not only are glottal reinforcement and replacement to be heard in connection with /p, t, k/ but also with /n, ŋ/.

I wonder if Dobson has anything to say on this topic in his monumental English pronunciation.

stress minimal pairs - a subgroup

credit: Gary Allman

I think it was John Maidment who started the ball rolling when he put a posting online dealing with stress minimal pairs. I'd like to draw your attention to a subgroup, namely stress minimal pairs the members of which are semantically unrelated.

Consider /ˈtɔːment/ (= severe suffering) and /tɔːˈment/ (= to make someone suffer severely): They share the same number and types of phonemes and they are semantically closely related. 

/ˈɪnsaɪt/ (= clear understanding) and /ɪnˈsaɪt/ (= encourage someone to do something) also share the same number and types of phonemes, but they are semantically unrelated (well, sort of). It this latter group I'm looking for. Here's a first list (some of the items may have identical stress):

1. ˈessay (= writing) - esˈsay
2. ˈforebear - forˈbear (vb)
3. ˈforegoing - forˈgoing
4. ˈincense - inˈcense
5. ˈinsight - inˈcite
6. ˈintern - inˈtern
7. ˈtrusty - truˈstee
8.  
9.  
10.  
11.  
12.  
13.  
14.  
15.  

Any further examples are greatly /əˈpriːsieɪtəd/!

a li'le bi' of bu'er

The IPA symbol (no. 113) for the glottal plosive is this: [ʔ] This isn't breaking news, is it?
But there have been other suggestions. 
A. M. Bell in his Visible Speech of 1867 describes the glottal "catch" (p. 60) like this:

 The symbol he uses looks like the Greek letter χ or two round brackets (see comments below). In his list of consonant symbols on p. 93 we find a sample word written <buʼer>:

Here Bell indicates the glottal plosive by an apostrophe.

A. J. Ellis in the 4th volume of his Early English pronunciation of 1875 quotes Bell's example on p. 1344, but he uses the semicolon [;] for the glottal stop:

Bell is once again mentioned in Sweet's Handbook of phonetics of 1877 on p. xvi and p. 7. He calls the sound "glottal catch" and uses the symbol [x] for it:

In the 5th edition of his Grundzüge der Phonetik of 1901 Eduard Sievers states on p. 278 that the glottal stop ("Kehlkopfverschluss", which Sievers also calls "Stosston"), for which he uses the symbol [ʾ], replaces an oral closure in some English accents:

Henry Sweet in his Sounds of English of 1908 uses the symbol [!] to indicate a glottal stop:

Daniel Jones in The Pronunciation of English (I have access to the 2nd ed. of 1914) uses the familiar glottal stop symbol (see p. xvi):

______________
This blog posting is greatly indebted to Bjørn Ståhlhane Andrésen’s book Pre-glottalization in English Standard Pronunciation (Oslo, New York, 1968).

Merry Christmas

I wish you all a Merry Christmas!

ʧœːmən kœriwɜːst ɪn soːhoː

Off-topic posting:

credit: www.herman-ze-german.co.uk/

If you happen to be in London and you're into German worst - sorry: wurst - then you've got to pop into "Herman ze German". The menu can be found here.
They have two shops:

credit: www.herman-ze-german.co.uk/

            

19 Villiers Street and
33 Old Compton Street


BTW: I don't get any royalty payments for this blog post

Cruttenden's new edition

credit: Routledge

The new eighth edition is due to come out in February of 2014. The accent described will no longer be RP, but General British (= GB). I'm looking forward to the justification for the change from RP to GB.
Here's the table of contents:
PART I: Speech and language
1. Communication
2. The production of speech
3. The sounds of speech
4. The description and classification of speech sounds
5. Sounds in language
PART II: The sounds of English
6. The historical background
7. Standard and regional accents
8. The English vowels
9. The English consonants
PART III: Words and connected speech
10. Words
11. Connected speech
12. Words in connected speech
13. Teaching the pronunciation of English

There will be a companion website at www.routledge.com/cw/cruttenden.

You can pre-order it now. The recommended retail price is ₤ 29.99.