Robert Burns on mice and men

Could anyone help me with the pronunciation of a line in R. Burns' poem To a Mouse?

This is the stanza:

credit: Stephen M Barnett creativecommons.org

But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

 I've highlighted the line in question. The rhyme scheme, it seems, is
a a b c a c, so "agley" should rhyme with "joy" or am I wrong here? What then is the pron of "agley"? A transcription of the whole line would be appreciated.

The wrong hypo + thesis

In last week's seminar one of my young professionals pronounced the word hypothesis as /ˌhaɪpəʊˈθiːsɪs/. Nice try and I'm shore everyone will have understood her, but it's pronounced /haɪˈpɒθəsɪs/.

Here are some words with their main stress on the 1st syllable - /ˈhaɪpə(ʊ)-/:

• hypocaust
• hyponym
• hypostyle
• hypotaxis

Next, words with the stress pattern /haɪˈpɒ-/:

• hyponymy
• hypostasis
• hypotenuse
• hypothecate
• hypothesise
• hypothesis
• hypoxia

Some words have a secondary (or no) stress on the 1st syllable -  /ˌhaɪpə(ʊ)-/:

• hypochondria(c)
• hypodermic
• hypogeal
• hypotension
• hypothermal
• hypothetic(al)

Then, we encounter /ˈhɪpə-/ as in

• hypocrite

Or  /ˌhɪpə-/ with secondary or no stress in

• hypocritical

And, last but not least (and with thanks to Alex), {hypo-} in GB and GA is pronounced /hɪˈpɒ-/ and  /hɪˈpɑː-/ respectively in

• hypocrisy
• hypobole

The combining form (also called neo-classical prefix) {hypo-} is Greek in origin: ὑπο-. Its senses are according to the OED: "under, beneath, down, from below; underhand, secretly; in a subordinate degree, slightly". The prefix was handed down to the English language via Latin and French. There are about 200 words with this combining form most of which start with /haɪpə-/, sometimes against etymology and historical development.

Update: There's now another blog post on <hypo-> by John Maidment to be found here (the blog post, not John). 

Looks promising!

credit: CUP

"Sounds interesting" is the title of a new book written by John C Wells to appear in October 2014. It will contain selected entries of a blog run by John until the 22nd of April 2013 when it was discontinued. The text is livened up by drawings done by Lhinton Davidson. Here is the

• Table of Contents

  Preface
  1. How do you say…?
  2. English phonetics: theory and practice
  3. Teaching and examining
  4. Intonation
  5. Symbol shapes, fonts, and spelling
  6. English accents
  7. Phonetics around the world
  Postscript
  Index of words
  General index.
  

The book will cost around 16 GB.

smoked salmon or mother-in-law

Question: Does everyone happen to have smoked salmon in the freezer or is it just my mother-in-law?

credit: Ryan Lerch

Reaction 1: We only have fresh salmon in the freezer ... and no family members.

Reaction 2: Quick, bury her in the garden!

Reaction 3: Why does your frozen mother-in-law look like smoked salmon?

Reaction 4: Most people wouldn't have room for salmon once the mother-in-law ...

GIM 8 - 3rd blog

Let's take a closer look at the description of the KIT vowel in GIM 8 and concentrate on those variants which are considered to belong to either GB or CGB.
For the purpose of easier reference I took the liberty to modify the corresponding figure (number 13 on p.115). This is what my version of it looks like (the five variants are assumed to be numbered consecutively 1 to 5 from top to bottom, i.e. "i (finally)" is no.1):

Variant no. 1 is to be heard from GB speakers in final unstressed position as in heavy, bickie, bevy, many. Variant no. 2 represents the typical GB pronunciation of the KIT vowel in stressed position, e.g. in pit, lip, sit.

There is another variant used by GB speakers in non-final unaccented position, e.g. in the word visible. The penultimate is unstressed and the vowel tends to be more centralised. This fact is not visualised in the original figure of GIM 8. You can see it as variant no. 3 in my modified version. Next, we have variant no. 4, which represents the diphthongisation of the KIT vowel in monosyllabic words by CGB speakers (e.g. dib, fig with [ɪə]). Variant no.5 is the CGB allophone to be heard in final positions of words such as university or liberty.

My thanks to Alan Cruttenden for elucidating me on these variants.

Say, I am happy!

Samuel Beckett
credit: Roger Pic

In the second act of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, we are presented with these verbal symmetries:

Say, I am happy.
I am happy.
So am I.
So am I.
We are happy.
We are happy.
(Silence)
What do we do, now that we are happy?
Wait for Godot.

Barry Cusack drew my attention to a BBC Radio 4 broadcast from the 31st of March, which contains a sound snippet from a performance of Waiting for Godot. The interesting thing is that the two actors employ different word-final KIT vowels in the word happy. Listen:

The first actor has a KIT vowel in unstressed word-final position which is rather at the half-close level whereas the second uses an /ɪ/ more at the close level.

I couldn't find out the names of the actors, so I can't tell you anything about their age or professional training.

quasihomophonous lacquer

This is what I found in an advert by a German DIY company:

credit: Bauhaus

short story stressed

credit: Harry Clarke

"The Tell-Tale Heart" is a short story by Edgar Allen Poe.

As you know, not each and every short story is a short story in the technical sense.

My question to you, dear follower who art an indigenous speaker of the English tongue, is this: What is the stress pattern of the term short story in my initial sentence?

'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