early c20 /ɑː/ - part 2

First of all - thanks for the comments on my previous post.
If Dobson is right, then we've clarified the matter as far as the situation up to the c18 is concerned. But what about the c19 and (early?) c20? My query was stimulated by a comment made by the 7th Earl of Onslow in an interview with Melvyn Bragg for the BBC series Routes of English:

What I’d call it is a perfectly natural accent because that was the accent I was brought up with. It’s different slightly to my parents and it’s different to my grandparents. I mean, the only thing I can remember is instead of saying "weekend" they would always say: “come from a Saturday to Monday”. They never used the word “weekend”; it was considered rather awful. My parents would definitely say "larndry", "larnch", "harnch", "Cumton", "Cuventry", "Brumton", lengthen sounds in "orff" and "gorn" and shorten them like "gel". Now I say some of those but not as many as I can sometimes try to remember to if I try to be very snobbish.

Michael Onslow was born in 1936, his father William in 1913 and his grandfather Richard in 1876.
Here's the list of words again to which I've added 'haulm':

item	Afzelius
haulm	hɔɔm, haam
haunch	hɔɔnʃ, haanʃ
haunt	hɔɔnt, haant
launch	lɔɔnʃ, laanʃ
laundry	lɔɔndrĭ, laandrĭ
gauntlet	gɔɔntlĭt, gaantlĭt
jaundice	ʤɔɔndĭs, ʤaandĭs
paunch	pɔɔnʃ, paanʃ

It seems there's only scant evidence of this variation (a baronet and a squire's widow so far - both not on one of the lower steps of the social ladder, I guess).
Addendum: There's a post by Jack Windsor Lewis in his Phonetiblog #321 (= 'Words Like Launch') of Christmas Eve 2010. In this blog entry he gives some additional information on the topic.

early c20 /ɑː/?

I'm currently looking for some evidence for the pronunciation of words such as 'laundry', 'launch', 'haunch' etc. with /ɑː/ instead of the now exclusively used /ɔː/. When did the former pronunciation fade out? Already in the c19? Early or mid-c20? Was the /ɑː/~/ɔː/ variation restricted to certain letter combinations? Was it associated with some particular social stratum (~upper class)?
Jon Arvid Afzelius in his Engelsk Uttalsordbok (Stockholm) of 1909 lists these items (randomly selected by me):

credit: www.twitterstash.com

item	Afzelius
haunch	hɔɔnʃ, haanʃ
haunt	hɔɔnt, haant
launch	lɔɔnʃ, laanʃ
laundry	lɔɔndrĭ, laandrĭ
gauntlet	gɔɔntlĭt, gaantlĭt
jaundice	ʤɔɔndĭs, ʤaandĭs
paunch	pɔɔnʃ, paanʃ

But only /ɔː/ is indicated in 'daunt' or 'flaunt'. I don't have access to the first editions of either Ward's The Phonetics of English or Jones's An Outline of English Phonetics who may have mentioned this. If one of my gentle readers happens to have one of these and is inclined to check what they say about the variants, I would be very grateful. Also - could you point me to some other secondary sources that shed light on this matter?

a short history of OED

credit: National Portrait Gallery

If you have access to the new OED3 online version and in case you're interested in the historical development of this magnum opus, look at http://www.oed.com/page/oedhistory/history-of-the-oed.
D'you know who this gentleman with a lot of facial hair is? I bet you do.

the various publication stages of the new OED3

I must admit that I fell into a 'trap' unintentionally set by the OED team (and it was Jack Windsor Lewis who freed me from it).The new OED online version represents various (temporal) stages of publication. Some pronunciations represent the 1989 version, others reflect the state of the art of the 3rd edition.

Here are two examples:

 Take a look at the beige area to the right of the entry. It tells you that the article on 'ingressive' represents the publication stage of 1989 in its online version of November 2010. When you click on "Previous version" you get this:

In the case of 'monophthong' the beige area reveals a publication stage of January 2010, which represents the 3rd edition:

Whether you like it or not, the present OED online version represents different 'gestation' stages. Words within the alphabet range M - R comply with the 2010 standards, words outside this section reflect the state of 1989. There are some minor exceptions to this, however. So you've got to eyeball the beige area.

Here's another example - perishability. The transcription for it is

 

if you look at the version representing the 3rd edition, but it's

if you click on the version representing the 2nd edition. The transcription symbols look much more agreeable in the new, third-edition style. However, although Clive Upton is pronunciation adviser, the symbols of OED3 are not a hundred per cent identical with what ODP offers. This is what 'perishability' looks like in ODP:

What immediatelly strikes one's eyes are the two symbols in the 2nd and 5th syllables which are different from what appears in OED3. ODP uses a small capital i (without dot) with bar, whereas OED3 prefers barred small i (with dot). It's not what I call uniformity.

There's a new blog entry by Jack Windsor Lewis on this topic here, which I strongly recommend to you. 

Jack Windsor Lewis

(It's got the running number 001, which should actually be 320). The item in question is titled "OED3 Phonetics".

bedtime without bats

Children's bedtime stories shouldn't have bad endings.

credit: Peter Harakaly

This was one of the sentences my German EFL students had to read out last week. As you may guess, what most of them said was

1. bet time
2. bat time
3. bad time
4. bed endings
5. bet endings
6. [ˈstɔrɪ ]

I then pronounced the two words 'bed' and 'bet' in isolation and asked them to describe the difference(s) they heard. They recognised the difference in vowel length (= pre-fortis clipping as the experts call it). I had them read the sentence again - with little success. Next, I pronounced 'bed' again accompanied by a long horizontal hand movement (roughly 3 feet) and 'bet' along with a much shorter movement of my hand. That seemed to help.
In a German context 'story' is normally pronounced [ʃtɔʀi] or [stɔʀi] as in 'Erzähl keine Stories!' (~ don't tell any (made up) stories!). British customs officers shouldn't let this version in.

credit: Peter Harakaly

"Brit." vowel symbols in OED

Here's the list of phonetic and letter symbols and model words for General British vowels, which OED labels "Brit.":

phonetic symbol	letter symbol(s)	model word(s)
ɪ	ih	pit
iː	ee	bean
i	ee	happy
ɨ	ih	roses, business
ɛ	e	pet
æ	a	pat
ʌ	uh	butter
ɑː	ah	barn, palm
ɒ	o	pot
ɔː	or	born
ʊ	uh	put
uː	oo	goose
jʉ	jew	articulate
ə	ə	another (schwa)
əː	er	nurse
eɪ	ay	bay
ʌɪ	eye	buy
ɔɪ	oy	boy
aʊ	ow	mouth
əʊ	oh	goat
ɪə	ear	near
ɛə	air	pair
ʊə	oor	cure, jury
ɛ~	ah	fin de siècle (nasalized)*
œ	eur	boeuf, coeur
y	yew	French du
e	eh	French bébé
œ~	uh	French un (nasalized)*
ɑ~	oh	French franc (nasalized)*
ɔ~	oh	bon mot (nasalized)*

* placing the tilde beside the letter symbol instead of above it will not be the definitive way to indicate nasalisation in OED. Rumour has it that changes will be made in due time to conform to IPA conventions.
The same letter symbols are used for [ʌ] and [ʊ], and <oh> represents three sounds. Who needs these letter symbols anyway - cui bono? 

credit: Oxford University Press

BTW: There's a separate OUP webpage entitled 'Key to the pronunciation'; it lists different pronunciation descriptors than the ones I display above. Mine are taken from individual dictionary articles. The former seem to be codes for printers, e.g. {lm} for 'length mark' or {shti} for 'short i' (be careful when typing this code!) or {ope} for 'open e' meaning [ɛ].

OED's new transcription system

In December Oxford University Press launched the newly designed online version of OED. The editorial board (one of its members is the pronunciation consultant Clive Upton) re-designed, among other things, the way the pronunciation of a word is displayed:

The screenshot shows the pronunciation of the word 'incomprehensibility'.
One of the new features is the fact that one can click on the pronunciation and a window pops up which displays the 'meanings' of the transcription symbols. Here's an example:

There are three columns. The left column contains the phonetic symbols; the center column displays a a letter or two intended to represent the sound and the right column indicates one or two model words.
What's missing, by the way, is the secondary stress on the 2nd syllable of 'incomprehensibility'.

I'm going to list all symbols for vowel sounds in a separate blog entry, and the consonants will follow in yet another post.
 






PS: See also Jack Windsor Lewis's blog #319.

more on /v/ and /w/

Here are some phrases/sentences for you to practise:

1. very wet weather
2. what wonderful value
3. that vamp of a woman
4. she's very witty
5. a vat of dry wine
6. a woolly vest
7. very well done
8. a villain obsessed with wealth
9. men as vain as women
10. payments via wire transfer

approximant /w/

/w/ is a voiced labial velar approximant. It's the sound that most Brits who speak General British produce at the beginning of this sentence: "Woe gates here zoo den Laser roymen." (sorry for the weak joke)
Seen aerodynamically /w/ displays laminar airflow, so - in auditory terms - there's no audible friction. If I'm not mistaken, the term 'approximant' was first proposed by the late Peter Ladefoged in 1964 in his monograph A Phonetic Study of West African Languages, in which he writes on p. 24 (I quote from the second ed. of 1968):

"The term approximant is used here to describe a sound which belongs to the phonetic class vocoid or central resonant oral [...], and simultaneously to the phonological class consonant in that it occurs in the same phontactic patterns as stops, fricatives and nasals."

[w] is an approximant; others would call it a frictionless continuant. We need both lip-rounding (at least in careful speech) and a frictionless narrowing of tongue and velum to articulate the sound. That's why the sound is classified as labial velar. It's called 'voiced' because the vocal folds vibrate.

Q: What do you call snakes on your car windscreen?
A: Windscreen vipers.

1. The wurst is yet to come.
2. Wurst is best.