My Family

credit: BBC

I'm watching the BBC sitcom My Family. In one scene Susan Harper, the mother, reminds her daughter Janey of an appointment she has with the local council to submit a petition. Janey has tarted herself up, which her mother Susan doesn't like.

Daniela Denby-Ashe as Janey Harper

credit: BBC

So Susan says reproachfully: "You should be wearing an outfit that says: 'Take me seriously' not: 'Take me seriously'" (I deliberately left out any punctuation marks). If you're an EFL learner, how would you say these sentences to get the message across?

The answer will be posted here at a later date (including a sound file illustrating how the actress said the two sentences).

Here's how Susan Harper (played by Zoë Wanamaker) said the two sentences:

Zoë Wanamaker as Susan Harper

credit: ??

AEP

No, AEP does not stand for Auditory Evoked Potential, at least not in this context, but for
Accepted English Pronunciation. It's the title of a book of 123 pages written by Beverley Collins, S. P. den Hollander and Jill Rodd in 1973. What I acquired is the "zevende druk" of 1987. (The eighth impression bears the title Sounding Better with Inger M. Mees as an additional co-author; a CD now comes with the book.) I bought it second-hand (alas, without the cassette, which was not available) because book and cassette are out of print.

The subtitle reveals that the book is directed at NSs of Dutch. It's designed for intermediate and advanced learners of English.

Interestingly, the title contains the adjective 'accepted'. When you replace it by the fairly outdated quasi-synonym 'received', you get Received English Pronunciation. And it was particularly the section on the model of pronunciation this book is based on which I was interested in and which made me buy it.

Paragraph 3 on p. 10 is entitled 'Models for pronunciation'. The accent of English for learners to imitate is called Received Pronunciation and abbreviated to RP. This accent is described as the "speech of the average modern RP speaker" (10) and as "modern English Pronunciation" (7).

More on the contents of this booklet in a future blog entry. There is, by the way, a parallel publication entitled Accepted American Pronunciation by Collins and Mees.

search keywords

The software this blog is based on provides the possibility to see which keywords visitors used to search my blog. Among the keywords of today were:

credit:www.dailymail.co.uk

• english idioms have the upper hand
• shifting sands
• narrow transcription examples

But one of them was fairly puzzling:

•  "jack windsor lewis" queen

Jack, I didn't know you have any royals in your ancestry!

BTW: The query came from Spain.

Bell and vowels

Sidney Wood has published some interesting thoughts on A M Bell and his vowel articulation model. It would be worthwhile to do a study on the historical development of articulation-based vowel models from the earliest orthoepists to the Cardinal Vowel zenith. If such a history has already been written, let me know.

new edition on the (distant) horizon

Routledge advertises the 3rd edition of Practical Phonetics and Phonology by Bev Collins and Inger Mees. Here is what Routledge says about the new features:

New features of this edition include: new readings by Peter Trudgill and John Wells; a section on English orthography; an appendix of websites dealing with phonetics and accents of English; revised and updated activities and examples. The accompanying CD now includes: British Estuary English and New York English.

It seems I copied the announcements for the 2^nd edition. Sorry for that! Here's what I found on the 3^rd ed.:

Section A: Introduction 1. English Worldwide 2. Phoneme and Allophone 3. Connected Speech and Phonemic Transcription 4. How we Produce Speech 5. Consonant Possibilities 6. Vowel Possibilities Section B: Development 1. Phoneme and Syllable Revisited 2. English Consonants 3. English Vowels 4. Features of Connected Speech 5. Stress and Rhythm 6. Speech Melody Section C: Exploration 1. Accent Variation – General American 2. Accents of British Isles 1: England 3. Accents of British Isles 2: Celtic-Influenced Varieties 4. World Accent Varieties 5. Pronunciation Change: Past, Present, Future 6. Teaching and Learning a Foreign Language Section D: Extension 1. RP – R.I.P? David Abercrombie 2. Attitudes to Accents Daniel Jones 3. Pronunciation Worries David Crystal 4. Helping the Deaf to Hear Dennis Fry 5. Making Computers Talk Peter Ladefoged 6. Covert Associations of Speech Sound Steven Pinker 7. Using Phonetics to Fight Crime Maurice Varney 8. The Rise of ‘Upspeak’ Barbara Bradford 9. How Children Learn the Meaning of Intonation David Crystal.  

To be published 1st January 2013 (chuckle!).
The hardback edition will sell like hot cakes for £70.00 (gulp!).

credit: www.texasbasstackle.com

Re: "British Estuary English". Have I missed something here? Are there Estuary Englishes other than the British chimaera? (This comment refers to the second ed.)

doodle of the 29th of February

2012 is a leap year. Unlike a common year it contains an additional day (the 29th of February). Google's doodle for this day looks like this:

credit: www.google.co.uk

Frogs? Making music? The association between frog and leap year is easy to form: Frogs leap and 2012 is a leap year (funny ha-ha). The chain of associations between music and 2012 as a leap year is a bit longer: 220 years ago, on the 29th of February of 1792, the Italian composer Gioachino Antonio Rossini was born. He composed operas in the buffo style, but he is historically more important as a composer of opera seria.

But how is the Italian pronunciation /dʒoaˈkiːno rosˈsiːni/ made palpable to the English tongue? Let's see what LPD3 and EPD18 offer.

	LPD3	EPD18
Rossini
Gioachino	no entry	no entry

If there's no Gioachino in the dictionaries, maybe there are other words starting with <Gio(a)->? One gets Gioconda, Giotto, Giovanni in both LPD and EPD. In Italian (and, please, correct me if I'm wrong because I do not speak Italian) we have /dʒo-/ as a pronunciation of <Gio->. With the added <a> we get /dʒoa-/, and this is what Forvo offers for Gioachino. When it comes to English the situation is not so straightforward.

To quote John Wells: "Usually, when English borrows a word from some other modern language, we keep the spelling used in the source language and hesitate about the pronunciation." Sound observation, innit?

a year in the merde

I'm reading Stephen Clarke's A Year in the Merde of 2004. It's about a Brit going to Paris to start a new job there. Some of the Parisian frogs try to speak English with him - in a more or less strong French accent. As one can't expect the average reader to be familiar with IPA symbols, the author tries to convey the accent by a kind of pronunciation spelling.

Here are some examples for you to enjoy. Can you guess their meanings?

sentence		solution (to be published)
Alok for wah toowa king wizioo	1	I look forward to working with you
Ah'm ed of hah tee	2	I'm head of IT
Ah've done a yee-uh uv post-grad at Jo-ja state	3	I've done a year of post-grad at Georgia State

Stephen Clarke

credit: www.piper-verlag.de

what's it called? (with updates)

This blog entry will be revised!

What is the standard accent or norm accent or reference accent or model accent of England called? Well, the term that first and foremost comes to mind is RP or Received Pronunciation. But there are others (together with some updates as suggested by blog followers) such as

name	abbrev.	used by
BBC pronunciation	---	Peter Roach1
Educated Southern English	ESE	Gerhard Leitner2
English Standard Pronunciation	E.S.P	John L. M. Trim3
General British pronunciation	GB	Jack Windsor Lewis4
Modern Received Pronunciation	MRP	Patricia D. Scott Ashby5
Public School Pronunciation	PSP	Daniel Jones6
Non-Regional Pronunciation	NRP	Beverley S. Collins7
Received Standard	---	Henry Cecil Wyld8
Reference Pronunciation	RP	David Rosewarne9
Standard British English	SBE	Ken R Lodge10
Southern British English	---	Kenyon & Knott11
Southern British English	---	Alfred C. Gimson12
Southern British Standard	SBE	John C. Wells & Greta Colson13
Southern England Standard Pronunciation	SESP	Paul Tench14
Standard Pronunciation	StP	Daniel Jones15
Standard Southern British English	SSBE	Rachael-Anne Knight16
Received Pronunciation	RP	Alan Cruttenden17(and others)
Traditional Received Pronunciation	Trad RP	Peter Trudgill18
U pronunciation	---	Alan S. C. Ross19

This list is by no means complete. I deliberately left out denominations like Queen's English or Oxford English. The burning question (well, at least for some; for others it's a tiring one) is why some authors opine that RP is an inappropriate label and therefore fancy another term. This'll be pursued in another blog entry.

Used with permission from Debbie Ridpath Ohi at Inkygirl.com.

--------
¹Roach, P. (2009), English Phonetics and Phonology, (London etc.), p. 3
²Leitner, G. (1982): "The Consolidation of 'Educated Southern English' as a Model in the Early 20th Century", IRAL 10, p. 93
³Trim, J.L.M. (1961): "English Standard Pronunciation", ELT Journal XVI (1), p. 28, 34
⁴Windsor Lewis, J. (1972), A Concise Pronouncing Dictionary of British and American English, (London), p. xiv
⁵Ashby, P. (2011), Understanding Phonetics, (London), p. 4
⁶Jones, D. (1917), An English Pronouncing Dictionary, (London)
⁷Collins, B., Mees, I.M. (2008²), Practical Phonetics and Phonology, (London, New York), p. 4
⁸Wyld, H.C. (1914), A Short History of English, (London), p. 17
⁹Rosewarne, D. (1984): "The term RP", JIPA 14, p. 91
¹⁰Lodge, K. (2009), A Critical Introduction to Phonetics, (London, New York), p. 71
¹¹Kenyon, J.S., Knott, Th.A. (1944), A Pronouncing Dictionary of American English, (Springfield, Mass.), p. v
¹²Gimson, A. (1970), An Introduction to the Pronunciation of English, (London), p. 85
¹³Wells, J.C., Colson G. (1971), Practical Phonetics, (London), p. 6
¹⁴Tench, P. (2011), Transcribing the Sound of English, (Cambridge etc.), p. 4
¹⁵Jones, D. (1909), The Pronunciation of English, (Cambridge), p. v
¹⁶Knight, R.-A. (2012), Phonetics, (Cambridge etc.), p. 9
¹⁷Cruttenden, A. (2008), Gimson's Pronunciation of English, (London), p. 77
¹⁸Trudgill, P. (2002): "The sociolinguistics of modern RP", in Trudgill, P., ed., Sociolinguistic variation and change, (Edinburgh), p. 171-180
¹⁹Ross, A.S.C. (1970), How to Pronounce It, (London), p. 11

another (fairly) new blog

In November 2011 Sidney Wood launched a blog called SWPhonetics. It contains some good tutorials, e.g on PRAAT, if you're into this program(me). I also recommend the postings on (the dangers of) mp3-recordings.

Sidney Wood

I'm afraid I can't display a photo of Sidney Wood here because I do not have either the express or the written permission from the blog's author, and it would be too tiresome to give full credit with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. ;-)