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

John Wright - Speaking English

When looking into one of my drawers I found a long-forgotten magnetic tape:

I'm going to digitise it to preserve it. Does anybody have any details on the author John Wright?

Update: See comments to this blog entry!

GIM 8 - 2nd blog

Two other variants are set off from General British: CGB and RGB.

CGB stands for Conspicuous General British. Who uses this variant? According to Cruttenden it is

to be associated with upper-class families, with public schools and with professions which have traditionally recruited from such families, e.g. officers in the navy and in some army regiments (81).

It is "commonly considered to be 'posh'" (81).
What are typical phonetic features? Here's a selection:
1. use of the KIT vowel in unstressed word-final position as in 'there's a universit/ɪ/ in our lovel/ɪ/ cit/ɪ/';
2. a very open word-final schwa as in 'wait[ɐ]', 'moth[ɐ]';
3. the ash vowel is frequently diphthongised as in [mɛəd] for 'mad'.

RGB is a hybrid variant mixing GB with a few regional features. Cruttenden concedes that the term should actually be used in its plural form - RGBs. In comparison with CGB, RGB is a cover term for regional variants rather than a marker of class or, in Cruttenden's words: "[...] it is useful to have such a term as RGB to describe the type of speech which is basically GB except for the presence of a few regional characteristics which may well go unnoticed even by other speakers of GB" (81). One of his examples is the vocalisation of dark l, which "passes virtually unnoticed in an otherwise fully GB accent" (82).

GIM 8 is available

The new, eighth edition of Gimson's Pronunciation of English by Alan Cruttenden is available now.

One of the eye-catchers will certainly be the replacement of RP (= Received Pronunciation) by the more neutral term GB (= General British). The latter was first mentioned in an academic publication by Jack Windsor Lewis in his 1972 book A Concise Pronouncing Dictionary of British and American English:

It took more than 40 years for the term GB to appear in another important book on the topic.
The reason why Cruttenden adopted GB as a term is summarised on p. 80, where he states that it was because of the "narrow use by many of the name RP, and the frequent hostility to it, the accent described in this book has been changed to General British (GB)." He then adds that "it has to be made clear that [...] it is not a different accent that is being described, but an evolved and evolving version of the same accent under a different name."

More about the new edition in a future blog.

Routledge announced a new book:

credit: Routledge

The author is Dr. Adam Brown, senior lecturer at the Auckland Institute of Studies, NZ.

credit: AIS

Here's the table of contents:
Symbols for English Sounds
Preface
Section I: Phonetics
1: Introduction
2: Accents of English worldwide
3: Airstreams and the vocal cords
4: Cardinal vowels
5: Vowels
6: The vocal organs and consonant classification
7: Plosives and nasals
8: Fricatives and affricates
9: Approximants
10: Non-English sounds
11: Syllable structure
12: Phonemes
13: Accent differences
14: Phonology
15: Weakening and linking
16: Assimilation and elision
17: Connected speech processes
18: Pausing and speed
19: Word stress
20: Tone groups
21: Tones
22: Rhythm
23: Voice quality
Section II: Pronunciation Teaching
24: Targets
25: Integration
26: The effectiveness of pronunciation teaching
27: Motivation and affect
28: Fossilization
29: First language influence
30: Importance
31: Spelling: History
32: Spelling: Literacy
33: Nonverbal communication
34: Listening
35: Testing
Section III: Sample Exercises
Sample exercises
Answers to exercises
Resources
Glossary
References

The book will be available by the end of March (so they say).
Update 1: I ordered the book a couple of days ago. It's supposed to arrive on Monday. 
Update 2: The book has arrived.

Aisōpos - de vento et sole

De vento et sole.

Immitis Boreas placidusque ad sidera Phoebus
Iurgia cum magno conseruere Iove,
Quis prior inceptum peragat: mediumque per orbem
Carpebat solitum forte viator iter.
Convenit hanc potius liti praefigere causam,
Pallia nudato decutienda viro.
Protinus impulsus ventis circumtonat aether
Et gelidus nimias depluit ymber aquas:
Ille magis lateri duplicem circumdat amictum,
Turbida submotos quod trahit ora sinus.
Sed tenues radios paulatim increscere Phoebus
Iusserat, ut nimio surgeret igne iubar,
donec lassa volens requiescere membra, viator
deposita fessus veste sederet humi.
tunc victor docuit praesentia numina Tytan,
Nullum praemissis vincere posse minis. 


This text, translated into English and many other languages, has been used for the description of phonetic features of languages for quite some time. The English version is as follows:

The North Wind and the Sun were disputing which was the stronger, when a traveler came along wrapped in a warm cloak. They agreed that the one who first succeeded in making the traveler take his cloak off should be considered stronger than the other. Then the North Wind blew as hard as he could, but the more he blew the more closely did the traveler fold his cloak around him; and at last the North Wind gave up the attempt. Then the Sun shined out warmly, and immediately the traveler took his cloak off. And so the North Wind was obliged to confess that the Sun was the stronger of the two.

The text serves its purpose fairly well if it it used for characterising the phoneme inventory of English, although according to Deterding (2006) some phonemes are missing, namely the consonant /ʒ/, the diphthongs /ɔɪ/, /ʊə/ and /eə/, and there are no triphthongs. Limitations also exist in regard to positional variants, e.g. word-initial and word-medial /z/ is missing. For additional deficiencies of the text see Deterding (2006).

As a consequence Deterding favours an adaptation of another Aesopian fable, entitled 'The Boy who Cried Wolf'.

There was once a poor shepherd boy who used to watch his flocks in the fields next to a dark forest near the foot of a mountain. One hot afternoon, he thought up a good plan to get some company for himself and also have a little fun. Raising his fist in the air, he ran down to the village shouting "Wolf, Wolf." As soon as they heard him, the villagers all rushed from their homes, full of concern for his safety, and two of his cousins even stayed with him for a short while. This gave the boy so much pleasure that a few days later he tried exactly the same trick again, and once more he was successful. However, not long after, a wolf that had just escaped from the zoo was looking for a change from its usual diet of chicken and duck. So, overcoming its fear of being shot, it actually did come out from the forest and began to threaten the sheep. Racing down to the village, the boy of course cried out even louder than before. Unfortunately, as all the villagers were convinced that he was trying to fool them a third time, they told him, "Go away and don’t bother us again." And so the wolf had a feast. 

Some of the advantages of this text over the previous one according to Deterding are

• each of the monophthongs is represented at least thrice;
• the missing diphthongs are represented;
• the word diet contains  - smoothing excluded - the triphthong /aɪə/;
• etc.

Jack Windsor Lewis argues that a text should include

 at least exclamations, commands, contradictions, question-word, yes/no, alternative and tag questions, hesitations, vocatives and leave-takings" (see here, blog 409),

and its transcription should also indicate intonation marks.

BTW: There are other texts used for similar purposes, e.g. Arthur the Rat, Comma Gets a Cure or The Rainbow Passage.