consonant cluster reduction #2

Paul Carley inspired me to write another blog entry on consonant clusters (the previous one is to be found here). How does one pronounce the plural form of month - /mʌnθs, mʌntθs, mʌnts, mʌnʔs, mʌns/ - or what?
Listen to this extract from the morning news of the 2nd of October on BBC 4 (Paul, our truffel-finder, spotted it; the speaker is the International Development Correspondent to the BBC, Mark Doyle):

If the disease [Ebola] continues at current rates a million people across the West African region could die within months."

 Here is the whole sentence plus repetitions of months:

How does Mr Doyle pronounce months?Which of the above-mentioned variants does he use. The choice is actually between /mʌnts, mʌnʔs, mʌns/.
Let's look at the waveform first:

/mʌ/ ~ 100 ms
/n/ ~ 74 ms
pause ~ 58 ms
1st aperiodic low volume signal section ~ 39 ms
2nd aperiodic higher volume signal section ~ 160 ms.
The pause section seems to represent the hold stage of an epenthetic /t/ in /mʌnts/.

Could the speaker also have said /mʌns/? In that case the waveform would have looked something like this

and sounded like this:

Not much of a difference, is it?

FLEECE and KIT vowels

Cruttenden writes in his latest edition of GPE on p. 113 that a "short /i/, i.e. a vowel nearer in quality to the long /i:/, rather than /ɪ/ is now the norm in GB finally in words like lady, slopy, happy, donkey, prairie." True as it is, there are always speakers who do not comply with it.
Paul Carley, our phonetic tracker dog, (Paul, no insult intended!) has dug up some interesting examples which are worth being preserved¹.
The speaker is the Diocesan Canon Angela Tilby from Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford.

credit: Christ Church, Oxford

In her Thought for the Day she uses "fantasy" once and "fantasies" twice:
1. "Most of us have Walter Mitty moments; flashes of fantasy in which we enjoy unlimited power, riches, success or sex."
2. "If when an invitation comes, you find yourself scheming your way to turning your fantasy into reality you run the risk of implosion."
3. "It's only when the opportunity appears to realise those unlived fantasies that we have to make a choice of whether to pursue them or resist."
4. "Being completely humiliated by the exposure of your own fantasies is a terrible ordeal but it is also a moment of opportunity."

You first hear the whole sentence, next the word in isolation and then the final syllable only.









What you clearly hear - at least this is what MY ears tell me - is that  fantasy1 and fantasies3 and fantasies4 rather display the quality of the KIT vowel in their final syllables, whereas fantasy2 is pronounced with the quality of FLEECE.

Paul has an explanation for the KIT vowel quality in fantasy1: "I think the cut out bit of fantasy 1 includes a bit of the following 'in', and that's why it sounds a bit like KIT."

In the case of fantasy2 the cotext of the word is slightly different. The next word ('into') also begins with a KIT vowel; however, there is a speech pause before it. So it seems more likely that the speaker has a FLEECE quality before and a KIT quality after the pause.

Canon Tilby's speech contains additional words with the happY vowel, e.g. society, desirability, story, Mitty, recently, only, really, opportunity, spirituality, respectability, highly, any, completely, integrity. But I won't examine these.


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¹ BBC Radio broadcasts are usually available online for seven days only.

consonant cluster reduction

Here's another of Paul Carley's finds. 

 It's about word-final cluster reduction. You may be familiar with the phrase 'King George VI' and the problems that may arise at the phrasal end when it comes to pronouncing it. To make thinks worse, try to say 'King George VI's throne'. Don't hold me liable for any knots in your tongue. What do speakers do to avoid this? Well - they cut corners, i.e.they discreetly delete one of the post-vocalic consonants in /sɪksθ/. Which one?
On the 26th of September on BBC Radio 4 the speaker introduced the six o'clock news by saying:

It's six o'clock on Friday, the twenty-sixth of September. Good morning! [...]"

 Listen to my snippet!

Did you spot the glottal stop as well?

... say how old ...

On the 29th of September Paul Carley from the University of Bedfordshire

credit: Bedfordshire University

drew our attention to an instance of r-liaison (aka intrusive r) in the sentence "[...] and I wouldn't like to say how old our oldest player is" said by a North-East female speaker in a BBC Radio 4 interview. The /r/ pops up between "how" and "old". Listen to this extract. You first hear the complete sentence, next "say how old" at normal speed and then twice the same section slowed down by 38 per cent.

Here’s another sample dug up by Paul: David Cameron in a speech to the UN said this:

“Isolation and withdrawing from a problem like ISIL will only make things worse.”

Listen to the word highlighted in red:

There’s no letter <r> leading speakers into temptation.

'-ed' and /-ɪd/

In an earlier post (see here) I wrote about the pron of <-ed> in aged. As you know there are many more words ending in <-ed>. The pronunciation of many of these words is rule-governed and the rule is fairly simple. I'm talking about the so-called regular past (participle) tense form of verbs such as
hate, love, seize. Here we have three allomorphs which are phonologically conditioned: The final phoneme of the verb in its infinitival form decides upon the correct allomorph. If the verb ends in an alveolar plosive, we add /ɪd/ as in hate. With final voiced sounds other than alveolar plosives we add /-d/, otherwise /-t/. So far, so easy.
But there are a few adjectives with final <-ed> most of which require the pronunciation /ɪd/ or /əd/ (I may not have dug up all):

1. aged
2. beloved
3. blessed
4. cragged
5. crooked
6. cursed
7. cussed
8. deuced
9. dogged
10. jagged
11. learned
12. -legged, legged³
13. naked
14. ragged³
15. reserved
16. rugged
17. sacred
18. wicked
19. winged (sense: having wings)
20. wretched 

Here are some sample phrases and sentences illustrating their verbal (= 2nd column) and nominal² (= 4th column) use.

1	he aged quickly, she's aged 12	-->	my aged grandma
2	I was beloved again	-->	my beloved daughter
3	he blessed them	-->	the Blessed Virgin Mary
4	??	-->	what a cragged stone
5	its horns crooked backwards	-->	a crooked nose
6	she cursed her fate	-->	she's a cursed woman
7	the witch cussed him	-->	what a cussed day
8	planes are deuced by some people	-->	don't be so deuced obstinate
9	he dogged her footsteps	-->	their dogged resistance
10	he jagged his hand	-->	Cornwall's jagged coast
11	I've never learned this	-->	my learned friend
12	I got on my toes and legged it	-->	he sat cross-legged on a stool
13	??	-->	she was stark naked
14	??	-->	men in ragged clothes
15	he reserved two seats	-->	go fetch the reserved tickets
16	she ragged him mercilessly about his sex life	-->	a land of rugged mountains
17	??	-->	our chapel is a sacred place
18	??	-->	she is a wicked person
19	the bird winged back and forth	-->	Pegasus is a winged horse
20	??	-->	he made the wretched happy

 

What about their pronunciations?

			pronunciation(s)1
1  aged	'of a particular age'  'old'	-->	eɪdʒd ˈeɪdʒɪd
2  beloved		-->	bɪˈlʌvɪd, bɪˈlʌvd
3  blessed		-->	ˈblesɪd
4  cragged		-->	ˈkraɡɪd
5  crooked	'not straight'  'having a crook'	-->	ˈkrʊkɪd  krʊkt
6  cursed		-->	'kɜːsɪd, kɜːst
7  cussed		-->	'kʌsɪd
8  deuced		-->	'djuːsɪd, djuːst
9  dogged		-->	'dɒgɪd
10 jagged		-->	'ʤagɪd
11 learned		-->	'lɜːnɪd
12 -legged		-->	'legɪd
13 naked		-->	'neɪkɪd
14 ragged		-->	'ragɪd
15 reserved		-->	rɪ'zɜːvd
16 rugged		-->	'rʌgɪd
17 sacred		-->	'seɪkrɪd
18 wicked		-->	'wɪkɪd
19 winged		-->	wɪŋd, 'wɪŋɪd (= poetic)
20 wretched		-->	'reʧɪd

Things are getting even more complicated because some of these adjectives have a parallel adverbial form, e.g. reserved -> reservedly. More on those in a later post.
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¹ based on LPD3 and CPD18 (if listed at all); /æ/ -> /a/; the reference accent is GB.
² nominal = adjectival and substantival
³ My thanks go to John Maidment for drawing my attention to these two verbs. The sentences were pinched from various sources.

'playstation' by phonetic transformation becomes a fish&chips shop

What will become of a playstation if and when you manipulate it phonetically in the following way:
1. apply pre-fortis clipping to the first diphthong;
2. lengthen the duration of /s/ (need not be done in fluent utterance)?

Postscript: What is now a 'Plaice Station' once was the Padgate Railway Station. The station building is unstaffed now and part of it is used by this fish&chip shop.

© Copyright JThomas and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

wʊlfgæŋ æmədeɪəs ...

... no, not exactly! But almost.

credit: www.mowsart.co.uk

diurnus

credit: Joel Montes de Oca; licence: https://creativecommons.org

 I'm currently marking the pronunciations of the students in my Spoken English (aka phonetics) classes. One of the recurring mistakes is the pronunciation of the word 'journalism'. The correct one is /ˈʤɜːn(ə)lɪz(ə)m/ (with an additional /r/, if you're aiming at a hyper-rhotic accent). The segment /ʤɜːn/ is used in all of the following words (plus their inflectional and derivational variants):

• journal
• journalese
• journalism
• journalise, -ize
• journalist
• journalistic
• journey
• journeyman
• journo

Measure for Measure

credit: Mason Bryant licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

1. | fɔː ɡɪlz meɪk wʌn paɪnt |
2. | tuː paɪnts meɪk wʌn k(w)ɔːt |
3. | tuː barəlz meɪk wʌn hɒɡzhed |
4. | tuː hɒɡzhedz meɪk wʌn paɪp |
5. | tuː paɪps meɪk wʌn tʌn |
6. | fɔː peks meɪk wʌn bʊʃl̩ |
7. | wʌn mɪnɪt haz twenti eɪt skruːpl̩z |
8. | wʌn hʌndrəd ənd fɔːti fɔː skweə laɪnz ɑː wʌn skweər ɪntʃ |

Greetings from days gone by!