the good old days, and that pesky letter "shee" (formerly "shch")

[William Ryan]

Re "Jeck" and "Peddington" - guide books to London sometimes tell you 
that the street called Pall Mall is pronounced "Pell Mell". It still is 
by posh old ladies who shop at Fortnum and Mason's, and perhaps the 
Queen, although a few affected speakers may sometimes be heard to 
pronounce it "Paul Maul", and a few taxi drivers may pronounce it to 
rhyme with "how now". Otherwise most Londoners probably rhyme it with 
"pal". I remember reading somewhere that King George V (I think) 
explained the difference between The Mall (another London street) and 
Pall Mall by saying "I walk down The Mall but I run Pell Mell".
One of the problems for Russians who have been taught what they are told 
is good British English is that they often find it hard not to put a 
strong 'y' in front of the 'e' (I am not versed in IPA) so that 'have' 
becomes 'hyev'.
Will Ryan


crosswhi at RICE.EDU wrote:
> You know, I really hesitated about writing in about this subject 
> because it seems so far off the topic of Slavic languages. But then I 
> realized that it is, after a few bobs and weaves, kind of relevant. 
> The subject is the pronunciation of words like "back" in British English.
>
> I've really enjoyed reading recent postings on this topic. I teach 
> phonetics in the Linguistics Department at Rice University in Houston, 
> and one of the topics I include in my intro phonetics class is how 
> British and American differ phonetically.
>
> John Dunn is quite correct in his observation that the British 
> pronunciation of "back" and similar words has changed noticeably over 
> the past several decades. In IPA transcription, the change is noted as 
> one from [�] to [a]. An important detail, though, is that modern 
> British phoneticians adhere strongly to the official IPA, in which [a] 
> refers to a fully open *front* vowel, while [�] is a slightly higher 
> vowel. So the change in pronunciation is one of lowering, not backing.
>
> That's an important thing to note, I think, for Slavists, or anyone 
> who studies the sounds of non-Germanic languages. This is one case 
> where different transcription systems use the same symbol -- [a] -- to 
> mean completely different things. In Slavic linguistics that's a 
> non-front vowel, but in the official IPA, it's front.
>
> If you've never looked at the *official* IPA vowel chart, it's worth a 
> glance: http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/vowels.html. You'll notice 
> they *don't have* a symbol for a fully open central vowel. As I 
> understand it, that's a principled stance on the part of the 
> International Phonetic Association. The back-front dimension is 
> shorter at the bottom of the vowel space than at the top, so there's 
> not room for three categories down there (or so the story goes).
>
> However, there was an article last year in the Journal of the IPA 
> arguing that this should be revisited. They point out that the current 
> system actually could mislead ESL students -- a speaker of Russian, 
> Spanish, etc. might, for example, think that the official IPA [a] of 
> modern British English should be equated with the low vowel of his/her 
> native language, traditionally transcribed [a]. That would just lead 
> to retention of foreign accent in words like "back," which must be 
> counter the intentions of having an international phonetic alphabet in 
> the first place. The same could be said for any language that has a 
> "triangular" vowel inventory (only one low vowel) rather than the 
> Germanic rectangular model.
>
> A really great film clip, which I learned of from John Wells's 
> phonetics blog, shows both an 1940-era ESL speaker of British English 
> and an old-style speaker of British RP. Here's the URL: 
> http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=82205.  Concentrate on the 
> words "Jack" and "Paddington," which both speakers say several times. 
> They're almost like "Jeck" and "Peddington." If Russians or others are 
> still learning that system for English, they will definitely stick out 
> in today's UK.

>
> A more modern British pronunciation can be heard in sentence #5 of the 
> following online transcription exercise: 
> http://www.ladefogeds.com/course/chapter2/exercises2/2hbritish.htm  
> That is still a front vowel, but much lower than the "Jeck" of the 
> film clip, and also lower than the present-day American [�].
>
> If you want to hear the full vowel inventory for both modern British 
> and modern American, you can try the links below. The American speaker 
> contrasts [?] and [?], but many Americans (like me) don't. I think 
> it's cool that British has four low-ish vowels (�/a, ?, ?, ?) where I 
> only have TWO (�, ?).
>
> British: http://www.ladefogeds.com/vowels/chapter3/bbcenglish.html
> American: http://www.ladefogeds.com/vowels/chapter3/amengvowels.html
>
> Sorry for such a long post on something that's only tangentially 
> Slavic. I think vowels are so cool -- I just get overexcited when the 
> conversation turns that way and can't restrain myself...
>
> Best,
>
> Katherine.
>
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