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

[John Dunn]

I'm sorry, Paul, but I can only conclude that you mis-spent your youth watching too many British films of the 1930s.  It is true that the pronunciation with a front(ed) vowel was a feature of 'old' received pronunciation (RP), but RP was in some respects a bit like the Old Moscow Norm: though required on stage and in the early days of broadcasting, it was never, contrary to what was widely believed outside the United Kingdom, an uncontested norm, being marked for social class.*  Since the 1950s the 'old' RP has dissolved into the newly emerging standard, and although this standard allows a considerable degree of variation, the pronunciation with the front(ed) vowel is now rarely heard.§

The problem for learners is that the [æ/e] pronunciation formed part of a system, and while most could  produce an approximation of the RP version of 'back', they found it more difficult to master the system in its entirety, and  so ended up with a version lacking internal consistency.  And those who did master the system sometimes created for themselves a social identity which was not perhaps what they wanted.  It is, I believe, to the credit of O.A. Akhmanova and her acolytes that those who worked in the English-language service of Radio Moscow could  reproduce an almost perfect 'old' RP; the problem was that the target audience could never quite work out why the doctrines of proleterian internationalism were being promulgated in the accents of the British aristocracy.

Meanwhile, going back to щ/сч, it is worth noting that the substitution of сч for щ is one of the conventions of 'olbanskij jazyk' , as in the phrase: аффтар пешы есчо.

John Dunn.

*cf G.B. Shaw's observation (from the preface to 'Pygmalion'): It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.

§'During the second half of the twentieth century, however, there has been a noticeable move back towards ordinary a [i.e. a back vowel - J.A.D.] in Britain.  The move from southern towards ordinary a is one which marks out younger from older speakers of Received Pronunciation ...' (Clive Upton and J.D.A. Widdowson, an Atlas of English Dialects, Oxford, 1996, p. 5) 
 

-----Original Message-----
From: "Paul B. Gallagher" <paulbg at PBG-TRANSLATIONS.COM>
To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
Date: Wed, 16 Sep 2009 12:57:36 -0400
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] the good old days, and that pesky letter "shee" (formerly "shch")

???

As an American I'm completely baffled by this. How can this vowel be 
anything /but/ front??? (We have [bæk] in all but a few dialects.)[FN] 
I'm familiar with the British renditions of words like "pass" with /a/ 
as in "father," but I don't think I've ever heard this done in "back." 
Say it ain't so!

--------------------
[FN]--I am referring to the band of dialects from about Chicago to 
Albany, where the Northern Cities Shift has globally replaced /æ/ with a 
diphthong ranging from [eə] as in "fail" to [iə] as in "idea." Listen to 
Hillary Clinton or Bob Woodward and you'll see what I mean.

-- 
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
pbg translations, inc.
"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
http://pbg-translations.com


John Dunn
Honorary Research Fellow, SMLC (Slavonic Studies)
University of Glasgow, Scotland

Address:
Via Carolina Coronedi Berti 6
40137 Bologna
Italy
Tel.: +39 051/1889 8661
e-mail: J.Dunn at slavonic.arts.gla.ac.uk
johnanthony.dunn at fastwebnet.it

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