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

Fri Sep 18 06:14:10 UTC 2009

Katherine wrote:

(I would be more polite, but you didn't provide a last name).

Thank you for your fascinating post, and for the audio links.

 From what I'm hearing in the BBC rendition of /æ/, it's significantly 
higher than my /æ/ in "back," which is quite low. It's not as high as 
their /ɛ/, however, so the distinction is maintained; I would say their 
/ɛ/ is also somewhat higher than mine.

Unfortunately, Ladefoged does not seem to take account of the dramatic 
and diverse changes underway in American English /æ/, and the American 
English audio clip demonstrates one of the problems.

First, in a band of dialects from about New York City to the DC metro 
area, many speakers distinguish a pure /æ/ as in "back" (which we don't 
hear in Ladefoged's clip) from a diphthong that might be conventionally 
designated /ǣ/, roughly [ɛə] in my speech but ranging upward through 
[eə] and [ɪə] and occasionally as far as [iə]. This [ɛə] is what we hear 
in the Ladefoged clip for American /æ/. In dialects like mine, "can" = 
"to be able" is /kæn/ = [kæn] and "can" = "metal container" is /kǣn/ = 
[kɛən]. This phonemic split is why I'm so conscious of the nuances with 
these vowels, and why I find it difficult to listen to speakers who 
would have Mary get Maried and have a Mary Christmas (I have three 
different vowels, and only the first one is /ǣ/ = [ɛə].

Second, the Northern Cities Shift, which affects a region roughly from 
Albany to Chicago, /æ/ is globally raised and diphthongized (they have 
no words with pure /æ/), often as far as [iə]. An excellent examplar is 
the journalist Bob Woodward, who speaks of "going biack to Cianada to 
hiave a chiat with a friend in Siaskiatchewan," etc. As a speaker, I 
cian't stiand it, but as a linguist I find it fascinating. Hillary 
Clinton also does this when she lets her guard down, though less so, and 
she's added a thick overlay of standard American so it's not so easy to 
observe.

Both of these sound changes are strongly reminiscent of the evolution of 
Common Slavic /æ/ from *ai, *oi etc. through ѣ to its various modern 
reflexes. It remains to be seen where American will take this, but the 
parallels are hard to overlook.

There's a lot more going on with American /æ/ elsewhere, but space and 
topic limitations prevent a thorough description.

> 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 [æ] 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 [æ] is a slightly higher vowel. So the 
> change in pronunciation is one of lowering, not backing.

That's quite a relief -- I was imagining a much backer vowel. Of course 
I don't need to point out to you that lowering a front vowel also means 
backing it somewhat. Still, the vowel heard in the clip was nowhere near 
the /a/ = [ɑ] in "father" that I thought he meant.

> 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).

This is more a question of classification -- how do we divide up the 
vowel space? -- than of reality. For speakers of languages with one low 
vowel, the forced choice between front /æ/ and back /a/ makes no sense 
unless the vowel patterns strongly with one set or the other. E.g., 
Finnish has an /a/ that patterns with /o,u/ and an /æ/ that patterns 
with /i,e,y,œ/, but Spanish couldn't care less. As you say.

> 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.

Yes, and they sound veddy stuffy to an American ear, too.

> 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 [æ].

For this, I have /hɪz pæl pækt hɪz bǣg wɪð ǰækɪts/, where /ǣ/ in "bag" 
represents [ɛə] as noted above, and the British speaker in the clip 
definitely has raising at the end of /æ/ in "bag," too, and perhaps a 
palatal [ǵ] as well (chicken or egg? I don't know). As for the other 
three instances of /æ/, I find them completely natural, and similar to 
what I would produce. These are *not* lower than my /æ/ as in "back" or 
"can" = "be able," but they *are* lower than my /ǣ/ as in "bag" or "can" 
= "metal container."[FN]

> 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 [ɑ] and [ɔ], but many Americans (like me) don't. I think it's 
> cool that British has four low-ish vowels (æ/a, ɑ:, ɔ:, ɒ) where I only 
> have TWO (æ, ɑ).

I hope I've supplied the correct vowels here where your transcription 
was garbled in transmission. Please forgive any errors. I was tempted to 
include /aə/ and /ʌ/ in your inventory of British "lowish vowels," but I 
had to limit myself to four guesses.

> 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...

Thanks for sharing.

--------------------
[FN]--I am referring, of course, to pronunciations in stressed position. 
Like most Americans, I can reduce the vowel in "can" to schwa or even 
eliminate it entirely: "Sure, /I/ c'n do that." And just the other day I 
asked an order taker at Wendy's, "C'ave a pack o' ketchup?" [kævə pækə 
kɛčəp].

-- 
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

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