Theatre Speech (was: Flapping to another Topic)

[Beverly Flanigan]

This is interesting--reminds me of "the voice from nowhere" in _American
Tongues_ (where the Directory Assistance operator says she was chosen for
her "generic" speech).  The combination of features doesn't seem quite
right:  Hasn't the voiced-voiceless /w/ distinction been (largely) lost on
both sides of the Atlantic?  And non- or weak-rhoticity fits only half of
England (according to Trudgill's maps) and much less than half of the
U.S.  By "released" intervocalic /t/ do you mean [t]?  Again, this wouldn't
fit either side of the pond today, would it?

I heard a segment on NPR yesterday on the growing popularity of Shakespeare
productions in this country that may be relevant:  The speaker (from
Britain) said that we should stop trying to sound like present-day BBC
announcers and instead  pronounce the r's and change some of the vowels to
sound more like the 16th century--in other words, talk American!  Reminded
me of a wonderful article by A. H. Marckwardt on "The Language of the
Colonists" (reprinted in _The Play of Language_, 1971), which I use with my
undergraduates because it has no phonetics, only rhymings with modern
words, to illustrate 16th-17th century vowels, notes wide variation in S-V
agreement, etc.

At 01:25 PM 1/22/00 -0800, you wrote:
>Theatre (and theater) vocal coaches use the term "Transatlantic" for a
>conservative variety of stage speech still taught to stage actors today. It
>preserves many low-back vowel distinctions, has the voiced-voiceless W
>distinction, is either non-rhotic or prescribed as having "weakly
>articulated R", and has a released instead of flapped intervocalic /t/. It
>is called "Transatlantic" because, in the words of one prominent voice
>trainer, it is "the kind of speech that might be heard somewhere in the
>Atlantic Ocean exactly halfway between New York City and London" (Robert L.
>Hobbs, 1986, Teach Yourself Transatlantic: Theatre Speech for Actors, p. 6).
>Having examined some actor speech training manuals, I think that
>Transatlantic most closely resembles non-rhotic Eastern New England speech
>with the addition of British intervocalic /t/.
>
>Nancy C. Elliott
>Southern Oregon University