the good old days, and that pesky letter "shee" (formerly "shch")
crosswhi at RICE.EDU
crosswhi at RICE.EDU
Fri Sep 18 03:49:34 UTC 2009
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 [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 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 [æ].
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 (æ/a, ?, ?, ?) where I
only have TWO (æ, ?).
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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