I’m not sure why you have brought up the question of nationality. If you’ve somehow interpreted my posts as being critical of Americans, then I regret that.
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I doubt he stretches anything. Remember that just because we write things down with spaces between each word, that doesn’t mean that when we speak they are similarly isolated. Phonemes are affected by preceding and following sounds even in final and initial positions on words and it’s quite possible that Acsenray, and many others would most accurately represent their pronunciation as pastarrabiata. Your mind is agile enough to hear the two different concepts and insert the division where no such split actually occurred. Surely you’ve noticed listening to people speaking in a language you don’t know that it’s hard to determine when words end and begin?
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Yes, but language also operates at a lower level than that. If we relied entirely on high-level context, things would risk becoming unintelligible. We also rely on low-level cues to tell us things such as where one word starts and another ends. And an important cue in that is audible transitions between words.
The problem with these attempts at phonetic spelling is that “r” is pronounced very differntly in US and UK.
I would say that in the US we pronounce “talk” as close to “tawk”, and “palm” as close to “pawm”, except in the latter, the “aw” is closer to “al” than is the case with “talk”. The tongue approaches the upper palate, but does not reach it the way it does when we say “hell”.
We wouldn’t say we say it as “parm” because we enunciate our r’s, rather than dropping them or modifying them to the “awh” sound that Brits use.
But a Brit on hearing us could say we do, based on the way they pronounce r’s.
Just look at the pronunciation guide in OED. It codifies the way most Brits pronounce their r’s. It’s more of a vowel modification than a consonant.
Except that there are a lot of accents that exhibit the cot/caught merger, so talk is pronounced something like “tahk” /tɑk/ and palm something like “pahm.” /pɑm/.
Actually, if you listen with your ear rather than with your interposing understanding, you would notice that the vast majority of language is actually not spoken with clear divisions between words. That’s in fact a natural feature of speech and it’s one of the things that makes it difficult to learn a new language. In speaking professions, when people are taught to read from a script, one of the first stages is the teach them to speak naturally, and a bi part of that is not to make audible breaks between words. Because when we speak naturally, we don’t do that. Part of what makes reading a script unnatural by an untrained reader is overenunciation and treating spaces between words in text as if they should be audible.
In the 1980s, the singer Sade’s name was pronounced here in the US as “Shar-Day,” with the full R sound. I’ve heard that this was because she had told the British that her name should be pronounced like “sharday” as if it had an R in it, but to the British, this doesn’t include the R sound to us Americans. Her point was to indicate how the vowel sounds, like someone would pronounce the vowel in the word “all.” Anyway, when we Americans saw that, we thought that for some reason it had an R sound that wasn’t spelled in there, and the pronunciation stuck.
The point is that you can’t tell someone how you pronounce a word by comparing to another word, because that someone is likely to pronounce that other word in a way you don’t expect.
Yes. I never heard whether that was the explanation, but I figured it out for myself. I had a Hungarian phrasebook that was published in the UK, and I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. It said stuff like köszönöm (“thank you”) is pronounced roughly as “ker-ser-nerm.” Well, let me tell you, that doesn’t work in most American accents. There is definitely no “r” sound in köszönöm, and saying “kersernerm” in my American accent is way off. “Kuh-suh-num” is closer, and probably understandable, but still a bit off.
I don’t remember how it happened, but finally it dawned on me that this was a British phrasebook, and the pronunciation guide reflected British approximations (which, yes, I know is difficult given the wide range of British accents, but I assume it was assuming RP.) After that, it all made sense. Same with the “shar-day” business.
I didn’t say that there were breaks or gaps between words in spoken language. I said transitions. Some audible transitions occur between words. I agree that they also occur within words, and don’t necessarily occur between words. This thread is about how British English marks a certain type of transition.
No, what I am saying is that it’s not a deliberate “R” sound, in normal speech and the perception of the listener would have a bearing on how intrusive the “R” sound is perceived.
The “tuna oil” example is difficult to pronounce with continued voicing without the risk of a brief “R” like sound during the tongue repositioning from the “a” in tuna to the “o” in oil, depending on how the tongue is moved.
The similarity to an “R” sound varies according to the path the tongue takes in the glide to the “O”.
If the tip of the tongue travels up on the way back for the “o”, then it’s more likely to be rhotic , if the tip travels down to touch the back of the bottom row of teeth, then the intrusive R is less prevalent.
I think what we’re hearing is the result of a certain vocal laziness ie keep the voicing going, avoiding the energy expended in a glottal stop, or the alternative combination of a slight throat constriction and tongue positioning change which would avoid the rhotic glide between the vowels.
I guess it’s the same sort of vocal “laziness” we hear when some regional accents in the USA or Britain, pronounce it “toona” instead of “tyoona”.
I do, however, acknowledge the phenomenon described by someone else regarding the actor Rupert Grint, exaggerating this “intrusive R” in an attempt to emulate a rhotic American accent.
Many Australians, including actors, do this too, and it sounds awful and totally fake.
Beatles examples are invalid, and we warned of them back on page 1. Like other British artistes of the time, they deliberately tried to sound American, which among other things meant enunciating the letter R at every opportunity, even when there was no such letter. It may not sound convincing to actual American ears, but it was good enough for the Worthing Pavilion back in 1963.
Pulykamell, I listened to that bit you mentioned, and while I know to what you’re referring, I don’t believe it is perceived as an “R” sound by so many Brits and Australians, so much as the result of a lazy attempt at a glottal stop!
I understand that it is not perceived as such by speakers who employ it–I’ve explained that several times through this thread. But it is a rhotic “r”, whether you perceive it as such or not. Those of us in English dialects who do not employ an intrusive “r” hear it clearly.
I’ve always said “pawlm” and “tawk.” Was living in Illinois and had a visitor from Iowa. In the middle of a conversation she said, “You guys ‘tock’ funny.” The rest of us (who all say ‘tawk’) almost fell over laughing at this ridiculous accusation…
Their singing is not proof of qualities of british speech because they consciously altered how they sang to sound more american. If you can find examples of the intrusive intrusive R in their regular speech among fellow britons, that would mean something.