I’m still amazed at the knowledge of TSD message board. My thanks to everyone fighting my ignorance.
I’ve always wondered…the English always seem to extol their virtue of proper word pronunciation. I even remember highschool English teachers saying how beautifully everyone speaks over there.
Now, what I don’t understand is that they seem to just be unneccesarily gussying up the words. “Horse” is “haus”(not the German)…you know, completely throwing aside the hard ‘r’ sound. Also seems that they stress the wrong syllables (according to the dictionary, or should I say, dik-shun-ree).
Please help. I don’t know how many old ‘Who’s Line is it Anyway?’ episodes I can take without feeling self-righteous.
The dropping of the hard “r” sound is common in certain parts of the UK, and it also appears in New England - eg “Hahvahd Univuhsity”.
In the SW of England, people tend to pronounce the hard “r”, as in most parts of the US.
Many apparently “up-market” British pronunciations (“dick-shun-a-ree”) are relatively recent developments, dating from 100-150 years ago. They came about as petit bourgeouis types tried to emulate the upper classes - and grotesquely overdid it.
Basically it’s oversimplistic to talk of British vs American pronunciation. IMVHO, it’s also wrong to think of different accents as “superior” or “inferior” to others - PROVIDED they can be understood by others.
However, many inhabitants of British cities like Glasgow, Newcastle, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham and London - like many urban blacks in the US - speak a patois, even though they are exposed to standard English in the media. And they complain if people look down on them, misunderstand, don’t hire them, etc. Such an accent is surely “inferior” because it is socially and economically crippling.
Now, repeat after me: “The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain…”
As described, the English world has a vast variety of accents. The US alone has several broad types of accent.
Hemlock, the dialects you mention aren’t “patois” any more than Australian English or Canadian English or any other dialect is a patois. They’re your basic pronunciation of English in those areas, as easily used for street slang as for the content of a business conversation.
What you are correctly referring to, though, is the fact that they are heavily socially stigmatized in Britain because they differ from certain lects within the Thames Estuary dialect. It so happens that fortune, historically, smiled upon people who spoke those lects; consequently the lects themselves became privileged and regarded as standard British English pronunciation.
A person with a Mancunian/Liverpudlian/Glaswegian accent can say something using perfect Standard English syntax and vocabulary, but will still be stigmatized for having that accent.
MY question is, how do you say “pronounciation” ?
Is is PRO-NOUNCE-EE-A-SHUN or PRO-NUN-SEE-A-SHUN? It’s one I just don’t know. And if both are indeed correct, which should I say if I live in Quebec or Ontario?!?!?!
Well, given that it’s “pronunciation,” it becomes more obvious that “pronunciation” should be pronounced pr&-nun-sE-A’sh&n (or your second form) as confirmed by:
However, while dictionary.com only lists the latter pronunciation of “pronunciation,” Webster’s (http://www.m-w.com) lists your former pronunciation of “pronunciation” as a proper pronunciation (as if pronunciation were spelled - and pronounced - “pronounciation”).
Gawd, I’m feeling inadequate even posting around you people. Still in amazement.
Well…at any rate, I was basing the “right” way of pronouncing a word on what the ~dictionary~ says. (Webster’s, Merriam) Sooo…do British/English/whathaveyou dictionaries note to pronounce words differently?
If that’s not the case, then I guess I’m just having a hard time understanding why we have a ‘better’ grasp on the correct, almost scientifc way of pronouncing things than the mother tongue. Evolution?
side note: I’ve always wondered what the American accent sounds like. I imagine I must be horrably monotanous with little flair compared to the Romantic languages[Spanish, Italian…Japanese] etc etc. Also, (and here’s where my life’s inexperience will show like a pair of fluorescant undies) how do the British reguard the way Americans speak?
I’m talking purely generally, mind you. I agree with ya, Hemlock, on the superior/inferior thing.
If you live in Quebec, you should say prononciation: pro-no[sup]n[/sup]-see-ah-syo[sup]n[/sup].
**
Sometimes. However, if I can get slightly technical, a lot of the differences in pronunciation are what we could term “allophonic” rather than “phonemic”.
Words are represented in the brain as strings of “phonemes”: concepts of sounds that form the basis for the actual production of the sounds. For example, we can represent the word “writer” as a string of five phonemes: /rajt@r/. We can think of this as a pattern that is more or less constant in the brains of all English speakers.
Between the phonemic representation and the sounds we hear are two levels: the phonological level (which governs how the phonemes interact) and the phonetic level (which deals with how the sounds are actually produced and interact within the vocal tract). It is at these levels that we get the variance between different English accents. Tha
For example, Canadian and US dialects often have a phonological rule: /t/ -> [r"] (a representation for a phone called an alveolar flap). Canadian speakers often have a rule called Canadian Raising where the diphthong /aj/ in this kind of circumstance becomes [Vj] (aw-ee becomes uh-ee, more or less). And of course, speakers in Southern England have a rule wherein the r at the end of such a word is deleted: /r/ -> 0. Such a deletion rule is a very common phenomenon among the world’s languages in a variety of circumstances.
So since all these different dialects have different rules about rendering the phonemes in “writer”, the same /rajt@r/ becomes [rajr"@r] in parts of the US, [rVjr"@r] in Canada, and [rajt@] in southern Britain.
Anyway, all this to say that in general the pronunciations listed in dictionaries are more or less phonemic rather than phonetic: they provide this pattern for the way we pronounce things rather than attempting a precise description of how it ends up sounding. The dialect provides us with the rules as to what sounds this pattern will produce.
It’s therefore wrong to say that we have a more “scientific” way of pronouncing r-final words than the British do. It just so happens that the r-final deletion rule does not occur in our dialects (which, I might point out, evolved from British dialects which did not have that rule either).
I suppose when you say “scientific”, you mean having a greater correspondence between sound and letters; however, since English orthography in general is pretty much a worst-case scenario in this regard, having a silent “r” is not that big a deal.
I’ve never heard Southern US English, for example, accused of being flat. And Venezuelan Spanish speakers think Mexicans speak monotonously. It’s all a matter of taste.
Note: Japanese is not a Romance language, or even an Indo-European one. Its identity is in doubt, but the theory in my textbook places it in the Altaic family. Romance languages include Latin and its descendents, such as Spanish and Italian as you say, and also French, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, etc.
Yes, and this is unfair - though in some cases (since the Beatles?) such accents can also be trendy. I was thinking about those who add non-standard (to put it euphemistically) syntax and vocab to their charming regional burr. Language that is “fuckin chronic innit mate?”.
The UK’s most trust-winning accent (according to research for companies deciding where to locate call centers) is “educated lowland Scottish”.
Well…yes. An American dictionary will describe/reccomend (depending on the bent of the dictionary) the American pronunciation(s), and a British one will describe/reccomend the British one(s). It’s kind of a dictionary ‘thing’.
Shucks, that’s me :D. And hence the large number of telephone call centres being started in lowland Scotland in recent years.
In school, we were always taught that the best (as in most correct) English was spoken in Inverness. Any linguistics experts know anything about this?
As for the OP’s “horse” is “haus”. Yes, this type of pronunciation is very noticable in “posh” accents. My favourite example is one favoured by Tory politicians and BBC newsreaders: “law and order” is pronounced “lawr and ohdah”, losing 2 r’s from the final word and gaining one in the first!
And a person with a SE England ‘Standard English’* accent can be equally stigmatized. It all depends on who your are talking to and what their prejudices are. Try speaking ‘Standard English’* in Aberdeen for a ready example of this in practice.
And you can have differences in syntax and vocab within a dialect and still be perfectly ‘correct’.
Besides that, as has been pointed out, Glasgow is absolutely packed with call-centres. So we must be doing something right that agrees with everyone else. Inverness has a nice accent, but I think it’s recognision on being the most ‘correct’ is simply because through chance it bears similarities to other more southern English ones.
*I really hate the description Standard English, as it pre-supposes there is an agreed universal constant. All we really have is a jumped up regional accent that got lucky.
Not a subject on which I’ve reflected much but I am confused by the notion of ‘Standard English’ (SE) – is it in use because I thought SE just addressed the issue of correct grammar ?
FWIW (and if I have to), I’d tend to categorise accents as:
Non-Regional English (versions of the public school accent, inc ‘Queens English’), and
Regional English
That’s it for me. Am I missing something ?
Also, I must be watching different news programmes to ** jinty ** because I don’t hear most newsreaders using a “posh” (non-regional) accent ?
My SO is from Glasgow and I’m from Montreal. I just love teasing her about how her people can’t speak their own language. It get her so riled up it’s funny.
She of course hits right back with how my people(french Canadian) can’t speak our own. So it’s not just english that sounds different from country to country.
While we are on the subject of pronouciations, can someone explain why the Americans insist on souding most “H”'s (including thoses not normally sounded, such as in the middle of “Buckingham”) with one notable exception … “Herb”. For some reason "Herb ALWAYS becomes 'erb (an almost emphatic dropping of the first aspirate).
That’s interesting. The French think the best French is spoken in Tours.
That’s interesting… Perhaps in a few generations New Brunswick English will be the North American standard
I would tend to go with the first one. Although we can call it Standard English because it has been made the standard, it is important to remember that it, too, started off life as a “regional dialect” (the Thames Estuary region, specifically). If you don’t like “standard”, another description is “acrolect” (the privileged lect).
Why do Venezuelans pronounce some of the h’s (enjotamiento) that other Spanish speakers leave silent? Just another dialectal variation.
re. Americans’ penchant for pronounciating words lit-er-al-ly, with all the r’s and h’s: according to historian Daniel Boorstin, that’s due in part to the emphasis on spelling bees early on in our colonial, and then national, history. The primacy of the “bee” – which was not an annual competition, as it is now, but a more everyday part of schooling, for all ages – helped enforce that pronunciative literalism in any number of generations. IIRC.
In addition, there was also that perverse pride that many early Americans had in breaking away from British traditions, which is why “Webster’s American Dictionary,” with its American spelling and pronounciation standards, immediately became the definitive American dictionary [pardon the pun].
My thanks to everyone fighting my ignorance.