Page 5 of 41

Re: Pronunciations you had to unlearn

Posted: Tue Nov 13, 2018 2:16 pm
by Ryusenshi
Linguoboy wrote: Mon Nov 12, 2018 3:14 pmOffhand I can't think of any unconditioned mergers of historically long vowels with the corresponding short vowel phonemes.
Uh, wasn't THOUGHT historically long? The THOUGHT set is a bit of a mixed bag anyway.
Vlürch wrote: Tue Nov 13, 2018 10:30 amI mean, how could that happen in practice unless RP stopped being a prescriptive pronunciation? And if RP stopped being a prescriptive pronunciation, would it even be RP anymore?
anteallach wrote: Tue Nov 13, 2018 1:27 pm BTW I think RP is better thought of as a sociolect than a "prescriptive standard". And Daniel Jones's RP isn't John Wells's RP, and John Wells's RP isn't my generation's RP. (My generation's RP is pretty much what Lindsey is describing, I think.)
As Geoff Lindsey says in the article mentioned above, we should probably stop using "Received Pronunciation" for contemporary versions. I tend to use "RP" for accents from Daniel Jones to John Wells, and "Standard Southern British English" (or "Standard British") for the contemporary sociolect. If it's not a "prescriptive standard", it's at least useful as a model for non-native learners.
Travis B. wrote: Tue Nov 13, 2018 11:00 am You do realize that the people who write in journals make practically no money off of it, and practically all the money goes to the publishers - even the peer reviewers for the journals are normally not paid for the work they do.
Yeah, it's a common complaint from scientists. They don't get paid anything when they publish in a journal, or when they review a paper, but they still have to pay heavy fees to have access to other people's work. This makes people wonder what exactly do those journals do: they don't write the articles, they don't review them, they barely even print them on paper nowadays... so why are we paying them so much?

Re: Pronunciations you had to unlearn

Posted: Tue Nov 13, 2018 2:26 pm
by Salmoneus
RP dialects - and I'd describe them as a family rather than a single form - do still exist, but almost entirely among those over 50. Almost nobody young speaks an RP form natively today.

What we speak is SSBE. And no, this is not 'received' in the way that RP used to be - while it is a prestigious dialect in some contexts (and disparaged in others), it is no longer a normative standard to the same extent, and other dialects are widely encountered in business and in culture, including the BBC. Although of course it remains true that specific - archaic rural or innovative urban - dialects do remain, as it were, anti-standards.

SSBE differs from RP not only in its sociological role, but also in phonology. Two very obvious differences are that SSBE is lot/cloth merged and happy-tensing, and RP was the opposite.

Re: Pronunciations you had to unlearn

Posted: Tue Nov 13, 2018 2:32 pm
by anteallach
Salmoneus wrote: Tue Nov 13, 2018 2:26 pm RP dialects - and I'd describe them as a family rather than a single form - do still exist, but almost entirely among those over 50. Almost nobody young speaks an RP form natively today.

What we speak is SSBE. And no, this is not 'received' in the way that RP used to be - while it is a prestigious dialect in some contexts (and disparaged in others), it is no longer a normative standard to the same extent, and other dialects are widely encountered in business and in culture, including the BBC. Although of course it remains true that specific - archaic rural or innovative urban - dialects do remain, as it were, anti-standards.

SSBE differs from RP not only in its sociological role, but also in phonology. Two very obvious differences are that SSBE is lot/cloth merged and happy-tensing, and RP was the opposite.
Yes, there's a reasonable case for not using "RP" for the sort of accent Lindsey describes, and "SSBE" is probably the best alternative. But a lot of people do still call it "RP", or more specifically "modern RP", and they are basically talking about the same thing.

Even John Wells's RP is LOT/CLOTH merged. (Daniel Jones's I think not.)

Re: Pronunciations you had to unlearn

Posted: Tue Nov 13, 2018 2:50 pm
by Linguoboy
Ryusenshi wrote: Tue Nov 13, 2018 2:16 pm
Linguoboy wrote: Mon Nov 12, 2018 3:14 pmOffhand I can't think of any unconditioned mergers of historically long vowels with the corresponding short vowel phonemes.
Uh, wasn't THOUGHT historically long? The THOUGHT set is a bit of a mixed bag anyway.
I guess "historically" wasn't the best word choice. Perhaps "etymologically" would make more sense? AFAICT, vowels in the the THOUGHT set derived from earlier short vowels. Thought, for instance, had *a in Proto-Germanic, which became /ɔ:/ via compensatory lengthening following the lost of *n before *h. (Cf. StG gedacht.) In other cases there was diphthongisation with a following consonant and subsequent monophthongisation, e.g. *haƀukaz > hafoc > hawk.

Re: Pronunciations you had to unlearn

Posted: Tue Nov 13, 2018 3:31 pm
by Travis B.
Linguoboy wrote: Tue Nov 13, 2018 2:50 pm
Ryusenshi wrote: Tue Nov 13, 2018 2:16 pm
Linguoboy wrote: Mon Nov 12, 2018 3:14 pmOffhand I can't think of any unconditioned mergers of historically long vowels with the corresponding short vowel phonemes.
Uh, wasn't THOUGHT historically long? The THOUGHT set is a bit of a mixed bag anyway.
I guess "historically" wasn't the best word choice. Perhaps "etymologically" would make more sense? AFAICT, vowels in the the THOUGHT set derived from earlier short vowels. Thought, for instance, had *a in Proto-Germanic, which became /ɔ:/ via compensatory lengthening following the lost of *n before *h. (Cf. StG gedacht.) In other cases there was diphthongisation with a following consonant and subsequent monophthongisation, e.g. *haƀukaz > hafoc > hawk.
A major source of /ɔ:/ is the vocalization of postvocalic OE /ɣ/ to ME /w/, and then monophthongization in EModE.

Re: Pronunciations you had to unlearn

Posted: Wed Nov 14, 2018 1:51 am
by jal
How does SSBE differ from Estuary English?

[Note to any moderator: perhaps it's time to split of the whole RP etc. discussion to a seperate thread, this hasn't been about unlearning pronunciations for a while...]


JAL

Re: Pronunciations you had to unlearn

Posted: Wed Nov 14, 2018 4:16 am
by Ryusenshi
I'd say the main features of "Estuary" (as opposed to SSBE) are:
  • widespread L-vocalization, with various vowel mergers before final L (fill and feel are both [fɪo], doll and dole are both [dɔʊ], etc.);
  • replacing T with a glottal stop before a vowel, as in wha[ʔ] about, or even word-internally as in wa[ʔ]er;
  • fronting /θ ð/ to [f v], or using a stop [d] instead of /ð/. (I can't imagine that becoming standard any time soon.)

Re: Pronunciations you had to unlearn

Posted: Thu Nov 15, 2018 9:44 am
by Ares Land
integer is pronounced with a /d͡ʒ/. My whole world is crumbling.

Re: Pronunciations you had to unlearn

Posted: Thu Nov 15, 2018 9:55 am
by Pabappa
Ars Lande wrote: Thu Nov 15, 2018 9:44 am integer is pronounced with a /d͡ʒ/. My whole world is crumbling.
I said/ In'ti.gər/ when I was young, but I was 10 and had no reason to say it out loud for several more years. Was reading my sister's high school math book, I yhink.

Re: Pronunciations you had to unlearn

Posted: Sat Nov 17, 2018 7:04 pm
by bbbosborne
the p in receipt is silent. i thought having a /p/ sounded cooler and then found out :(

Re: Pronunciations you had to unlearn

Posted: Wed Nov 21, 2018 2:45 pm
by Raholeun
Hearing macabre as [məka:b] really caught me off guard today. I was among non-native speakers (like myself) who typically have a guttural rhotic and thus you would expect the final syllable to be pronounced. Learnt off stackexhange [məka:b] is accepted.

Re: Pronunciations you had to unlearn

Posted: Wed Nov 21, 2018 4:20 pm
by Travis B.
For some reason I always have the (unspoken) pronunciation of [ˈmɛkəːbʁ̩(ː)]... Apparently, the American English pronunciation, according to the Cambridge Dictionary, is supposed to be /məˈkɑbrə/, which for me would be [mɘˈkʰaːbʁə(ː)].

Re: Pronunciations you had to unlearn

Posted: Wed Nov 21, 2018 4:47 pm
by Linguoboy
Raholeun wrote: Wed Nov 21, 2018 2:45 pmHearing macabre as [məka:b] really caught me off guard today. I was among non-native speakers (like myself) who typically have a guttural rhotic and thus you would expect the final syllable to be pronounced. Learnt off stackexhange [məka:b] is accepted.
The OED lists it as an alternative pronunciation in the both the UK and the US. Wiktionary gives it as the preferred pronunciation for the US.

This is the pronunciation I learned for English. Years later, when I began actively studying French, I adopted a dialectal (Louisiana) pronunciation which universally drops final postconsonantal syllabic sonorants. Back when I learned macabre in English, I didn't know such (colloquial) pronunciations existed; I just imitated those around me. Now keeping the final sonorant (in English or in French) sounds somewhat affected to me.

Re: Pronunciations you had to unlearn

Posted: Wed Nov 21, 2018 4:52 pm
by Pabappa
Ive always had <macabre > with final -b because i learned it from https://i.imgur.com/ddU50.jpg

Re: Pronunciations you had to unlearn

Posted: Wed Nov 21, 2018 10:24 pm
by Nortaneous
Pabappa wrote: Sat Nov 10, 2018 12:32 pm Herb is a name, but I suspect the loss of /h/ in AmE that word is just due to chance, not due to confusion with the name.
Loss? /h/ in 'herb' is a spelling pronunciation. It wasn't there to begin with - the British pronunciation is the innovation.

Re: Pronunciations you had to unlearn

Posted: Thu Jan 10, 2019 11:02 am
by Kuchigakatai
Zompist recently posted a list of English words with stress on the fourth-to-last syllable:
http://verduria.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t ... t=20#p7641
zompist wrote: Tue Jan 08, 2019 3:17 pmabominable, accompaniment, accuracy, adequacy, agglutinating, agriculture, apothecary, architecture, brother-in-law, candlemaker, caricature, cauliflower, cemetery, countertenor, dedicated, dictatorship, discriminating, doppelgänger, egalitarianism, gentlemanly, intimacy, inimitable, isolating, interesting, invigorating, laboratory (in America), lesbianism, literature, mercilessness, metalworker, miserable, moneylender, nominative, oligarchy, oratory, orthodoxy, partisanship, patriarchy, seriousness, solitary, testimony, trustworthiness, veritable, voluptuousness, witticism, womanizer
And it turns out I do mispronounce a good number of them. I found my mispronunciation of "nominative" [ˈnɑmənəɾɪv] as *[nəˈmɪnəɾɪv] especially damning, because it's such a common word in conlanging and I had been saying it wrong all this time. (If anybody doesn't know, I'm a non-native speaker.)

Re: Pronunciations you had to unlearn

Posted: Thu Jan 10, 2019 11:32 am
by Linguoboy
Nominative is a proparoxytone for me; I simply delete the first unstressed /ɪ/. Same goes for abominable, interesting, irritable[*], miserable, and veritable and for caricature in rapid speech. In literature, I sporadically drop the /ə/, i.e. [ˈlɪɾɚtʃɚ] (and not "/ˈlɪ.tə.tʃɚ/", given as the "Midwestern" pronunciation in Wiktionary).

[*] Until about high school, I thought this word was spelled eardible.

Re: Pronunciations you had to unlearn

Posted: Thu Jan 10, 2019 11:46 am
by Zaarin
Linguoboy wrote: Thu Jan 10, 2019 11:32 am Nominative is a proparoxytone for me; I simply delete the first unstressed /ɪ/. Same goes for abominable, interesting, irritable[*], miserable, and veritable and for caricature in rapid speech. In literature, I sporadically drop the /ə/, i.e. [ˈlɪɾɚtʃɚ] (and not "/ˈlɪ.tə.tʃɚ/", given as the "Midwestern" pronunciation in Wiktionary).

[*] Until about high school, I thought this word was spelled eardible.
For me, this is true of abominable, interesting, and miserable and sometimes nominative, but not the others.

Re: Pronunciations you had to unlearn

Posted: Thu Jan 10, 2019 12:53 pm
by Salmoneus
In case it helps, here's how I (/people around me) would deal with those words...



Possible vowel reductions:
abominable, accuracy, accompaniment, apothecary, cemetery, interesting, laboratory, literature, miserable, oratory, solitary,
These reductions form a continuum. At one end is "interesting", where I think NOT reducing the vowel would probably indicate some sort of ironic overpronunciation. "Literature" follows close behind, along with "solitary"; I also learned "cemetary" without the reduced vowel, and while I tend to include it now, it's effectively an affectation for me. "Oratory" is a similar case: I think I by default have it without the vowel in the sense of 'rhetoric', but I have a version with the vowel in the specific meaning "Catholic Order following the teachings of St Philip Neri, or place of Christian worship associated with that Order". "Laboratory" is an unusual one for me - my 'native' pronunciation has initial stress, with occasional reduction of the following schwa, probably less than expected due to the taboo of "lavratory" nearby; however, these days I mostly stress the second syllable, in which case the penultimate vowel is usually but not always reduced.
Near the other end of the continuum, "abominable", "accompaniment", "miserable" and "voluptiousness" are all words I would keep the vowel in in careful speech, and that I honestly think I at least sometimes have the vowel in in even rapid speech - but where I'm sure I do drop the vowel sometimes. "Apothecary" is more often reduced than these, but less often reduced than the previous category of words.

And then AT the other end of the continuum, there's "accuracy", where dropping the vowel is disallowed for me, but where I think it happens sometimes anyway. The additional confusion is that of course I don't have coda /r/, so this is a 'vowel reduction' from /Ur@/ to /U@/, and may be considered a consonant reduction instead. This sounds like 'accuecy', which is why it's disallowed - but as I say, I think it happens sometimes in rapid speech, possibly with some residual subphonemic rhotic element.

I've also heard 'testimony' with the penultimate vowel dropped, although I don't think I do that myself generally.

As can be seen, these tend to be cases in which an unstressed vowel is followed by a sonorant.

Polyphthongs
cauliflower, voluptuousness
These have antepenultimate stress phonemically, because -ower and -uous have phonemic triphthongs, and form single syllables. Phonetically, in over-annunciated speech, these triphthongs (aU@ and juU) may be broken up with epenthetic /w/ (aUw@ and juwU), but this is both phonemically and etymologically secondary, and don't seem to effect stress patterns and phonotactics and the like. [in much the same way that, in over-annunciated speech, "goal" may be said to have two syllables, but generally doesn't in actual fluent speech].
Coincidentally, these triphthongs in careful speech are often reduced in rapid speech anyway (aU(w)@ > a:, and tju(w)U > tSU).

Secondary stress
agglutinating, agriculture, architecture, caricature, dedicated, dictatorship, discriminating, doppelgänger, egalitarianism, isolating, invigorating, lesbianism, orthodoxy, patriarchy, witticism,womanizer
The suffixes -ate, -arch and -dox all seem to generally take secondary stress in these words. Notably, -ate is a suffix with phonemic secondary stress for me - secondary stress in verbal forms, and in some nouns, and no stress in adjectives and most nouns. [of course this could also be analysed as a vowel quality and length distinction, but I think it makes more sense to view stress as primary and reduction as secondary].

More difficult are the suffixes -ism and -ship... these vowels should only reduce to /I/, rather than /@/, and it's possible that this is leading me to ascribe secondary stress when there isn't any. I'm pretty confident there's secondary stress in 'lesbianism' and probably 'egalitarianism', I'm a little less sure of 'witticism', and I'm torn on 'dictatorship', though I think it does have the stress.

"Architecture" and "agriculture" likewise have secondary stress on the penult, despite lacking one of these affixes (and it becomes primary stress if you add another affix (agricúltural, etc), as does "doppelgänger". "Caricature", on the other hand, defies this pattern by having secondary stress on the final, NOT on the penult.


Full dual stress compounds
brother-in-law, candle-maker, counter-tenor, metal-worker, money-lender, trust-worthiness
These words are pronounced as compounds, even when not spelled as such. The second stress is usually weaker than the first, but stronger than routine secondary stress. In all cases other than countertenor, the primary stress can be moved for emphasis, although this isn't obligatory. ["It's terrible how many candles people use!" - "not if you're a candlemaker!"]

Different stress locations
oligarchy, partisanship
In the case of "partisanship", I generally have penultimate stress; this matches the adjective, and the name of the Yugoslav Partisans; I can also sometimes say it with initial stress but strong secondary stress on the penult, to match the noun when not used for the Yugoslavs. I also have a pronunciation with initial stress and no secondary penultimate stress, used only in the context of political science, and most often in discussing American politics, which is clearly a loanword in this context - this is like 'dictatorship', in that I think there's a secondary stress on the final, but I'm not certain.
In the case of 'oligarchy', second-syllable stress is normal for me. However, I can optionally have initial stress, with secondary stress on the penult, when talking specifically about a political system dominated by oligarchs (rather than, say, in economics).

Residual words with genuine, unambiguous, single, preantepenultimate stress:
adequacy, gentlemanly, intimacy, inimitable, mercilessness, nominative, seriousness, veritable
The odd one out here is 'nominative'. This 'should' have secondary stress on -ate, in accordance with the general rule about. Indeed, it does - in any context other than linguistics. For me, all case names in -ate lack secondary stress, even when they would have it in any other context. [for instance, when discussion physical ablation, 'ablative' has at least secondary, and possibly primary stress on the second syllable, but the linguistic case, for me, does not].

Re: Pronunciations you had to unlearn

Posted: Thu Jan 10, 2019 10:04 pm
by Pabappa
There are so many case names like elative, illative, allative, and ablative that sound alike so we need to put initial stress on to make sure people are hearing the important part. OTOH, I don't know about adessive&abessive, do people pronounce those with initial stress too ?