What if English actually SOUNDED like this??
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- Опубліковано 7 бер 2024
- Ever wondered why the vowel symbols most widely used for 'British English' don't sound the way they do in the International Phonetic Alphabet? It's because they were chosen long ago to describe an upper class accent that's now considered, well, a bit ridiculous. Anyone who wants to cling to these symbols today is totally disregarding the reasons they were chosen!
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Okay ✅
Why are we still using the anachronistic term "received pronunciation" to describe modern speech? "Standard English English" is problematic but still preferable.
@@DadgeCityStandard Southern British English is the term that makes most sense.
It says the address is invalid :(
I do NOT like the IPA symbols. They sometimes sound similar depending on the accent but NOT the same. Only ONE phonemic symbol is used for different accents and even languages. The quality is different in every language, for sure.
The /u:/ symbol for the word GOOSE is WRONG! Even if we change it to /ʉw/, it won’t sound exactly the same as people do really say the word GOOSE. It won’t sound natural.
The /ɑ/ as in father in the IPA sounds too rounded. The /ɑj/ will sound like oi/oy as in coin/boy.
So English was originally written phonetically, but all the vowels shifted and now the spelling doesn't make sense. Thankfully, phoneticians came to the rescue and spelled everything phonetically again. But all the vowels shifted again and now the "phonetic" spelling doesn't make sense. Do we need a "phonetic phonetic spelling" now to account for these changes?
we absolutely do
If we re-phoneticize the spelling, then the various dialects of written English would start to lose mutual intelligibility.
If British people could keep the same vowels for more than 20 years, this wouldn't be such a problem
Exactly. You got it. The IPA in dictionaries is a second irregular non-phonetic writing system.
My next video looks at this
As someone who isn't a professor of linguistics and phonetics I reckon RP originally meant *REALLY POSH.*
Right Proper innit!
RP isn't really posh though. If you listen to royalty or aristocrats, they have a very different accent. Sounds like they have their teeth wired together and are being strangled!
Back in the 60s, BBC announcers spoke posh, but that's changed a lot over the years.
RP is def higher status than a regional accent though!
@@LittleNala When I was young, we referred to anyone with a posh English accent as having a plum in their mouth, which makes little sense as trying to talk with a modern plum in your mouth is nigh on impossible.
@@utha2665 when a hitch hiking student back in the late 1960s got a lift of a chap in a Rolls. !!
Lovely man but mouth so full of plums I had no idea what he was saying. And I grew up speaking RP.
I was reduced to hoping my nods and yeses and nos were relevant.
Ree-li Pɒsh
Warning : This video contains vowel language.
😮
i cannot believe he talked about sacks such publicly and openly. there are children watching, you know...
👁️👄👁️ the viewer discretion is advised
ba dum tisssss
😂😂😂😂😂😅😅
Schoolchildren in Japan are taught English pronunciation using IPA symbols, but I, having grown up in London, always felt that those symbols were somewhat wrong. So when I started giving private English lessons, that's what I told my students. Then after nearly 30 years, it is good to see things clarified by an expert.
It's pretty much like this for most languages. Except a few like Italian and Spanish. Foreigners trying to learn Mandarin Chinese from Pinyin have the same problem. Once I freed myself from pretending Pinyin was phonetic people started understanding me (-:
@@andrewdunbar828Italian is so lovely because, once you know all the sounds for the various phonemes, you can read almost anything aloud with a high degree of accuracy, even if you don’t actually understand what it is you’re saying 😂
@@VenomHalosItalian is very accurate to the pronounciation. You can read it completely accurately almost always. Only thing that sometimes confuses me is how c and g gets different values based on vowels, and ch and gh. Vowel length and accents and syllable stress are not always shown either, but usually doesn't matter at all
Finnish is even better, it is almost 100% regular, the exceptions are very few like not having an ng sound in the alphabet.
@@tj-co9goTry Turkish. It’s almost completely 1 symbol 1 sound. Only the letter E has two pronunciations according to environment, at least in fairly careful speech. Colloquial speech does shorten some vowels almost to the point where they aren’t heard. And g/k get palatized around high vowels.
@@sazjiYup, I have studied some basics of Turkish, and that is correct. The g with circumflex is irregular too, but it is mostly very accurate orthography
A British soldier said to his battle mate: I came here to die.
An Australian answered : I came here Yesterday.
That is much too funny, much more than it has any right to.
what the brit understood: I came here, yes, to die.
This accent sounds so alien that none of the younger characters in Downton Abbey speak it, despite it being set in the period when it was spoken.
So alien that in Northern England 'here' is still straightforwardly /hɪə/
@@joaodavid2001Probably more accurately [ˈhɪjɘ]
And it's a great loss for the show! Cause it sounds less immersive, more like they just dressed up for some reason.
@@aborigine3716 'Original Pronunciation' Shakespeare is quite popular, I think it'd be interesting to see the same done for more recent literature - like Austen, Dickens or even early 20th Century stuff. We are so used to hearing things translated into essentially a modern accent with a few nods to the period. There's an interview on here with a woman who grew up in Victorian London and I remember thinking how different she sounds to the actors in Dickens adaptations.
I bet Regency era would be especially odd- all those posh folk going to balls all the time would sound nothing like modern RP. I think some of their accent features would sound quite working-class to modern ears.
@@joaodavid2001isn't it normally two syllables in the North?
14:00 i can't believe the samples form a major arpeggio
That’s exactly what I thought when I got to that part too 😂
You noticed! Took me a while to edit that.
@@DrGeoffLindsey i noticed most of them were kind of musical, but this one obviously stood out, amazing work as always, it's details like these that make your videos much richer!
Almost like a certain bell ringing. Very British!
@@DrGeoffLindseyBless you, sir!
I am an American who went to a British school in Africa, in a Portuguese-speaking country, in the 1960's. I learnt to emulate my 'heightened" RP speaking teachers who were educated in the 1930's and 40's. Decades later, when I spoke in RP to Brits, they took an instant dislike to the accent, even offense, at the accent. I was even accused of emulating a Dick van Dyke take on a posh accent instead of his infamous Cockney take. However, those English who were more open-minded said my RP accent was quite good but told me that nobody spoke like that any longer. I was always bewildered by this but lately, thanks to videos like this, I have come to realize that I had learnt an archaic RP from Brits who were "isolated" from the rest of the UK (as they had been living in a Portuguese-speaking country for decades).
Still and all, RP is a great standard that should have never been abandoned due to basic social prejudices: LOOK AT SPOKEN ENGLISH IN BRITAIN NOW!! Dropping t's, simplifying everythng to the point of pronouncing and sounding like functionally illiterate brutes.... AND LOOK AT BRITAIN NOW!! Everyone should aim for a better society, not for a more brutal and lacking one!! Haters of RP probably hate themselves and their own country as well.
So where do you live now, and how do others describe your manner of speech?
@@edwardenglishonline "Prejudice"; effectively the power-elite in the UK spoke a language which was hardly understood by the masses and as the video illustrates, the power-elite had been shown to be laughable lying hypocritical failures who due to their own social prejudices had allowed traitors with the correct school-tie and manner of speech to infiltrate the military intelligence services, so there was quite a long history for the British people to judge by. There was nothing "Pre" about the rejection.
Ugh, this along with my young kids' school assignments have reminded me how much I despise the terms "long" and "short" vowel. They're two different sounds, the fact that we represent them with the same letter doesn't change that and since you can say both of them for a short or long duration, the terms are just so unclear.
I think English just really really wants to be like the languages that actually have contrastive vowel length. It's like a vowel measuring contest.
In my diction for singers class we just referred to them as "open" or "closed" instead of long and short
The terms "long vowel" and "short vowel" *in this context* refer to phonemes of spoken English. Yes of course you can say [ʊ:] for as long as you can exhale. But spoken English doesn't do that. There is nonetheless a point to distinguishing between short vowels on the one hand, and long vowels and diphthongs on the other.
@@brunoparga The FLEECE vowel is high, front, long and tense; the KIT vowel is near-high, near-front, short and lax. Which of those criteria are contrastive and which are not? The idea of a binary, a single criterion being either contrastive or not contrastive, is problematical. It implies that one of two statements is true: either 1) the language has two vowel phonemes which contrast in length and are identical in all other criteria; 2) that criterion is irrelevant to each and every vowel phoneme in the language. The trouble is that differences between similar vowels in a language are not always as simple as differences in one and only one criterion.
Oh boy you are going to love writen Greek.
I was watching an old show about Jack the Ripper. They were trying to use linguistics to determine if he was in fact an American named H. H. Holmes. And there you were! I was so excited to recognize you, I almost jumped out of my chair. 😀
Answering so I get notified if he answers
Wow, I didn't even knew Dr Geoff worked on the Whitechapel case! How old is he?
@@jerrysstories711He’s been around since well before the 21st century
Do you recall the name of the documentary?
@@rianrenegade4441 It was a series, maybe for History or Discovery, called something like "Finding Jack the Ripper". It was about a descendant of H.H. Holmes (often credited as America's first serial killer) who was convinced that Holmes and Jack were the same person. The evidence, though voluminous and compelling, was nonetheless inconclusive.
When I first started studying English I found myself lost with the apparent need to learn not just the Roman letters, but also what I was back then calling “transcirption letters”.
The irony is that the RP vowel symbols are now so inaccurate that they've become a *second* irregular and unphonetic spelling system....
It's always been a problem with a writing system that should vary when you moved a few miles from city to city. But now I am older I notice the effect of the decades.
Even my impersonation of "posh" English has become archaic.
I also found myself lost when I first started. Now I find RP to be one of the most interesting English "nuances", far more preferable and better sounding than the current dropping of T's, the tearing down of any subtleties, the destruction of complexity, the simplification of everything "so that anyone may be able to understand it without thinking"... (Look at the UK then... look at the UK NOW!! The appalling consequences of rife ignorance and basic and brutal social status anxieties and prejudices. Very, very sad, indeed!).
@@edwardenglishonline they are replacing the t with a glottal stop rather than dropping it entirely as in silent t words like hustle, castle, ballet and listen.
It's not well regarded, but saying t clearly distinct from d seems to be a habit losing ground.
I am old enough to be grumpy but it's things like "I have went" or Brits saying Americanisms like "take it off of the table" when just a single preposition off or from is needed and avoids triggering my "error lights".
we learned these symbols for british english singing in my diction for singers class and they were perfect... for singing classical music
As someone who’s from the Great Lakes area of the US, I always love videos on English vowels. I can never relate to them because I pronounce almost all of them differently, but that’s the fun lol
This channel is my dream come true! I've loved phonetics for years - ever since I took a college course in 1978 to fulfill a speech requirement - and considered myself pretty well versed in the subject. But Dr. Geoff fearlessly delves into all those tiny details which I've heard for years and assumed nobody else noticed. The perfectly chosen videos of public figures and the perfectly timed on-screen transcriptions must take ages to prepare. And Dr. Lindsey's sophisticated dry humor is the icing on the cake.
I'm glad I lived long enough to see UA-cam make such content available. There have always been fantastic instructors like Geoff Lindsey, but not many of us had the chance to hear them in person.
Harry Enfield really nailed Mr. Cholmondley-Warner’s accent then, it sounds just like At The Stationer’s
Yes, Paul Whitehouse too. They're in my long video about the symbols being wrong. They also nailed that early 20th century GOAT vowel.
I was thinking of this as well while watching, due to the mention of shows like The Crown and Jeeves And Wooster.
I think my favorite part of your videos is the joy you take in the subjects, which appears to me like a subtle glee (if glee can be subtle) in your expression.
I'm glad you don't make many assumptions about your audiences familiarity with the phonetic alphabet, making sure to pronunce and highlight them all as they come up. Otherwise it would all look like nonsense.
*audience’s
It all just sounds like David Attenborough to me
He's probably the most well-known RP speaker around the world
Seriously endangered
He’s the only living example I know of an RP speaker still saying ‘zebra’ as ‘zeebra’ not ‘zebbra’ like posh people did decades ago (which ironically makes them sound more like typical Americans than typical Britons)!
Same here
@@fuckdefed Is this related to how some old British speakers pronounce Kenya as "Keenya"?
I agree that a cardinal [e] is hard to distinguish from [ɪ]. Latin is said to have contrasted /e:/ and /ɪ/ and the contrast could only be maintained because the one was long and the other was short. When phonemic length distinction faded, the two merged. The same is true for German, which also contrasts /e:/ and /ɪ/. Without length distinction the two sounds would now be distinguishable; at least not reliably.
Australian English solved that problem by raising /ɪ/ to [i]. I was hoping Dr Lindsey would mention that in his French Google Translate video.
@@tinfoilhomer909 Don't the South African and New Zealand accents back /ɪ/ to /ɨ/ (aka the Russian ы sound)?
Did Latin actually use /ɪ/? It seems hard to believe that it did given that all the modern Romance languages use only /i/.
@@GCarty80It was lost as the result of the /e:/-/ɪ/ merger. These mergers (/e:/-/ɪ/ and /o:/-/ɔ/) are the main reason why the short Latin vowels are reconstructed the way they are (lower and more central than their long counterparts). For a more detailed description see pp.47-48 of Allen's Vox Latina.
@@GCarty80 NZ uses the lower [ɘ] and South Africa is similar. The schwi [ɨ] sound is rare in my Aussie accent but unstressed "just" sounds quite close to it.
For some reason Rag ,Tag and Bobtail ( shown on a Thursday ) was my favourite programme ( pre school , so aged under 5 - there was no nursery school in those days ).
Mum said I called it Rag, Tag and Tail. I hated Andy Pandy ( which was Tuesday's offering )and wasn't keen on the gibberish of the Flowerpot Men that flowed on Wednesdays.
That left Picture Book on Mondays and the farm thing on Fridays ( with Spot the dog).
Woodentops, the one with Weeeeed and those terrifying geese.
No hang on, weeed was Bill and Ben
@@DrGeoffLindsey Oh yes the Woodentops. I had a colleague that used " woodentop " as a term for those he thought were stupid.
@@DrGeoffLindseyYes, it was Little Weeeeeeed!
The classic RP's short vowel set of "if young men lack posh books" sounds strikingly similar to modern Australian English.
As a Melburnian I was very surprised at just how Australian those vowels sounded. It could have been something on the ABC, or even that older gent on Nine News Melbourne
Yes, Australian English is a fascinating mix of things that are distinctively different from the Brits and things that have stayed closer to RP. The same is true in a different way for Cockney-Essex.
@DrGeoffLindsey The correlation between Cockney-Essex and pie & mash shops is rather striking. Aussie pie & mash shops aren't proper pie & mash shops; they don't serve eels.
That’s interesting. I’m Australian. When I was young it was often assumed by other Australians that I was English. I’m now middle aged. It’s a couple of decades since I was asked that question.
It must depend on where you're from because I'm from Sydney and those vowels sounded really weird to me; much closer to each other and much more nasal than the more distinct (I think) and I would say 'lazy' vowels sounds we use.
So good to be reminded of my university linguistics...as an Aussie I get caught in the crazy differences in English pronounciation between UK, Aus and US English (to name a few) and in the fascinating dialect differences within each country...so much to explore...so little lifetime. Thanks for exciting my tastebuds (you get my drift).
Earbuds?
I find the accent of Jacinda Ardern absolutely wild.
With languages as a hobby, a lifetime is too short to ever get bored.
@@paulbreen8533It is. Even to my ears. Check out Lynn from Tawa 😅
Would love to hear you expand on the differences in r-colouring between the major rhotic dialects of English
You mention the tension between Jones' choice of simple symbols versus Gimson's preference for accuracy. One could imagine two vowel charts, one of which divided the vowel space into only five regions, while the other used many more, maybe the IPA's 28. In that case, it makes sense to speak of that tradeoff of simplicity for accuracy. But when a transcription chooses one symbol over another because it's shared with the English alphabet, that's much harder to justify, IMHO.
If you look at our dictionary CUBE, we have a toggle for simplicity. My co-editor Péter is the simplicity guy, I'm the Gimson in the double act. Sad that some have pigeon holed me as a Gimson hater
@@DrGeoffLindseyah I hadn't realised your co-author was Hungarian. Nagyon jó! I spent some happy years in Hungary, including teaching at EKTF (now EKKE). Ironically, for someone who went to "Grammar School", I only really started to understand my own language when I was teaching overseas.
There is an Edward Lear limerick in which "kettle" is rhymed with "little", showing just how close that "e" and "i" were in 19th century RP.
Thanks as always for your fantastic work, Dr. Lindsey!
(This should be a comment on another video but I can't find it right now, probably it was the one on the strut vowel.) Native German speaker here. In an older video you asked why when English is taught to native German speakers, the a in "cat" isn't taught to be pronounced the same as e.g. in the German "Katze" for simplicity, since it correlates better with the contemporary English pronunciation. I think the issue here is that this would probably merge "cat" and "cut" and that's why "cat" is taught as being pronounced like the vowel in the German "Kätzchen", which in turn makes English speakers from Germany conflate the used æ and ɛ and in genral have trouble separting for example "head" and "had".
Even in Australia we have two different IPA systems for Aussie English. The stodgy old Mitchell & Delbridge based on RP and the brash new kid on the block, Harrington, Cox and Evans.
Phonetics has always been my weak point and I still don't know really where my /æ/, /e/, and /ɛ/ are. Especially after a few decades of roaming around the world and my accent getting mixed up. When I'm learning a new language, even if I have IPA symbols for it, I never have a good handle on the vowels in that area and either mix them up or get them wrong.
Excellent video. Looking forward to the next one!!
Such a great content, as always! Thanks for sharing!
Thank you, Dr. Lindsey. These videos are always phenomenally well-researched and well-produced - the paragon, I think, of what online-delivered university lectures should be.
I've only just now looked you up on Wikipedia and realised what a phenomenal résumé you have! Very impressive indeed.
Thanks for the video.
Loved seeing the clips of the show from your childhood! Very illuminating.
It’s always a joy watching your videos!
Amazing video! Can't wait to watch the next one ... A video on the history of loss of rhoticity in British English would be really appreciated too. Thanks for your precious work!
I love your videos, Geoff. Keep up the good work!
I've never seen such a thorough analysis of this. Those /ɑʊ/ and /eɪ/ diphthongs were real eye-openers and I love the way you isolate sounds and repeat snippets of recordings. The historical /ɒ/ and /ɔː/ sounds were quite different and sounded surprisingly American to my ear, although I suppose I shouldn't be surprised given how the American accent developed in the first place.
This is an eye-opener! thank you so much Dr. Lindsey
Thanks, Dr Geoff Lindsey! Enlightening video. You've convinced me that the FLEECE and GOOSE vowels are indeed diphthongs, which I refused to believe at first when I heard about it from you. We should add them to the "no cowboy highway" phrase. Maybe "you see no cowboy highway"?
Geoff Lindsey, your work is incredible and deeply appreciated
This explains... so many things.
I'm a native Spanish speaker, and ever since I first encountered the IPA transcription of English, I always felt that something wasn't quite right. Those /i:/ and /u:/ that are nothing like Spanish /i/ and /u/, the schwa and "nurse" vowels being different for whatever reason... Now I know.
Thank you so much, Mr. Lindsey.
You can also find all the wonderful sounds of the English Language upon the last pages of most well-documented English ESOL Textbooks. RP sounds much better than the current "street mess". England also looked like a much nicer, kinder place back then. Oh well... "todo se pega, menos la hermosura" 🙃 Even if it is "justified" by an "expert".
I enjoyed and learned a lot. Thanks for the video.
In several of your videos, you've mentioned the Great Vowel Shift. I'd love if one day you made a video about this in depth! Love your content!
Watch With Mother was well before my time, but we did have a VHS with a week's worth of it including this episode of Rag, Tag and Bobtail. (Probably the reason this particular episode is so well preserved).
American accents have also changed dramatically over a similar period. Often old recordings are East Coast accents most of us don't have. If you want to hear the ancestors of "generic" American, I suggest asking UA-cam about the speech of Warren G Harding (Ohio), William Howard Taft (Ohio) or Thomas Edison (Michigan). William Lyon Mackenzie King (Ontario) is also a good example, although he has some element of the "Canadian dainty" transatlantic affectation.
Same for Australian English. Skippy from the '60s sounds like everybody is in England. The Paul Hogan Show in the '70s might need subtitles for young people (-;
There’s a video of an American Civil War veteran, born in the South in the 1840s and interviewed as a very old man. He sounds almost British to me and nothing like a modern American.
Midwestern isn't really generic, though?
Excellent discussion, Dr. Lindsey.
I was an EFL/ESOL teacher for over 20 years and used these symbols religiously all through that time! Watching your videos over the last couple of years has been a real eye-opener: everything you say is demonstrably true.
Thank you. Wonderful topic.
Wow this is excellent! Thank you!!!!
I run into such problems with American English transcriptions too, teaching phonology to linguistics students. Conventional transcriptions obfuscate the relevant featural identify of most segments, as well as conflating phonemic and phonetic details, but since they're used in most published textbooks and exercises, its hard to do otherwise. I love these videos, any chance you could make similar overviews of other varieties of English?
I, a Finn, speak a very much bastardized version of British English. The books and scientific papers I read are usually written in "Briton" but any attempt at pronouncing a word in English is usually a mishmash of cockney, scottish and australian. Which is odd since American English is such a huge part of my life in IT.
The 'newscaster accent' which is often what prescribed is basically the accent of Upstate New York from the early 20th century, chosen cause it was relatively neutral on a national level at the time. Since then that region has undergone the Northern Cities Vowel shift so barely anyone talks like that anymore.
For instance:
It has /ʌ/ as a phonemic quality separate from /ə/. There are accents that round /ʌ/ to /ɔ/ or front it to /ɜ/ and there are still accents where it is phonemic in the Northeast due to the lack of the HURRY-FURRY merger there, but on a national level it probably should be considered an allophone of /ə/
Since especially the 1980s the COT-CAUGHT merger has become the national standard, much to my chagrin as a speaker that moves the THOUGHT/CLOTH vowel to an /oə/ or an /oɐ/ in resistance to this merger via the Mid-Atlantic back vowel shift, with my dialect essentially opting to be more similar to dialects across the pond than GA in this regard.
The prescribed GOAT vowel is a very narrow diphthong /oʊ/. I find this to be too closed, I think the median GOAT vowel is probably more like /ʌʊ/ now adays, with speakers in the South and California fronting it further to a more British /əʊ/
Likewise it seems to me that the median face should be analyzed as /ɛɪ/ rather than /eɪ/.
Also a certain level of GOOSE fronting is becoming increasingly common but I don't think the median speaker has quite reached where Brits are yet outside of the Sunbelt region (the South and California) where GOAT fronting is also common. Resistance to both occurs in Northern and AAVE accents.
The GA ipa vowel chart is pretty much as oldfashioned as the standard British one.
Most Americans front their /u/ vowels to an extent, especially southerners who may even sometimes realize it as /y/ (being an allophone of /ʉ/)
The /ɑ/ sound is higher than the chart says.
It uses /ʌ/ instead of /ə/. since they are mostly merged GA accents they didnt even bother putting /ə/ on there, which is lame.
And, ofc it also fails to show the glides in certain sets, much like the British symbols. lots of things like that
I`ve spent the past ten years trying to emulate these sounds only to realise they are out of date. What sounds shall I use in order to sound more contemporary so that I know what to do in the next ten years?
My book English After RP tries to use IPA symbols accurately for a modern 'neutral' ish pronunciation. I'm thinking of a second edition with audio
@@DrGeoffLindsey That'd be so great.
I can't help you with British English, but here are the IPA sounds of my geographically-mixed-up American English accent:
[i] as in 'be' and 'bean'
[ɪ] as in 'bin'
[e] or [eɪ] as in 'bane' and 'bay' and 'bait'
[ɛ] as in 'bet'
[æ] as in 'ban'
[ɑ] as in 'ball' and 'bawl' and 'bot' and 'bought'
[ʌ] as in 'bun'
[o] or [oʊ] as in 'bone' and 'bow'
[ʊ] as in 'bull' and 'bush'
[u] as in 'boo' and 'boot'
[aɪ] as in 'by' and 'bite'
[aʊ] as in 'bout'
Go to any of the many London ghettos and see how the "erban yoof" make their utterances, and you'll sound a lot more contemporary!! (Just kidding! 🙃).
Thank you so much for your videos, explaining so clearly and with so much knowledge what I've been trying to get across to my fellow amateur linguists for years. (And I have learned a bit too ;))
I always find it curious that perceived slurring/mumbling speech, or pronouncing different sounds the same is so often snobbishly looked down on as a sign of someone not being properly educated. Meanwhile, it's one of the defining features of RP. the British class system is absolutely wild.
the fact that someone bothered to write a news article about the queen's accent changing a bit in 20 years is insane
I thought slurring was the epitome of posh. Stiff upper lip, so the servants couldn't lipread you.
And this is why I've always hated it when we did phonetics in English class.
By the point we were doing that, I had already learnt IPA on my own. So then I had to re-learn all the vowel symbols, because what the symbols meant in IPA, thus meant to me, was different from what they meant on my textbook.
In other words, knowing IPA beforehand made it _MORE DIFFICULT_ for me to learn "English phonetics" (and by that I mean the conventional system). How ridiculous is that...
If you're interested in a concrete example, I probably got the transcription of "dog" wrong at some point, because it sounded to me like /dɔg/ but is transcribed /dɒg/, whereas "door" sounded to me like /doː/, but is transcribed /dɔː/.
In fact, I later realised there has kind of been on overall "counter-clockwise rotation" of the a number of vowels on the chart.
Standard transcription /e/ sounds more like /ɛ/, /æ/ more like /a/, /ɒ/ more like /ɔ/, /ɔː/ more /oː/, and arguably /ʊ/ more like /ʉ/
Any actor who masters this accent could surely do well in the role of “WWII BBC news reader” though.
I've always wondered this. Amazing. What a man.
As an American, I will say that the “by boys” part sounded exactly the way I would pronounce it. Anyway, can’t wait for the next video!!!!!
Interesting; to me (speaker of geographically mishmashed American English) the first vowel in "boys" sounds much more open than how I would pronounce it.
Amazing, as usual
This is fascinating and amazingly detailed analysis as always !! Well that old timy accent sounds like it would hurt my mouth heheh .. im a french canadian speaker and it’s interesting to see where are distinctive vowels can be placed in the mouth ..
Well, just thinking out loud but could be interesting to see an analysis of french speaker vs quebecois speaker when they speak in english cos the accent is widely differents and i mean widely just watch an interview with denis villeneuve
Also cant wait for the next video !!
I made the observation years ago that each vowel has a more-or-less continuous range of sound depending on the word and the vowel’s placement within the word. The phonemes are fixed for didactic purposes but language in practice is fluid.
Thank you!
Thank you for this. I am trying to emulate an old fashioned RP accent for one of my acting roles. This is a useful video for how the sounds are pronounced. Thank you
I’m in American born in 1950 who grew up seeing a lot of British movies, as well as documentaries narrated in the old RP accent. I also saw a 1964 Russian documentary about the famous ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, called “Plisetskaya Dances“. The narrator for the version in English had an RP accent, but what annoyed me about the way he spoke was that his lips and tongue seem to be tiptoeing around all the consonants.
This was fascinating, and it also helped me hear some of the diphthong qualities that you've been talking about but that as yet aren't easy for me to pick up on.
If I ever find the time to do so, I'm going to study your videos more carefully, because I have long felt there to be two classes of diphthongs, based on what happens if you un-diphthong them. The diphthongs of "bite noisy clown", if only half realized in my dialect, become "bot nosy clan", whereas the other diphthongs like "bait" and "boat", if pronounced as "pure" vowels, simply sound like a foreign accent -- they don't create a different phoneme and thus a different word. (Effectively, one class of diphthong is two vowels (bite = bot + beet, noise = nose + knees, down = Dan + dune or maybe the lax vowel of "wood"), while the other is a vowel with a nuanced realization, at least in how I think about it.)
But in your transcription format, they'd wind up like "bet" and "but" maybe? I'm not sure if that's how we pronounce them over here (and my anchor is off) or if that would only be the case in British English. And you've certaintly shown repeatedly that my mental model is inadequate and the actual sounds being produced may differ markedly (e.g. in your manipulation of sound files for the French vowels video and the Sbeech video). Hence my need to study your work more.
I much appreciate what you're doing; keep 'em coming!
I remember when I started mastering English pronunciation, I learned RP through books (which are, as you showed in one of your videos, are to a great extent outdated) in a very similar way you’ve shown in this video. Luckily, I came across your book and understood that what I actually needed was SSB.:)
If it doesn’t take much time, Dr Lindsey, could you answer a question?
12:51 - you say that those diphthongs, / ɪ́j/ and /ʉ́w/, are compressed into monophthongs in shortened syllables. Does it mean that they behave unlike the other SSB diphthongs? I’ve read in several sources that the other diphthongs in such conditions weaken or even drop their glide; by analogy, / ɪ́j/ and /ʉ́w/ are supposed to become /ɪ/ and /ʉ́/.
I'm not Geoff but I think in very rapid speech all the closing diphthongs can be monophthongised to some extent. Separately there's also the smoothing rules where diphthong plus ə can become simply a long monophthong with the first element of the diphthong (and no schwa).
@@Muzer0 Yes, you're right. But what I've read about all diphthongs except /i/ and /u/ says they lose they schwa's in this case, but those two behave differently: they don't lose the final element but merge into something in-between the core sound and the glide according to Dr Lindsey. My knowledge is limited, so I thought maybe it's not always the case, and those two also may lose their glide... or maybe the other English diphthongs may merge into something average between the core vowel and the glide.
As much as I love linguistics, phonetics tends to bore me to tears. However, you have a way of presenting and explaining the subject as to make it incredibly fascinating.
Thank you very much. As a native speaker of language with only 6 distinctive vowel, this video really help distinguish [i], [ɪ], and [e]; [u], [ʊ], [ɵ], and [o]; [au̯] and [ao̯]; and many more of the IPA vowel's true value. It's kind of unfortunate that Gimson's transcription is not accurate to the IPA. It had mislead me on what English phonology actually is
In my head canon, the singer of 2001's "Murder on the Dancefloor" is actually named Sophie Alice-Baxter, but she pronounced it posh and the phonetic spelling stuck... 🤔
yes, I knew it! there's definitely a difference between the real pronunciation and the transcription, thank you very much for this explanation!
This video in particular made me realize that as an American, I’ve been labelling what is clearly SSB as RP
I’m Australian, and my kids’ literacy lessons at school are based on a phonics approach. It’s got me wondering what similar lessons would be like in countries with different accents to ours (ie what phoneme-grapheme relationships would be different). And how do they choose what phoneme-grapheme relationships to use at schools within countries with lots of regional variations?
It’s also revealed a gap in my own awareness of sounds - I didn’t learn via a phonics approach, and have realised I am really bad at decoding what sound a lot of the digraphs for vowels represent!
Have you seen the AR rap that I stole for my previous video?
@@DrGeoffLindsey no - I’ll look it up now. Thanks 🙂
I worked in a school and taught phonics; my own accent is fairly standard southern British but it was interesting to hear the slight variations of my colleagues' when they taught phonics. Alas I didn't work in the same classroom with anyone with a very different accent to hear what they did, but I very much wondered whether they stuck with their native accents or modified for individual words whilst teaching the phonics.
Interesting, indeed! Es bueno conocer y reconocer aspectos diversos de aquel idioma.
Using this extended phonetic notation it would be great to document the emerging London "erban yoof" accent and see how that evolves over the next decade or two.
Not interested in the least to learn how the "erban yoof" evolve in their thinking, doing, behaving, speakiing or anything else that comes with their de-evolution (or is it "involution"? Decadence? Crass simplification? Impoverishment?). Naaah!! Not interested AT ALL!!
I've given it some thought, and I believe that I have 14 to 16 distinct vowel sounds in my (American) accent. Apparently there at one time were 20 different vowel sounds in posh English accents, since there are 20 phonetic symbols at the beginning of the video. (Or am I misunderstanding the point of the symbols?) In addition to vowel sounds shifting, I'm guessing that some vowel sounds must have merged as well, unless modern British accents still have 20 different vowel sounds?
My dialect of English has 20 distinct vowels, but the vast majority of English dialects have a few mergers which reduces the number, including in the UK.
RP is non-rhotic, so it requires more vowel distinctions, eg between fed fade and fared or between bid bead and beard. In rhotic accents, the following /r/ creates the distinction
Some are from other non standard accents. I was trying to figure out the vowel sound my Grandmother used to use when saying "pen" somewhere between "pan" and "pin" but I couldn't get the right one.
@@user-vo6hy4ns5n That's why Scots is much easier to understand as the vowels are more distinctive and being rhotic lends a nice warmth to the speech.
As a Finn, IPA sounds very logical and familiar. If Finnish people wrote English like they pronounced it, it would look something like that. | Äs ä Fin, IPA saunds veri lozikal änd fämiliör. If Finish piipol vrout Inglish laik tei pronaunsd it, it vud luuk samting laik tät.
Ägriid äs önaðör Fin, ai oolweiz fäund Inglish raiting to bii räðör inkönsistönt and illodzhikl. Lakili mai neitiv längwidzh häz a moo föynetik speling sistöm
@@tj-co9goBouþ ëv juw ar nëts.
Thank you for the video! Is the full recording of Jones and Firth's dialogue available sonewhere? I would like to hear it
Oh wow, that old RP "pen" shows pin/pen merger that I usually associate with southern US dialects!
well, *a* pin/pen merger, anyway... I think the southern pin/pen vowel converges on a different value
Well pin and pen didnt actually merge, he makes the point that the vowel quality in pin was very similar to today’s pen, making RP pin and pen very close acoustically but not quite the same
Firth’s voice reminds me of Stanley Laurel’s.
A bit off-topic, but, in English as spoken by a lot of people in the American south, I've noticed that the "fleece" vowel is starting to sound like the "kit" vowel. For example, "Kari Lake is Trump in heels" sounds almost like "Trump in hills." (From Beau of the Fifth Column's playlist.)
That's probably due to the following l. It happens in other English varieties too.
I swear there was a video where double consonant glottal stop was demonstrated, included finnish too and I learned more about my own language and speaking, but I can't find it.
English sounds have a distinct Scandinavian ring, and you can hear this more distinctly in many northern and eastern British dialects notably in the areas of Britain heavily colonised by the Danes and Norwegians. Especially dialects of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. Geordy (Newcastle-Upon-Tyne) on the other hand is said to be the closest living English dialect to how the Anglo-Saxons spoke Old English.
so English is basically becoming like, Japanese with multiple alphabets
Exactly. You got it. The IPA in dictionaries is a second irregular non-phonetic writing system.
where roman letters corresponding to kanji, phonemic IPA to hiragana and phonetic IPA finally to katakana
Soon speakers of the English Language won't be able to communicate with each other. Oh! Wait! It HAS already HAPPENED!! Let's keep on worshipping diversity of irregular, non-phonetic writing systems to continue "strengthening" our communication.
@@erkinalp No. Just no. Youre just completely wrong. Hiragana and katakana are two sets of identical sounds, which can be used to spell kanji.
Japanese has zero alphabets, because the term "alphabet" is just the first two letters of Greek, "alpha" and "beta" run together. It's fair to call the writing systems of Europe alphabets. If you want to refer to the Semitic languages, you could be a little more precise and call them "alefbets". If you REALLY wanna stretch the meaning of the word "alphabet", you could even call Korean Hangul one, but Japanese has two sets of syllabaries (kana, that is hiragana and katakana) and one indeterminate collection of concept-symbols (kanji). But Japanese has no alphabets.
I was part of a program that intended to teach students how to teach English to elementary students (as a second language) and it bugged me to no end that we were being taught this exact system but NO ONE was speaking with it. We were instructed to transcribe our own speech not correctly but rather using these IPA symbols used in these specific ways. What bugged me was that they were asking for narrow transcription but I was one of two native speakers of English in the program as an American (the other was from Sint Maarten) and everyone else was from various countries in Europe.
Obviously no one spoke as Gimson transcribed (though there was one Dutch young woman whose English was VERY close to a native southern English accent (though I couldn't say which given said americanness, my guess would be south east, but I reckon that doesn't say much). She only had the slightest of markers of being Dutch. Sometimes the ending consonants were devoiced (common with Dutch as a language and in Dutch learners of English) and the occasional vowel that struck me as being a bit Dutch, but it took me a while to pick up on it
Fascinating video thank you.
I reckon you could make English writing completely regular with an alphabet of around 16 letters, with accents for changing vowels, long vowels and grouping vowels in pairs loose & tight ie:
bit = tight, beet = long, bet = loose, bear = long
bat = tight, bart = long, but = loose, burt = long
Foot = tight, Food = long, bot = loose, bort = long
changing vowels are essentially diphthongs and would all be considered long
A = e/i,
I = a/i,
oy = o/i
these change to i,
iew (like in view) = i/oo
ou (like in cloud) = a/oo
O = u/oo,
and of course the sound a child makes expressing disappointment (which does not have a way of writing in English): o/oo these all change to oo
They either change up to i or down to oo which could be indicated with an accent up or down.
I haven't settled on a good way to differentiate all the different possibilities yet without having a large set of differing accents but ultimately the idea would to be able to represent all the vowels essentially with 3 fundamental letters, although 6 would massively simplify things and I am starting to lean towards that. Either way, it seems likely that a system along these lines would enable the writing of extra vowels that don't really appear in English like o/oo disappointment sound.
consonants could be categorised by voiced, unvoiced & nasal : B, P & M could all be represented by one letter with an accent or not to differentiate.
Other oddities of English, vowels ending with r are covered by the long vowels, vowels ending with w covered by changing vowels, the consonant y could be represented with the short vowel i prefixing the main vowel so a sort of diphthong where the y sound comes from the change, likewise the consonant w could be represented by the short vowel oo prefixing the main vowel.
Not only could you get a much smaller alphabet where every letter sounded perfectly regular every time it was written depending on accented variation, you'd get letters for sounds like we used to have like that we now make odd couples of consonants like 'th' (voiced ð 'then', unvoiced θ 'thin') or 'ch' which is essentially unvoiced j, as well as differentiation between the different ways some letters are used, like the s in leisure being simply the voiced form of the unvoiced consonant 'sh'
It seems to me English is a pretty sparse language, missing the common trill r amongst other things. Sorry for the long rambling post I fell down a rabbit hole a while back looking at runic scripts, Elder & Younger Futhark, Anglo-Saxon Futhorc etc. which made me think about how certain sounds had their own letters, when now they don't and so on. My only worry with my regularised English script is that it might turn into a complete mess of accents >
Great video, as always. I was just wondering if Germanic vowels tend to change more and faster than Romance ones. Or is it perhaps related to the stress/syllable timed spectrum and vowel reduction? Any ideas? Thanks!!
I'm no expert but it does seem so. One reason could be that the vowel space is so packed that small changes quickly cause a domino effect...
My personal theory is that it happens because some historically Germanic languages have had more unbalanced/asimmetrical vowel systems. This was true already in Proto-Germanic times (I can elaborate if you're interested). Examples of modern Germanic languages with asymmetrical vowel systems systems are English, Dutch and Danish. All of them are characterized by rapid evolution and chain shifts. On other words, it is much more common for speakers of these languages to pronounce vowels differently from their grandparents. I can give examples for all of these languages if you're curious. One big exception among Germanic languages is German, alongside with other Germanic languages spoken in Germany. German has an incredibly symmetrical vowel system (apart from long ä) which makes it super resistance to changes/chain shifts/mergers. As a result, there is less intergenerational change among Standard German speakers as regards their vowels.
To end this rant, I'll make a comparison with Romance languages as well. Overall all Romance languages have quite stable vowel systems. Think of Spanish (the famous 5 vowel pentagon of /a e i o u/), Italian (symmetrical piramid system of 7 vowels), Romanian (5 vowels of Spanish + two other central ones). The big exception here is French. After the period of Middle French, Modern French has inherited quite an asymmetric vowel system. As a result, there are ongoing mergers and shifts in its vowels that make the pronunciation of today's French youth so different from their great-grandparents.
To conclude, symmetrical vowel systems tend to be more stable over time. The day that English vowels will become more symmetrical, will be the day perfection has been reached in our world. Cheers
@DrGeoffLindsey What advice do you have for pronouncing long vowels for someone whose dialect only has dipthongs and short vowels? My central Canadian accent doesn't seem to have any length distinctions, and all my attempts turn into dipthongs, because that's how I'm SUPPOSED to make a vowel longer
The I in rid is longer than the I in writ.
Very informative and well presented. Thank you. I personally find it sad that this type of RP is no longer mainstream, as I like to speak like this, but then again I'm an old geezer in the body of a millennial.
Do you yet have a video on how much the velars (G and/or K) mutate vowels that come before them? Because the second you used "rag tag" as a demonstration of a vowel sound I got lost. I know in my own dialect there's a distinction in vowel sets: "short" vowels before G tend to lose their short/central quality in some fashion (rack/rag, beck/beg, bick/big).
Trying to sound them out as "r ae g", "b eh g", "b ih g" feels very weird to my ears and my mouth.
Not sure offhand which other vowels this affects. Log/lock have the same vowel sound, but that might be due to the loss of "short o" and the cot/caught merger.
Brilliant. I coach classical singers at a conservatory, and am driven crazy when their classroom diction teachers make arbitrary or completely wrong use of IPA. I'm no linguist, but it's a STANDARD SYSTEM.
Thank you - I loved it!
Another great one! I am awaiting the follow up!
For Canadians, I’d love to hear a study of the accents of The Friendly Giant and Mr Dressup! Interesting question of how children’s shows depict accents over the generations.
Your example sentence sounds like Gyles Brandreth!
This is the first Ipa related video I’ve seen. Forgive me if I have not understood. If are creating your own language, and perhaps that language includs rp vowels AND Ipa, which system do you use to demonstrate the pronunciation of that language?
8:50 So far the model sentence just sounds like Prince Charles.
I think he's King Charles now. 🙂 (But it's hard not to think of him as Prince Charles, since he held that title for most of his life.)
I don't know if that was a mistake or intended as a statement, but I approve the use of prince here.
@@Paul71H He might have the crown now, but he'll always be Prince Charles.
The Aristocrat Formerly Known as Prince Charles.
LOL, next think you'll be telling me he has changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol.
What is the name of that children's story?
Isn't the dipthong in "sound" beginning with /æ/? I know I've at least heard it like that somewhere...
Is there an animation, that would show, how english vowel phonemes drifted over time? Like in the IPA vowel space put some dots and let them drift over time
I did some of this in my videos a couple of years ago, but I intend to do more of that in future. E.g. check out the one on NZ and North of England
Evolution of the coordination of the tongue alongside or influencing language?
5:46 Perhaps Jones had the pen/pin vowel merger? I have this vowel merger in my American accent, and I pronounce "pen" and "pin" identically. (This vowel merger is common in the southeastern US and southern portions of the US midwest. Speakers with this vowel merger make no distinction between "en" and "in" or between "em" and "im". For example, the following word pairs are homophones for me: pen/pin, hem/him, gem/Jim, Ben/bin, ten/tin.)
It seems to be the same in South Africa too.
I would guess that was probably a feature that came along after the colonization of the Americas. Mostly because it's less common to separate two vowel sets the exact same way after it has already merged. It's possible that this system merged in southern US english and separated further in high class southern British english.
But you could also be right, there are many such cases of two pronunciations that were both in England leading to one surviving in the US and the other in the UK.
@@YujiUedaFanno, it's not merged in South African English. The short I exists but it is not the KIT vowel (except in the word him in the vowel pairs above). It's very similar to the NZ short I in "fish and chips" - a schwa that's a little longer than normal
Good point, but Jones and Gimson would have known if they were actually merging KIT and DRESS. As Gimson pointed out, the compression of KIT, DRESS and TRAP was just one of RP's oddities.
13:59 Near-perfect four-voice major chord!