Vowel for 'dad' vs 'mad'
Dylan Nicholson
between the basic pronunciation of the vowel in 'dad'
(/'had'/'lad'/'pad' etc.) and that in 'mad'/'sad'/'bad'.
But surely it's not just me that does make something of a distinction
here - I believe it to be only a difference in length, but it is
theoretically phonemic, in that say, "Is that Sinbad?" and "Is that
sin bad?" are different (even deliberately removing the natural stress
pattern). As far as I can tell, only those latter 3 words (and their
derivatives) use the long 'a' with a 'd', but there are others ending
with 'n' and 'm' ('dam' & 'fan', for instance, but not 'am' or 'can').
Any other speakers here have the same or similar distinction?
Andrew Gwilliam
"Me too!"
I posted a similar query to sci.lang recently:
http://groups.google.com/groups?dq=&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&threadm=2ohgpeFamsdiU1%40uni-berlin.de&prev=/groups%3Fdq%3D%26num%3D100%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26group%3Dsci.lang%26start%3D100
--
Andrew Gwilliam
To email me, replace "bottomless_pit" with "silverhelm"
Carmen L. Abruzzi
> I notice that none of the dictionaries I have access to distinguish
> between the basic pronunciation of the vowel in 'dad'
> (/'had'/'lad'/'pad' etc.) and that in 'mad'/'sad'/'bad'.
I find no difference between these vowels.
> But surely it's not just me that does make something of a distinction
> here - I believe it to be only a difference in length, but it is
> theoretically phonemic, in that say, "Is that Sinbad?" and "Is that
> sin bad?" are different (even deliberately removing the natural stress
> pattern).
Well, I agree that the stress lengthens the vowel, but this
happens to all of the words you mention.
Is that man dad?
Is that the lad?
Is that your pad?
Is that what you had?
Andrew Gwilliam
> Dylan Nicholson wrote:
>
>> I notice that none of the dictionaries I have access to distinguish
>> between the basic pronunciation of the vowel in 'dad'
>> (/'had'/'lad'/'pad' etc.) and that in 'mad'/'sad'/'bad'.
>
> I find no difference between these vowels.
It appears that some speakers of RP have this difference; I wouldn't
swear that some speakers of AusE and NZE don't have it as well. See my
other post for some background for this.
I have the following series:
[&]
bad [archaic past of "bid"], cad, fad, had, 'nad, pad, rad, tad
clad
cag, dag, fag, gag, hag, Jag, lag, mag, nag, sag, tag, wag
[&:]
bad [adjective], lad, mad, sad
glad
bag, rag
The only minimal pair is "bad" ~ "bad". It's probably not a coincidence
that one of these is from a verb (cf "swim" ~ "swam").
Areff
> It appears that some speakers of RP have this difference; I wouldn't
> swear that some speakers of AusE and NZE don't have it as well. See my
> other post for some background for this.
>
>
> I have the following series:
>
> [&]
> bad [archaic past of "bid"], cad, fad, had, 'nad, pad, rad, tad
> clad
> cag, dag, fag, gag, hag, Jag, lag, mag, nag, sag, tag, wag
>
> [&:]
> bad [adjective], lad, mad, sad
> glad
> bag, rag
>
>
> The only minimal pair is "bad" ~ "bad". It's probably not a coincidence
> that one of these is from a verb (cf "swim" ~ "swam").
This is looking a whole lot like the can/can (lax/tense) distinction in
several East Coast (US) dialects, including those of New York City (LSCIA),
including my own dialect, Postwar New York Prestige Standard[TM]. I think
I agree with all your [&] words, where I'd use the lax vowel (except I'd
never know how to say 'bad(e)'). I agree with your [&:] set too (where
I'd use the tense vowel) with the notable exception of 'lad': there I'd
use the lax vowel. I wonder if it's significant that 'lad' is hardly used
at all in ordinary American English, and is thought of as a BrEism or an
archaism.
--
Dylan Nicholson
news:41326e4b$0$6336$bed6...@news.gradwell.net...
I noticed you put 'lad' as a long a, but for me 'lad' is identical to 'dad'.
What about your 'am' words? I think all mine are long except 'am' itself.
Dylan Nicholson
> Andrew Gwilliam wrote:
> >
> > The only minimal pair is "bad" ~ "bad". It's probably not a coincidence
> > that one of these is from a verb (cf "swim" ~ "swam").
>
> This is looking a whole lot like the can/can (lax/tense) distinction in
You know what, the first few times I read about this, I was positive I
didn't make this distinction. Now that I think about it, you might be
right. The difference between a stressed "can" (able to) and "can"
(of beans) is basically the same difference. I'm not sure what you
mean by 'tense' and 'lax', it really just seems to be a difference in
length.
I use the long 'a' in almost all -an words, but the word 'an' itself,
and the 'able-to' can get the shorter version - I can't think of any
others that do. The long 'a' sound only exists with those few
previously mentioned -ad words, most -am and most -an words, *all*
'-ag' words, and that's it, AFAICT.
I'll have to listen out and determine whether this is typical of most
Australian accents.
Skitt
> Areff wrote:
>> Andrew Gwilliam wrote:
>>> The only minimal pair is "bad" ~ "bad". It's probably not a
>>> coincidence that one of these is from a verb (cf "swim" ~ "swam").
>>
>> This is looking a whole lot like the can/can (lax/tense) distinction
>> in several East Coast (US) dialects <snip>
>
> You know what, the first few times I read about this, I was positive I
> didn't make this distinction. Now that I think about it, you might be
> right. The difference between a stressed "can" (able to) and "can"
> (of beans) is basically the same difference. I'm not sure what you
> mean by 'tense' and 'lax', it really just seems to be a difference in
> length.
> I use the long 'a' in almost all -an words, but the word 'an' itself,
> and the 'able-to' can get the shorter version - I can't think of any
> others that do. The long 'a' sound only exists with those few
> previously mentioned -ad words, most -am and most -an words, *all*
> '-ag' words, and that's it, AFAICT.
I have finally established that there can be a difference in the can/can
vowels, but it is there only ir rapid speech, not when I'm taking care to
speak clearly. The "can" (able to) in rapid speech does not really contain
a vowel, only a sort of nasal sound accompanying the "kn". The "can" (of
beans) will always have a distinct vowel, although a short one.
--
Skitt
I wonder how much deeper would the ocean be without sponges ...
Dylan Nicholson
news:2phbd3F...@uni-berlin.de...
>
> I have finally established that there can be a difference in the can/can
> vowels, but it is there only ir rapid speech, not when I'm taking care to
> speak clearly. The "can" (able to) in rapid speech does not really
contain
> a vowel, only a sort of nasal sound accompanying the "kn". The "can" (of
> beans) will always have a distinct vowel, although a short one.
>
a schwa.
Skitt
> "Skitt" wrote:
>> I have finally established that there can be a difference in the
>> can/can vowels, but it is there only ir rapid speech, not when I'm
>> taking care to speak clearly. The "can" (able to) in rapid speech
>> does not really contain a vowel, only a sort of nasal sound
>> accompanying the "kn". The "can" (of beans) will always have a
>> distinct vowel, although a short one.
>>
> Of course, that's why I said *stressed* "can". When unstressed it
> just gets a schwa.
For me, a stressed "can" it is the same for both meanings. Not a shred of
difference.
--
Skitt (in Hayward, California)
www.geocities.com/opus731/
Mxsmanic
> I notice that none of the dictionaries I have access to distinguish
> between the basic pronunciation of the vowel in 'dad'
> (/'had'/'lad'/'pad' etc.) and that in 'mad'/'sad'/'bad'.
The same vowel is used in all of these words in standard English.
> But surely it's not just me that does make something of a distinction
> here - I believe it to be only a difference in length, but it is
> theoretically phonemic, in that say, "Is that Sinbad?" and "Is that
> sin bad?" are different (even deliberately removing the natural stress
> pattern).
That may be, but if your distinction is not widely shared by others, it
is not of great utility.
> Any other speakers here have the same or similar distinction?
I don't make any such distinction. Where were you born and raised? (Or
more specifically, where did you learn English?)
--
Transpose hotmail and mxsmanic in my e-mail address to reach me directly.
Andrew Gwilliam
They're the same for me, too.
Aaron J. Dinkin
> Dylan Nicholson writes:
>
>> I notice that none of the dictionaries I have access to distinguish
>> between the basic pronunciation of the vowel in 'dad'
>> (/'had'/'lad'/'pad' etc.) and that in 'mad'/'sad'/'bad'.
>
> The same vowel is used in all of these words in standard English.
>
>> But surely it's not just me that does make something of a distinction
>> here - I believe it to be only a difference in length, but it is
>> theoretically phonemic, in that say, "Is that Sinbad?" and "Is that
>> sin bad?" are different (even deliberately removing the natural stress
>> pattern).
>
> That may be, but if your distinction is not widely shared by others, it
> is not of great utility.
It is widely shared: it is prevalent in the dialects of the New York,
Philadelphia, and Baltimore areas (although New York does it slightly
differently than Philadelphia and Baltimore do).
-Aaron J. Dinkin
Dr. Whom
Mxsmanic
> It is widely shared: it is prevalent in the dialects of the New York,
> Philadelphia, and Baltimore areas (although New York does it slightly
> differently than Philadelphia and Baltimore do).
To me, widely means that it is used across an entire continent.
rzed
news:3ta7j0l3s7uenkad7...@4ax.com:
[Some context restored]
> Dylan Nicholson writes:
>> I notice that none of the dictionaries I have access to
>> distinguish between the basic pronunciation of the vowel
>> in 'dad' (/'had'/'lad'/'pad' etc.) and that in
>> 'mad'/'sad'/'bad'.
[Mxsmanic]
> The same vowel is used in all of these words in standard English.
Which is spoken where? And by whom?
[Dylan Nicholson]
>> But surely it's not just me that does make something of a
>> distinction here - I believe it to be only a difference
>> in length, but it is theoretically phonemic, in that say,
>> "Is that Sinbad?" and "Is that sin bad?" are different (even
>> deliberately removing the natural stress pattern).
[Mxsmanic]
> That may be, but if your distinction is not widely shared by
> others, it is not of great utility.
> Aaron J. Dinkin writes:
>
>> It is widely shared: it is prevalent in the dialects of the New
>> York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore areas (although New York does
>> it slightly differently than Philadelphia and Baltimore do).
>
> To me, widely means that it is used across an entire continent.
>
Do you have an example of a distinction that is shared across the
entire continent? (Leaving aside the question of what the distinction
would be from if it were that widely shared.) What I can gather of
your point seems to be that no regional variations in speech patterns
exist, or that they are beneath consideration. That ignoring them is
somehow of greater utility than paying attention to them. In what
context?
--
rzed
Dylan Nicholson
news:s697j0hbuhdm6g33v...@4ax.com...
>
> > Any other speakers here have the same or similar distinction?
>
> I don't make any such distinction. Where were you born and raised? (Or
> more specifically, where did you learn English?)
>
my distinctions are shared across the whole continent, but it wouldn't
surprise me, as Australian accents are remarkably uniform across large areas
(but vary a reasonable amount according to level of education, and whether
rural or urban).
Dylan Nicholson
news:2pfn85F...@uni-berlin.de...
using "Audrey", and tried
"Sad. Mad. Bad. Lad. Dad. Pad."
I hear the same distinction I make in my own vowels there - 'lad' is short.
I tried some '-am' words but they are all short, which doesn't match my
usage.
I don't know if individual words are sampled for this, or if it uses some
sort algorithm to generate the sound for even a single word.
Interestingly when I tried "Mike" (US English), his "sad", "mad" and "bad"
sound almost shorter than the latter 3.
Evan Kirshenbaum
> Aaron J. Dinkin writes:
>
>> It is widely shared: it is prevalent in the dialects of the New
>> York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore areas (although New York does it
>> slightly differently than Philadelphia and Baltimore do).
>
> To me, widely means that it is used across an entire continent.
Okay, so that rules out anything that's peculiarly British. Maybe
anything that isn't standard Australian.
--
Evan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------
HP Laboratories |The law of supply and demand tells us
1501 Page Mill Road, 1U, MS 1141 |that when the price of something is
Palo Alto, CA 94304 |artificially set below market level,
|there will soon be none of that thing
kirsh...@hpl.hp.com |left--as you may have noticed the
(650)857-7572 |last time you tried to buy something
|for nothing.
http://www.kirshenbaum.net/ | P.J. O'Rourke
Mark Barratt
Mxsmanic wrote:
> Dylan Nicholson writes:
>
> > I notice that none of the dictionaries I have access to distinguish
> > between the basic pronunciation of the vowel in 'dad'
> > (/'had'/'lad'/'pad' etc.) and that in 'mad'/'sad'/'bad'.
>
> The same vowel is used in all of these words in standard English.
A completely true but hardly complete statement. "Standard English" is
an entirely fictional form of English taught to foreign learners. It
does not, naturally, allow of any variations in pronunciation. The real
language is somewhat less tame.
How many phonemes in your English accent?
Mxsmanic
> Which is spoken where? And by whom?
Most of the U.S. and part of Canada, except for a swath of the southern
States and a few other localized regions.
> Do you have an example of a distinction that is shared across the
> entire continent?
The difference in vowels between "pin" and "pan." Many other examples
could be given.
> What I can gather of your point seems to be that no regional
> variations in speech patterns exist, or that they are beneath
> consideration.
In the United States, they are typically small enough to ignore or to
escape notice.
> That ignoring them is somehow of greater utility than paying
> attention to them.
Yes. Regional accents have a negligeable effect on comprehension when
they are slight, and there isn't really any other reason to pay any
attention to them. Sometimes it's useful to eliminate them to improve
comprehension or to avoid the prejudice of others who attach a lot of
importance to regional accents.
Mxsmanic
> Okay, so that rules out anything that's peculiarly British.
Well, now that you mention it ...
Mxsmanic
> Born, raised and learned English in Australia. I'm yet to determine whether
> my distinctions are shared across the whole continent, but it wouldn't
> surprise me, as Australian accents are remarkably uniform across large areas
> (but vary a reasonable amount according to level of education, and whether
> rural or urban).
The samples I've listened to recently are extraordinarily uniform, more
so than I expected. In that respect, Australian English seems very much
like American English. Indeed, Australian English _sounds_ very much
like American English, except for its frequent non-rhotic character.
Often fairly long utterances in Australian sound practically
indistinguishable from American.
Mxsmanic
> "Standard English" is an entirely fictional form of English
> taught to foreign learners.
Standard English is a reality, and it isn't just taught to foreigners.
Native speakers who wish to eliminate regional accents are taught it,
too.
> It does not, naturally, allow of any variations in pronunciation.
It's not a question of allowing or disallowing, it's a question of
following a precise model.
> How many phonemes in your English accent?
About 40, the same as in virtually all English accents. Phonemes tend
to be constant across all pronunciations, otherwise they would not be
intelligible amongst themselves (unintelligble accents are that way
because phonemes change).
Donna Richoux
We've learned here, from comparing notes, how subjective these
perceptions are. What sounds the "same" to you and what sounds
"different" depends entirely what you've spent your life up to now
paying attention to, or ignoring. And when it comes to language sounds,
this may depend on fine distinctions you acquired at age two or four,
and are unconscious now.
Evidence: the way Alistair Cooke, radio & TV personality, sounded
English to the Americans and American to the English. A single broadcast
could be heard so differently.
I go back to the concept of "lumping and splitting" to resolve these
dilemmas. There are times any of us "lump" things together according to
the ways they are similar, and there are times we "split" according to
how they are different. If one person is busy "lumping" and someone else
comes along and says, "Oh, no, I can't believe you think that, can't you
see how totally different those things are," confusion ensues. At that
precise moment, what mattered to one person did not matter to another.
Gotta go.
--
Best -- Donna Richoux
Sean O'Leathlobhair
Does it not rule out American English as well? American English
speakers may occupy a higher proportion of their continent than
British English speakers do but in neither case is the continent
monoglot. The Australians may be able to claim a whole continent in
which the vast majority of the population are native English speakers
but I don't think that anyone else can. What do they speak in the
Antarctic?
If we change the rule to "Used by all native (*) English speakers in
the continent" then we can apply it to British and American English.
(*) Substitute "fluent" if you prefer. Some features may count as
widely used in Europe since most Europeans who speak English do so in
a more British than American style. For example, Irish is distinct
from British but I think that it has more in common with British than
American. I believe that British spellings are widely used in this
sense.
Seán O'Leathlóbhair
Mark Barratt
Mxsmanic wrote:
> Mark Barratt writes:
>
> > "Standard English" is an entirely fictional form of English
> > taught to foreign learners.
>
> Standard English is a reality,
I meant that there is no native speaker that speaks in the way that
"Standard English" prescribes.
To be fair, my personal knowledge is of the so called "Standard
Southern English" which is currently the fashion in EFL on this side of
the Atlantic. It may be that its American equivalent (GAE - General
American English, as I understand it) does actually reflect the way in
which some Americans speak, but I doubt it, because teaching inevitably
oversimplifies.
> and it isn't just taught to foreigners.
> Native speakers who wish to eliminate regional accents are taught it,
> too.
I've met a few EFL teachers recently who have attempted to modify their
accents to be more like the accent they're teaching. The result is that
they end up sounding like second language speakers themselves. This
amuses me - it's hardly surprising that non-experts (such as yourself)
confuse "standard" and "correct", but one might expect language
teachers to understand the concept better.
> > It does not, naturally, allow of any variations in pronunciation.
>
> It's not a question of allowing or disallowing, it's a question of
> following a precise model.
Indeed - a precise model in which, for example, /t/ is always an
aspirated alveolar plosive. Since this is the most common allophone of
/t/, it's a resonable choice for the standard model. It's an
oversimplification of the way that native people speak English, though.
>
> > How many phonemes in your English accent?
>
> About 40,
About? So somewhere between 20 and 60 then? Answer the question.
(hint) SSE describes 44 - 7 short vowels, 5 long vowels, 8 diphthongs
and 24 consonants.
> the same as in virtually all English accents.
and "virtually all" is also vague to the point of evasion.
> Phonemes tend
> to be constant across all pronunciations, otherwise they would not be
> intelligible amongst themselves (unintelligble accents are that way
> because phonemes change).
Which planet are you living on? The most noticeable thing about
different accents is that the vowels change - often crossing phonemic
borders from the point of view of a listener with another accent. Some
accents have phonemes which are absent from the standard - Scots, for
example, has the voiceless velar fricative /X/; others may lack a
phoneme - Lancashire speakers, for example, do not have the /V/ vowel
and substitute /U/ in all words.
So how many phonemes in your English? Bear in mind that if you've
learnt American English you may also have triphthongs.
--
Mark Barratt
Tony Cooper
wrote:
This explains why you feel that accents can be easily removed from
speech with training. You don't hear them.
Mike Lyle
[...]
> Indeed, Australian English _sounds_ very much
> like American English, except for its frequent non-rhotic character.
> Often fairly long utterances in Australian sound practically
> indistinguishable from American.
I'd call that _far_ dinkum, and hope the phrase catches on. But the
outsider's ear is probably more reliable than a native's: do you
really mean it, or was it just a sweeping Usenet statement?
Mike.
Evan Kirshenbaum
> Evan Kirshenbaum <kirsh...@hpl.hp.com> wrote
>> Mxsmanic <mxsm...@hotmail.com> writes:
>>
>> > To me, widely means that it is used across an entire continent.
>>
>> Okay, so that rules out anything that's peculiarly British. Maybe
>> anything that isn't standard Australian.
>
> Does it not rule out American English as well? American English
> speakers may occupy a higher proportion of their continent than
> British English speakers do but in neither case is the continent
> monoglot.
No, but there are doubtless features that persist "from sea to shining
sea". That's "across an entire continent" (in one direction) in my
book.
Introspecting, I don't have the same feeling about Mexico, so I guess
there's some minimum distance that counts as "across the continent".
--
Evan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------
HP Laboratories |If the human brain were so simple
1501 Page Mill Road, 1U, MS 1141 |That we could understand it,
Palo Alto, CA 94304 |We would be so simple
|That we couldn't.
kirsh...@hpl.hp.com
(650)857-7572
Evan Kirshenbaum
Have you identified where you're from yet? Many Americans, until they
get familiar with Australian accents, assume them to be British.
--
Evan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------
HP Laboratories |He who will not reason, is a bigot;
1501 Page Mill Road, 1U, MS 1141 |he who cannot is a fool; and he who
Palo Alto, CA 94304 |dares not is a slave.
| Sir William Drummond
kirsh...@hpl.hp.com
(650)857-7572
david56
> Mxsmanic <mxsm...@hotmail.com> writes:
>
> > Dylan Nicholson writes:
> >
> >> Born, raised and learned English in Australia. I'm yet to
> >> determine whether my distinctions are shared across the whole
> >> continent, but it wouldn't surprise me, as Australian accents are
> >> remarkably uniform across large areas (but vary a reasonable amount
> >> according to level of education, and whether rural or urban).
> >
> > The samples I've listened to recently are extraordinarily uniform,
> > more so than I expected. In that respect, Australian English seems
> > very much like American English. Indeed, Australian English
> > _sounds_ very much like American English, except for its frequent
> > non-rhotic character. Often fairly long utterances in Australian
> > sound practically indistinguishable from American.
>
> Have you identified where you're from yet? Many Americans, until they
> get familiar with Australian accents, assume them to be British.
And vv. I have more than once been taken for Australian, when
visiting the West Coast (where I suppose Australians are more
common).
--
David
=====
Mxsmanic
> This explains why you feel that accents can be easily removed from
> speech with training. You don't hear them.
I do hear them. But I also don't confuse them with other phonological
phenomena.
Mxsmanic
> I'd call that _far_ dinkum, and hope the phrase catches on. But the
> outsider's ear is probably more reliable than a native's: do you
> really mean it, or was it just a sweeping Usenet statement?
I really mean it.
Mxsmanic
> Have you identified where you're from yet?
I've always known where I'm from.
> Many Americans, until they get familiar with Australian accents,
> assume them to be British.
They sound British if one has heard British more often than other
accents, and they do have some British-style features, such as the
bizarre non-rhotic features. Indeed, they sound that way to me, as they
deviate from American English in a direction that is distinctly British.
Mxsmanic
> I meant that there is no native speaker that speaks in the way that
> "Standard English" prescribes.
There are many native speakers who are so close to the theoretical
standard that the difference is not worth considering.
> I've met a few EFL teachers recently who have attempted to modify their
> accents to be more like the accent they're teaching. The result is that
> they end up sounding like second language speakers themselves. This
> amuses me - it's hardly surprising that non-experts (such as yourself)
> confuse "standard" and "correct", but one might expect language
> teachers to understand the concept better.
I don't confuse them. A correct accent is one that renders all phonemes
comprehensibly. A standard accent is one that is not perceived as an
accent by some large target group of native speakers.
> Indeed - a precise model in which, for example, /t/ is always an
> aspirated alveolar plosive. Since this is the most common allophone of
> /t/, it's a resonable choice for the standard model.
Yes.
> It's an oversimplification of the way that native people speak
> English, though.
The objective of ESL teaching is not to provide an academic survey of
the state and development of English pronunciation, it's to provide
students with the most correct, useful, and neutral pronunciation
possible.
> About? So somewhere between 20 and 60 then? Answer the question.
I did.
The number of phonemes in a language depends on where you draw the
threshold for minimal pairs. If you set the threshold to one, the
number of phonemes becomes astronomical, but as you raise the threshold,
the number drops very rapidly. The question is further complicated when
you consider complete sentences, as opposed to isolated words.
> (hint) SSE describes 44 - 7 short vowels, 5 long vowels, 8 diphthongs
> and 24 consonants.
I count typically 13 vowels (including three diphthongs) and 27
consonants.
> Which planet are you living on?
Earth, currently.
> The most noticeable thing about different accents is that
> the vowels change - often crossing phonemic borders from the
> point of view of a listener with another accent.
That depends on how you define the phonemes. They are more broadly
defined for complete sentences than for isolated words.
> So how many phonemes in your English?
About forty.
> Bear in mind that if you've learnt American English you
> may also have triphthongs.
There are no triphthong phonemes in American English. Indeed, there are
only three dipthong phonemes in GAE and RP.
Richard Ulrich
<kirsh...@hpl.hp.com> wrote:
> Mxsmanic <mxsm...@hotmail.com> writes:
>
> > Dylan Nicholson writes:
> >
> >> Born, raised and learned English in Australia. I'm yet to
> >> determine whether my distinctions are shared across the whole
> >> continent, but it wouldn't surprise me, as Australian accents are
> >> remarkably uniform across large areas (but vary a reasonable amount
> >> according to level of education, and whether rural or urban).
> >
> > The samples I've listened to recently are extraordinarily uniform,
> > more so than I expected. In that respect, Australian English seems
> > very much like American English. Indeed, Australian English
> > _sounds_ very much like American English, except for its frequent
> > non-rhotic character. Often fairly long utterances in Australian
> > sound practically indistinguishable from American.
>
> Have you identified where you're from yet? Many Americans, until they
> get familiar with Australian accents, assume them to be British.
Have you noticed how many Australian actors
have become international stars lately?
I've assumed that Nicole Kidman, Naomi Watts, and the rest
are able to pass as native-speakers for either AmE or BrE
(when they try). "L.A. Confidential" has Guy Pearce and
Russell Crowe as American cops.
--
Rich Ulrich, wpi...@pitt.edu
http://www.pitt.edu/~wpilib/index.html
Andrew Gwilliam
Mxsmanic wrote:
> There are no triphthong phonemes in American English. Indeed, there are
> only three dipthong phonemes in GAE and RP.
This is errant nonsense. Minimal pairs in RP:
bode /b@Ud/
bowed /baUd/
bayed /beId/
bide /baId/
buoyed /boId/
david56
> Have you noticed how many Australian actors
> have become international stars lately?
>
> I've assumed that Nicole Kidman, Naomi Watts, and the rest
> are able to pass as native-speakers for either AmE or BrE
> (when they try). "L.A. Confidential" has Guy Pearce and
> Russell Crowe as American cops.
Crowe did grow up in Australia, but he was born in New Zealand. Like
Xena.
--
David
=====
Donna Richoux
> Mike Lyle writes:
>
> > I'd call that _far_ dinkum, and hope the phrase catches on. But the
> > outsider's ear is probably more reliable than a native's: do you
> > really mean it, or was it just a sweeping Usenet statement?
>
> I really mean it.
Would you mean quoting enough of the previous discussion to keep things
meaningful? Your statement that Mike asked about was:
>> Indeed, Australian English _sounds_ very much
>> like American English, except for its frequent non-rhotic character.
>> Often fairly long utterances in Australian sound practically
>> indistinguishable from American.
I was rather skeptical of this, so I went to the IDEA collection of
sound files of various nationalities. I can't give a direct URL because
of the frame business, but you start at
http://www.ukans.edu/~idea/index2.html
and use the menu at the top to navigate to the Australia collection.
Three of the four clips (1, 2, and 4) sounded so Australian -- or at
least foreign -- to me so fast, I didn't bother listening very far. But
one of them, I would have to say, supports Mxsmanic's statement. It's
the third, marked:
Australia3.mp3 2.8 MB Male student, 18, Melbourne Australia3
There's something in the intonation that sounds American, and it
*doesn't* have as many of the "Australian" touches as the others. He is
younger than the other three -- could this be a trend among Australian
youth? Or is it region, class, etc.?
All four of them say "bow" (in "rainbow") in a very unAmerican way.
"White light" also comes across more like "whaat laat" and the A in
"path" is broader (always an old standby in identifying non-American
accents). I'm trying to set aside "rhoticity" but it's such a chief
factor, it's hard to miss -- "colors, "air," "arch", they're all
noticeable.
But I have to agree, there's something American-sounding about the third
clip.
Mark Barratt
Mxsmanic wrote:
> Mark Barratt writes:
>
> > I meant that there is no native speaker that speaks in the way that
> > "Standard English" prescribes.
>
> There are many native speakers who are so close to the theoretical
> standard that the difference is not worth considering.
Obviously, I don't get out enough.
> > I've met a few EFL teachers recently who have attempted to modify
their
> > accents to be more like the accent they're teaching. The result is
that
> > they end up sounding like second language speakers themselves. This
> > amuses me - it's hardly surprising that non-experts (such as
yourself)
> > confuse "standard" and "correct", but one might expect language
> > teachers to understand the concept better.
>
> I don't confuse them. A correct accent is one that renders all
phonemes
> comprehensibly. A standard accent is one that is not perceived as an
> accent by some large target group of native speakers.
A perfect description - sadly, of non-existent phenomena.
> > Indeed - a precise model in which, for example, /t/ is always an
> > aspirated alveolar plosive. Since this is the most common allophone
of
> > /t/, it's a resonable choice for the standard model.
>
> Yes.
>
> > It's an oversimplification of the way that native people speak
> > English, though.
>
> The objective of ESL teaching is not to provide an academic survey of
> the state and development of English pronunciation, it's to provide
> students with the most correct, useful, and neutral pronunciation
> possible.
And this means teaching them that /t/ is pronounced the same way in all
positions? Well, it does, yes - but not for the reasons you give, but
because it's simpler to present beginners with a simple half-truth than
it is to present them with the complex reality (without discouraging
them).
Of course, some of those beginners will give up their studies half-way
through, and will unfortunately be left saddled with the impression
that English is very simple. If they are arrogant enough, they may even
come to aue and tell us that we don't know what we're talking about.
>
> > About? So somewhere between 20 and 60 then? Answer the question.
>
> I did.
You didn't - and you've also snipped the context of this exchange,
which is generally considered poor netiquette.
>
> The number of phonemes in a language depends on where you draw the
> threshold for minimal pairs. If you set the threshold to one, the
> number of phonemes becomes astronomical, but as you raise the
threshold,
> the number drops very rapidly. The question is further complicated
when
> you consider complete sentences, as opposed to isolated words.
>
> > (hint) SSE describes 44 - 7 short vowels, 5 long vowels, 8
diphthongs
> > and 24 consonants.
>
> I count typically 13 vowels (including three diphthongs) and 27
> consonants.
13 vowels? In which language? If you speak English with only 13 vowels
you must be even more difficult to understand in speaking than you are
in writing.
>
> > Which planet are you living on?
>
> Earth, currently.
>
> > The most noticeable thing about different accents is that
> > the vowels change - often crossing phonemic borders from the
> > point of view of a listener with another accent.
>
> That depends on how you define the phonemes. They are more broadly
> defined for complete sentences than for isolated words.
Huh? Is there more than one planet called Earth?
> > So how many phonemes in your English?
>
> About forty.
>
> > Bear in mind that if you've learnt American English you
> > may also have triphthongs.
>
> There are no triphthong phonemes in American English. Indeed, there
are
> only three dipthong phonemes in GAE and RP.
You are a troll. Goodnight.
--
Mark Barratt
Andrew Gwilliam
> Mxsmanic wrote:
>
>>I count typically 13 vowels (including three diphthongs) and 27
>>consonants.
>
> 13 vowels? In which language? If you speak English with only 13 vowels
> you must be even more difficult to understand in speaking than you are
> in writing.
He[?] has already asserted that both GAE and RP only have three
diphthongs, so no doubt this is where the extra vowels are coming from.
It seems likely that he[?] is guilty of dodgy analysis however, rather
than this being evidence of how he[?] speaks.
Laura F Spira
> [fails to count to ten...]
>
>
> Mxsmanic wrote:
>
>> There are no triphthong phonemes in American English. Indeed, there are
>> only three dipthong phonemes in GAE and RP.
>
>
> This is errant nonsense.
[..]
"Errant" looks really odd to me - I would have written "arrant" although
I see from NSOED that it's a variant of "errant".
(PS: is it worth the effort? )
--
Laura
(emulate St. George for email)
Andrew Gwilliam
> Andrew Gwilliam wrote:
>
>> [fails to count to ten...]
>>
>> Mxsmanic wrote:
>>
>>> There are no triphthong phonemes in American English. Indeed, there are
>>> only three dipthong phonemes in GAE and RP.
>>
>> This is errant nonsense.
>
> [..]
>
> "Errant" looks really odd to me - I would have written "arrant" although
> I see from NSOED that it's a variant of "errant".
Interesting. I hesitated slightly whilst writing it, but couldn't think
of "arrant", probably because I was saying "errant" in my mind's ear.
My dictionary agrees with you, and I agree with it; yet... I like the
implied connection with "to err". Now I'm confused. I love a.u.e!
It doesn't look like the sort of word that you'd say rather than write,
but for me it is.
> (PS: is it worth the effort? )
I know... We all have moments of weakness.
Areff
> Interesting. I hesitated slightly whilst writing it, but couldn't think
> of "arrant", probably because I was saying "errant" in my mind's ear.
> My dictionary agrees with you, and I agree with it; yet... I like the
> implied connection with "to err". Now I'm confused. I love a.u.e!
>
> It doesn't look like the sort of word that you'd say rather than write,
> but for me it is.
For the MIMIMs among us, they sound the same. Homophones in SparkE.
--
Andrew Gwilliam
Mike Lyle (GG beta)
the Australian speech samples at
http://www.ukans.edu/~idea/index2.html
Sample 3, the 18-year-old Melburnian, has a Chinese mother who came to
Aus at the age of 17: I suspect that may be where he picked up the
non-Australian echoes I too noticed. I wish they'd said where she'd
learned her English.
Mike.
Spehro Pefhany
<mike_l...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
The biography transcript says that she is from Hong Kong. So, she
probably learned English with a British or an American accent.
Best regards,
Spehro Pefhany
--
"it's the network..." "The Journey is the reward"
sp...@interlog.com Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog Info for designers: http://www.speff.com
Dylan Nicholson
news:1gjeheo.zinqxx11nq5bbN%tr...@euronet.nl...
>
> But I have to agree, there's something American-sounding about the third
> clip.
>
word 'strikes' at the very beginning.
It's worth pointing out that he is certainly a more particular and
articulate speaker than the average Australian.
Dylan Nicholson
And Nicole Kidman was born in Hawaii. But in both her and Crowe's
case it doesn't seem to have affected their accents.
I actually have little trouble detecting Australian actors trying to
put on American accents (and absolutely no trouble at all with the
reverse - thankfully rare as it is).
Kidman's various British Accents are often better, but the odd
Australian vowel slips through here and there.
Mxsmanic
> This is errant nonsense. Minimal pairs in RP:
>
> bode /b@Ud/
> bowed /baUd/
> bayed /beId/
> bide /baId/
> buoyed /boId/
That's phonetic, not phonemic. Phonemically:
bode /bod/
bowed /bAUd/
bayed /bed/
bide /bAId/
buoyed /bOId/
Three diphthongs. The other dipthongs are typical of RP but are not
phonemic, as there are no minimal pairs separating them from otherwise
identical monopthongs (that is, same starting vowel without the
off-glide).
Thus, ESL students need only learn three diphthongs in English.
Mxsmanic
> And this means teaching them that /t/ is pronounced the same way in all
> positions?
That's a good initial policy, yes, since a single allophone of /t/ will
suffice in English. Those who wish to acquire a specific standard
pronunciation may need a bit more instruction later, if they reach that
point.
There aren't any minimal pairs separated by different pronunciations of
/t/.
> Well, it does, yes - but not for the reasons you give, but
> because it's simpler to present beginners with a simple half-truth than
> it is to present them with the complex reality (without discouraging
> them).
No, it really is sufficient to present just one /t/. They don't need
anything else.
> Of course, some of those beginners will give up their studies half-way
> through, and will unfortunately be left saddled with the impression
> that English is very simple.
English is no more complex than their native languages.
In ESL, we teach for comprehension, not to please amateur and
professional linguists. You only need to distinctively produce and
recognize a fairly small set of sounds in English in order to speak it
fluently and with full comprehension, and so that's what ESL instruction
normally emphasizes, except for extremely advanced students who
_specifically_ wish to eliminate an accent.
> If they are arrogant enough, they may even come to aue and tell
> us that we don't know what we're talking about.
Anyone can come here; I don't know that ESL students are any more or
less common (I suppose a general interest in language or English might
make them slightly more likely to visit, if they have such).
> 13 vowels? In which language?
American English
> If you speak English with only 13 vowels
> you must be even more difficult to understand in speaking than you are
> in writing.
I count fifteen vowels on my American IPA chart, out of 40 sounds.
Allowing for the fact that two pairs of vowels are pretty much
interchaneable, that comes out to thirteen vowels that are truly
phonemic.
> Huh? Is there more than one planet called Earth?
No, just more than one way to isolate phonemes. The set of phonemes for
isolated words is larger than it is for complex utterances, because the
number of semantically valid minimal pairs drops rapidly with an
increase in the total number of syllables in the utterance.
For example, 100% of the phones in "cat" are phonemes, but in
"confederation," the percentage is smaller than 100%, since there are
many pairs that have no meaning (changing the first vowel, for example,
produces no minimal pairs).
Mxsmanic
> He[?] has already asserted that both GAE and RP only have three
> diphthongs ...
Only three diphthong _phonemes_.
Mxsmanic
> Sample 3, the 18-year-old Melburnian, has a Chinese mother who came to
> Aus at the age of 17: I suspect that may be where he picked up the
> non-Australian echoes I too noticed.
Nothing in his speech sounds Chinese.
Steve Hayes
>Mxsmanic <mxsm...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Mike Lyle writes:
>>
>> > I'd call that _far_ dinkum, and hope the phrase catches on. But the
>> > outsider's ear is probably more reliable than a native's: do you
>> > really mean it, or was it just a sweeping Usenet statement?
>>
>> I really mean it.
>
>Would you mean quoting enough of the previous discussion to keep things
>meaningful? Your statement that Mike asked about was:
>
>>> Indeed, Australian English _sounds_ very much
>>> like American English, except for its frequent non-rhotic character.
>>> Often fairly long utterances in Australian sound practically
>>> indistinguishable from American.
>
>I was rather skeptical of this, so I went to the IDEA collection of
>sound files of various nationalities. I can't give a direct URL because
>of the frame business, but you start at
> http://www.ukans.edu/~idea/index2.html
When I first went to London I wondered why the place was full of Australians,
and it took me a while to twig that that was the local accent.
To me, an Australian accent is like a Cockney accent. Bournemouth, however,
was full of Americans, until I realised that that was the local accent.
Probably because it was rhotic.
--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7734/stevesig.htm
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk
Dylan Nicholson
>
> Naomi Watts IS American.
>
She was born in the UK actually, didn't move to Aus. till she was 14
or so. I suspect she lives largely in Hollywood now, but I doubt she
has US citizenship.
Andrew Gwilliam
>
>>> There are no triphthong phonemes in American English. Indeed,
there are
>>> only three dipthong phonemes in GAE and RP.
>
>
>>This is errant nonsense. Minimal pairs in RP:
>>
>>bode /b@Ud/
>>bowed /baUd/
>>bayed /beId/
>>bide /baId/
>>buoyed /boId/
>
> That's phonetic, not phonemic. Phonemically:
>
> bode /bod/
> bowed /bAUd/
> bayed /bed/
> bide /bAId/
> buoyed /bOId/
>
> Three diphthongs. The other dipthongs are typical of RP but are not
> phonemic, as there are no minimal pairs separating them from otherwise
> identical monopthongs (that is, same starting vowel without the
> off-glide).
More nonsense. If a phoneme is consistently realised as a diphthong, I
see no reason to assert that the phoneme itself is not a diphthong.
I have restored the initial context and have cross-posted this to
sci.lang for the experts' view.
Sean O'Leathlobhair
> jwla...@yahoo.com (Sean O'Leathlobhair) writes:
>
> > Evan Kirshenbaum <kirsh...@hpl.hp.com> wrote
> >> Mxsmanic <mxsm...@hotmail.com> writes:
> >>
> >>
> >> Okay, so that rules out anything that's peculiarly British. Maybe
> >> anything that isn't standard Australian.
> >
> > Does it not rule out American English as well? American English
> > speakers may occupy a higher proportion of their continent than
> > British English speakers do but in neither case is the continent
> > monoglot.
>
> No, but there are doubtless features that persist "from sea to shining
> sea". That's "across an entire continent" (in one direction) in my
> book.
Ah, you just mean along a horizontal line on a map. So if maps
reverted to the old east at the top then this would no longer be true.
It seems a bit odd that the orientation of maps should have a bearing
on whether a language feature was widely used.
I have not thought about the matter much but if I had to give a
definition of widely used I guess that it would be: the feature may be
found close to any point in the area. A bit like the topological
term: "dense".
> Introspecting, I don't have the same feeling about Mexico, so I guess
> there's some minimum distance that counts as "across the continent".
I don't know enough about Mexico to give an example but I would be
happy to use the term widely used in relation to Mexico. I would even
use it of Britain or England.
> --
> Evan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------
> HP Laboratories |If the human brain were so simple
> 1501 Page Mill Road, 1U, MS 1141 |That we could understand it,
> Palo Alto, CA 94304 |We would be so simple
> |That we couldn't.
> kirsh...@hpl.hp.com
> (650)857-7572
>
> http://www.kirshenbaum.net/
Seán O'Leathlóbhair
Mike Lyle
> On Tue, 31 Aug 2004 21:08:27 +0200, tr...@euronet.nl (Donna Richoux) wrote:
>
> >Mxsmanic <mxsm...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Mike Lyle writes:
> >>
> >> > I'd call that _far_ dinkum, and hope the phrase catches on. But the
> >> > outsider's ear is probably more reliable than a native's: do you
> >> > really mean it, or was it just a sweeping Usenet statement?
> >>
> >> I really mean it.
> >
> >Would you mean quoting enough of the previous discussion to keep things
> >meaningful? Your statement that Mike asked about was:
> >
> >>> Indeed, Australian English _sounds_ very much
> >>> like American English, except for its frequent non-rhotic character.
> >>> Often fairly long utterances in Australian sound practically
> >>> indistinguishable from American.
> >
> >I was rather skeptical of this, so I went to the IDEA collection of
> >sound files of various nationalities. I can't give a direct URL because
> >of the frame business, but you start at
> > http://www.ukans.edu/~idea/index2.html
>
> When I first went to London I wondered why the place was full of Australians,
> and it took me a while to twig that that was the local accent.
Only because you were In Earls Court.
> To me, an Australian accent is like a Cockney accent.
To me, as you'd expect, they're completely unlike. But to many Brits,
English-speaking South Africans can sound like "Australians or
something".
> Bournemouth, however,
> was full of Americans, until I realised that that was the local accent.
> Probably because it was rhotic.
Can you tell the difference now?
Mike.
Mike Lyle
> Mike Lyle (GG beta) writes:
>
> > Sample 3, the 18-year-old Melburnian, has a Chinese mother who came to
> > Aus at the age of 17: I suspect that may be where he picked up the
> > non-Australian echoes I too noticed.
>
> Nothing in his speech sounds Chinese.
If you're still here, note that you deleted the bit of my message
which said I'd like to know where (for the less imaginative reader,
this implies "or from whom") she learned her English. You have
distorted my remarks.
You know well that I did not say the young man's speech contained
Chinese features; but it certainly contains features he might have
learned from some Chinese speakers of English.
If you will, follow this carefully:
If a Cantonese etc speaker learns English at an early age...and then
emigrates to Australia...then marries a local man...and subsequently
brings up a child...and that child's speech as a young adult appears
to display "non-Australian echoes" to another Australian...then one
may suspect that the source of these echoes was the kind of English
spoken by the mother...at this point, the curious may wonder what
version of English the mother had learned.
Peter T. Daniels
Oh, God. We went through this all summer. If Mixmaniac is now gracing
a.u.e. with his presence, good riddance.
--
Peter T. Daniels gram...@att.net
John Holmes
> Areff <m...@privacy.net> wrote in message
> news:<2pfc0rF...@uni-berlin.de>...
>>
>> This is looking a whole lot like the can/can (lax/tense) distinction
>> in several East Coast (US) dialects <snip>
>
> You know what, the first few times I read about this, I was positive I
> didn't make this distinction. Now that I think about it, you might be
> right. The difference between a stressed "can" (able to) and "can"
> (of beans) is basically the same difference. I'm not sure what you
> mean by 'tense' and 'lax', it really just seems to be a difference in
> length.
I think Areff means that his first can is about the same as ours, but
his second one amounts to a cairn of beans, as we would hear it
non-rhotically. For us there's a phonemic difference in the length of
the vowel; for him, the vowel itself changes from something like & to
somewhere near E:, maybe slightly diphthongised.
--
Regards
John
for mail: my initials plus those of alt.usage.english
at tpg dot com dot au
John Holmes
>
> I was rather skeptical of this, so I went to the IDEA collection of
> sound files of various nationalities. I can't give a direct URL
> because of the frame business, but you start at
> http://www.ukans.edu/~idea/index2.html
>
> and use the menu at the top to navigate to the Australia collection.
>
> Three of the four clips (1, 2, and 4) sounded so Australian -- or at
> least foreign -- to me so fast, I didn't bother listening very far.
> But one of them, I would have to say, supports Mxsmanic's statement.
> It's the third, marked:
>
> Australia3.mp3 2.8 MB Male student, 18, Melbourne Australia3
>
> There's something in the intonation that sounds American, and it
> *doesn't* have as many of the "Australian" touches as the others. He
> is younger than the other three -- could this be a trend among
> Australian youth? Or is it region, class, etc.?
>
> All four of them say "bow" (in "rainbow") in a very unAmerican way.
> "White light" also comes across more like "whaat laat" and the A in
> "path" is broader (always an old standby in identifying non-American
> accents). I'm trying to set aside "rhoticity" but it's such a chief
> factor, it's hard to miss -- "colors, "air," "arch", they're all
> noticeable.
>
> But I have to agree, there's something American-sounding about the
> third clip.
I hear a trace of American there too -- not in the story reading so much
as when he's describing his background. It doesn't say where the
recording was made. I'd guess it was in the US, and the speaker had been
there for perhaps a few months. It is typical for Australians,
especially younger ones, to pick up traces of local accents fairly
quickly. Most find that it is necessary to affect some degree of
rhoticity in order to be understood when speaking to Americans, and no
doubt he was conscious of that when addressing the bloke working the
tape recorder.
So, I don't think it supports Mxsmanic's contention, because I doubt it
is entirely his natural accent.
It's an interesting collection, but a pity that some of the other
recordings are so muffled.
John Holmes
>
> To me, an Australian accent is like a Cockney accent.
Maybe it is to you, but I don't find it at all easy to understand
Cockney. It sounds so foreign. In Britain, the nearest accent to
Australian to my ears is a sort of regionless
something-approaching-RP-ish.
Mxsmanic
> More nonsense. If a phoneme is consistently realised as a diphthong, I
> see no reason to assert that the phoneme itself is not a diphthong.
Except that it isn't. With three exceptions, all the diphthongs in
English have monophthong allophones. The diphthong characteristic of
the phoneme is thus not itself distinctive.
For example, the dipthong [eI] is very common in practically all
pronunciations of English, and it represents /e/; however, the allophone
[e] is also very common, and one may use one or the other indifferently
without affecting comprehension. Thus, the phoneme is /e/, and it has
multiple allophones, not all of which are diphthongs (even if the most
common one is).
Mxsmanic
> You know well that I did not say the young man's speech contained
> Chinese features; but it certainly contains features he might have
> learned from some Chinese speakers of English.
Which ones, and how would they resemble American English?
> If a Cantonese etc speaker learns English at an early age...and then
> emigrates to Australia...then marries a local man...and subsequently
> brings up a child...and that child's speech as a young adult appears
> to display "non-Australian echoes" to another Australian...then one
> may suspect that the source of these echoes was the kind of English
> spoken by the mother...at this point, the curious may wonder what
> version of English the mother had learned.
It would be a bizarre coincidence indeed for these features to closely
resemble native American English, would it not?
Mxsmanic
> I hear a trace of American there too -- not in the story reading so much
> as when he's describing his background. It doesn't say where the
> recording was made. I'd guess it was in the US, and the speaker had been
> there for perhaps a few months. It is typical for Australians,
> especially younger ones, to pick up traces of local accents fairly
> quickly. Most find that it is necessary to affect some degree of
> rhoticity in order to be understood when speaking to Americans, and no
> doubt he was conscious of that when addressing the bloke working the
> tape recorder.
Then why does he retain the non-rhoticity of his native pronunciation,
making it the one distinctly non-American feature thereof?
> So, I don't think it supports Mxsmanic's contention, because I doubt it
> is entirely his natural accent.
I suspect it _is_ entirely his natural accent, as I've heard other
Australians who sounded the same, and they weren't all in the United
States or trying to sound American.
Andrew Gwilliam
> Andrew Gwilliam wrote:
[snip]
>>I have restored the initial context and have cross-posted this to
>>sci.lang for the experts' view.
>
> Oh, God. We went through this all summer. [...]
Ah, I can see what you mean. Following on from your comment I had a
browse through Google Groups and I can see that you suffered
particularly badly in July. There's no learning some people, you might
say. I now have added said nitwit to my "Ignore" filter in my
newsgroups client.
Please consider the cross-posting to have been withdrawn.
Athel Cornish-Bowden
[ ... ]
> > When I first went to London I wondered why the place was full of Australians,
> > and it took me a while to twig that that was the local accent.
>
> Only because you were In Earls Court.
>
> > To me, an Australian accent is like a Cockney accent.
>
> To me, as you'd expect, they're completely unlike. But to many Brits,
> English-speaking South Africans can sound like "Australians or
> something".
>
> > Bournemouth, however,
> > was full of Americans, until I realised that that was the local accent.
> > Probably because it was rhotic.
>
> Can you tell the difference now?
>
Africans in significant numbers 40 years ago I found their accents
indistinguishable, though it didn't take long to learn to distinguish
Australians from the other two, which continued to seem very similar
for years. Hearing them now they sound so different that it isn't easy
to understand why they once seemed so similar.
athel
--
Athel Cornish-Bowden
at...@ibsm.cnrs-mrs.fr
http://bip.cnrs-mrs.fr/bip10/homepage.htm
Mark Barratt
Mxsmanic wrote:
> No, just more than one way to isolate phonemes. The set of phonemes
for
> isolated words is larger than it is for complex utterances, because
the
> number of semantically valid minimal pairs drops rapidly with an
> increase in the total number of syllables in the utterance.
>
> For example, 100% of the phones in "cat" are phonemes, but in
> "confederation," the percentage is smaller than 100%, since there are
> many pairs that have no meaning (changing the first vowel, for
example,
> produces no minimal pairs).
OK, you begin to make yourself clear. I've heard phonemes described as
being defined by the existence of minimal pairs, but I long ago
discarded this definition as useless. Whilst in your example changing
the first vowel cannot produce another word, it nonetheless produces
something which is not an English word at all, which will itself lead
to misunderstanding. Moreover, is it not the case that by your analysis
the schwa is not a phoneme?
This inspires a more general question (and thus a change of subject
line). Can anyone think of a satisfactory minimal pair for /T/ (as in
"thin") and /D/ (as in "this")? The best I've been able to come up with
are "loth" and "loathe" which I find unsatisfactory because the first I
would deem archaic, and also because the dictionaries claim that they
are variants of the same word.
--
Mark Barratt
Peter T. Daniels
followups set.
> --
> Transpose hotmail and mxsmanic in my e-mail address to reach me directly.
Why would I _possibly_ want to do that??
CB
willingness to instruct native speakers of a language evidently not your
mother tongue (although you write it well), the style and diction of your
postings (this one is a good example) -- you're French, aren't you. I say
you're Jean Crapaud, et je vous réclame les cinq Louis-d'or. CDB
John Dawkins
de...@aol.com (DE781) wrote:
> Richard Ulrich <Rich....@comcast.net> wrote in message
> news:<82h9j0do1lqto66nu...@4ax.com>...
> > On Tue, 31 Aug 2004 09:33:23 -0700, Evan Kirshenbaum
> > <kirsh...@hpl.hp.com> wrote:
> >
> > > Mxsmanic <mxsm...@hotmail.com> writes:
> > >
> > > > Dylan Nicholson writes:
> > > >
> > > >> Born, raised and learned English in Australia. I'm yet to
> > > >> determine whether my distinctions are shared across the whole
> > > >> continent, but it wouldn't surprise me, as Australian accents are
> > > >> remarkably uniform across large areas (but vary a reasonable amount
> > > >> according to level of education, and whether rural or urban).
> > > >
> > > > The samples I've listened to recently are extraordinarily uniform,
> > > > more so than I expected. In that respect, Australian English seems
> > > > very much like American English. Indeed, Australian English
> > > > _sounds_ very much like American English, except for its frequent
> > > > non-rhotic character. Often fairly long utterances in Australian
> > > > sound practically indistinguishable from American.
> > >
> > > Have you identified where you're from yet? Many Americans, until they
> > > get familiar with Australian accents, assume them to be British.
> >
> > Have you noticed how many Australian actors
> > have become international stars lately?
> >
> > I've assumed that Nicole Kidman, Naomi Watts,
>
> Naomi Watts IS American.
Well, no, but thanks for playing.
--
J.
CB
"Mark Barratt" <mark.b...@enternet.hu> wrote in message
news:ch4q93$p...@odbk17.prod.google.com...
>
Andrew Gwilliam
> Mxsmanic <mxsm...@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<doeaj09b24sgg8eug...@4ax.com>...
[snip]
> If you're still here, note that you deleted the bit of my message
> which said I'd like to know where (for the less imaginative reader,
> this implies "or from whom") she learned her English. You have
> distorted my remarks.
Cute, ain't he? Snip snip snip, and on it goes.
I cross-posted a point on phonology to sci.lang, which produced a
painful groan from Peter T Daniels; naturally this prompted a look at
the Google Groups archive, and: sure enough, we have a 299-post thread,
with our friend producing about 50% of the posts. You won't be
surprised to hear that he/she was acting in exactly the same manner that
we've seen here.
I really can't understand why our friend is so reticent about his
identity though, as he has a history on newsgroups and the internet
going back to at least April 1994. He used to work for Bull, he appears
to have been living in Paris for at least the last ten years, he seems
to be American, and his name is Anthony Atkielski.
So now that's all out in the open, perhaps he'll now either go away or
start behaving sensibly.
Evan Kirshenbaum
> Evan Kirshenbaum <kirsh...@hpl.hp.com> wrote
>> jwla...@yahoo.com (Sean O'Leathlobhair) writes:
>>
>> > Evan Kirshenbaum <kirsh...@hpl.hp.com> wrote
>> >> Mxsmanic <mxsm...@hotmail.com> writes:
>> >>
>> >> > To me, widely means that it is used across an entire continent.
>> >>
>> >> Okay, so that rules out anything that's peculiarly British. Maybe
>> >> anything that isn't standard Australian.
>> >
>> > Does it not rule out American English as well? American English
>> > speakers may occupy a higher proportion of their continent than
>> > British English speakers do but in neither case is the continent
>> > monoglot.
>>
>> No, but there are doubtless features that persist "from sea to
>> shining sea". That's "across an entire continent" (in one
>> direction) in my book.
>
> Ah, you just mean along a horizontal line on a map. So if maps
> reverted to the old east at the top then this would no longer be
> true. It seems a bit odd that the orientation of maps should have a
> bearing on whether a language feature was widely used.
To me, too. But I assumed that we (via my "that" and your "it") were
discussing Mxsmanic's definition of the term as "across an entire
continent". It's a poor definition, I'll agree.
> I have not thought about the matter much but if I had to give a
> definition of widely used I guess that it would be: the feature may
> be found close to any point in the area. A bit like the topological
> term: "dense".
I don't even think I'd go that far. Something that was common in, say
the southern US but uncommon elsewhere would be "widely used" in my book.
>> Introspecting, I don't have the same feeling about Mexico, so I guess
>> there's some minimum distance that counts as "across the continent".
>
> I don't know enough about Mexico to give an example but I would be
> happy to use the term widely used in relation to Mexico. I would even
> use it of Britain or England.
Sure. But would you say that someone had traveled "across the
continent" if they had gone from Mexico's east coast to its west
coast?
--
Evan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------
HP Laboratories |The vast majority of humans have
1501 Page Mill Road, 1U, MS 1141 |more than the average number of
Palo Alto, CA 94304 |legs.
kirsh...@hpl.hp.com
(650)857-7572
Evan Kirshenbaum
> Why I first encountered Australians, New Zealanders and (Anglo) South
> Africans in significant numbers 40 years ago I found their accents
> indistinguishable, though it didn't take long to learn to distinguish
> Australians from the other two, which continued to seem very similar
> for years. Hearing them now they sound so different that it isn't easy
> to understand why they once seemed so similar.
For me, it was South African that split off first, with Australian and
New Zealander continuing to sound alike until much later. I'm still
not confident I can get them right all the time.
--
Evan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------
HP Laboratories |All tax revenue is the result of
1501 Page Mill Road, 1U, MS 1141 |holding a gun to somebody's head.
Palo Alto, CA 94304 |Not paying taxes is against the law.
|If you don't pay your taxes, you'll
kirsh...@hpl.hp.com |be fined. If you don't pay the fine,
(650)857-7572 |you'll be jailed. If you try to
|escape from jail, you'll be shot.
http://www.kirshenbaum.net/ | P.J. O'Rourke
Skitt
> "Skitt" wrote:
>> I have finally established that there can be a difference in the
>> can/can vowels, but it is there only ir rapid speech, not when I'm
>> taking care to speak clearly. The "can" (able to) in rapid speech
>> does not really contain a vowel, only a sort of nasal sound
>> accompanying the "kn". The "can" (of beans) will always have a
>> distinct vowel, although a short one.
>>
> Of course, that's why I said *stressed* "can". When unstressed it
> just gets a schwa.
It's not even a schwa for me in fast speech. It's the sound that is
inescapable when pronouncing "n", and that is not a schwa, the way I
understand it. In other words, I say something like "I kn do it."
--
Skitt (in Hayward, California)
www.geocities.com/opus731/
Areff
> This inspires a more general question (and thus a change of subject
> line). Can anyone think of a satisfactory minimal pair for /T/ (as in
> "thin") and /D/ (as in "this")? The best I've been able to come up with
> are "loth" and "loathe" which I find unsatisfactory because the first I
> would deem archaic, and also because the dictionaries claim that they
> are variants of the same word.
I don't consider 'loath' (as I would spell it) and 'loathe' to be archaic,
just a bit formal/literary, so I think those work.
Here's a good one: teeth/teethe.
--
Andrew Gwilliam
> John Holmes wrote:
>
>>Steve Hayes wrote:
>>
>>>To me, an Australian accent is like a Cockney accent.
>>
>>Maybe it is to you, but I don't find it at all easy to understand
>>Cockney. It sounds so foreign. In Britain, the nearest accent to
>>Australian to my ears is a sort of regionless
>>something-approaching-RP-ish.
>
> To my German ears Londoners sound more Australian than RP-ish people
> do.
That may be due to the rise in "Estuary English", which is influenced by
Australian soap operas on TV (yes, honestly).
> Although Australians abound in Japan, they seem not to be very welcome
> as teachers in English language schools - interesting, given that I
> have been offered a job as English teacher there, and people I know
> from Yougoslavia and the Ukraine did teach English.
Maybe there's a perception that Aussies are just travellers who'll
scarper as soon as they have a few yen saved up. Or maybe it's one of
those mysterious national stereotypes? In my own travels I've come
across people who have a ridiculously inflated perception of a British
work ethic; I've also come across people who think that the British are
all lazy.
By the way, that's Yugoslavia [now called "Serbia and Montenegro"].
^
Areff
> To me, as you'd expect, they're completely unlike. But to many Brits,
> English-speaking South Africans can sound like "Australians or
> something".
Also Sith Efricans sound like old-fashioned RP speakers, to some degree.
Americans often have trouble distinguishing Australian from "British"
(they're hearing the similarities between AusE and that sort of general
southeastern England standard), but they also sometimes mishear northern
England accents and Scottish accents as "Irish" (or vice versa, as the
case may be).
--
Areff
> Dylan Nicholson wrote:
>> Areff <m...@privacy.net> wrote in message
>> news:<2pfc0rF...@uni-berlin.de>...
>>>
>>> This is looking a whole lot like the can/can (lax/tense) distinction
>>> in several East Coast (US) dialects <snip>
>>
>> You know what, the first few times I read about this, I was positive I
>> didn't make this distinction. Now that I think about it, you might be
>> right. The difference between a stressed "can" (able to) and "can"
>> (of beans) is basically the same difference. I'm not sure what you
>> mean by 'tense' and 'lax', it really just seems to be a difference in
>> length.
>
> I think Areff means that his first can is about the same as ours, but
> his second one amounts to a cairn of beans, as we would hear it
> non-rhotically.
I think that's right. I understand that some non-rhotic New York speakers
merge "bad" and "bared". Same thing -- bad is in the 'tin can' group.
> For us there's a phonemic difference in the length of
> the vowel; for him, the vowel itself changes from something like & to
> somewhere near E:, maybe slightly diphthongised.
Yes. The degree of diphthongization in New York accents, and the degree of
raising, seems to be a nonprestige marker. I think there's a length
difference too (are diphthongization and lengthening closely related?).
--
Wood Avens
>I don't consider 'loath' (as I would spell it) and 'loathe' to be archaic,
>just a bit formal/literary, so I think those work.
>
>Here's a good one: teeth/teethe.
Sooth/soothe (but I suppose 'sooth' might be considered archaic too).
--
Katy Jennison
spamtrap: remove the first two letters after the @
Mxsmanic
> Why I first encountered Australians, New Zealanders and (Anglo) South
> Africans in significant numbers 40 years ago I found their accents
> indistinguishable, though it didn't take long to learn to distinguish
> Australians from the other two, which continued to seem very similar
> for years. Hearing them now they sound so different that it isn't easy
> to understand why they once seemed so similar.
I've encountered a number of South Africans who seemed to speak RP,
although I suppose it isn't precisely that. I was very surprised. I
thought South Africans had a sort of Dutch accent because of the
presumed influence of Afrikaans, but perhaps not.
Mxsmanic
> OK, you begin to make yourself clear. I've heard phonemes described as
> being defined by the existence of minimal pairs, but I long ago
> discarded this definition as useless. Whilst in your example changing
> the first vowel cannot produce another word, it nonetheless produces
> something which is not an English word at all, which will itself lead
> to misunderstanding.
Not necessarily; most listeners can guess the correct word.
The longer the utterance (in terms of number of segments), the smaller
the set of segment strings of that length that make actual sense, and so
the fewer the number of sounds or groups of sounds that are truly
phonemic in that they form minimal pairs.
This is why people have a very high tolerance for mispronunciations of
individual words in connected speech, but not when any of these words
are spoken in isolation.
> Moreover, is it not the case that by your analysis
> the schwa is not a phoneme?
Absolutely. However, that particular phoneme has a great many
allophones. It's like a placeholder.
Areff
> Dylan Nicholson wrote:
>> Of course, that's why I said *stressed* "can". When unstressed it
>> just gets a schwa.
>
> It's not even a schwa for me in fast speech. It's the sound that is
> inescapable when pronouncing "n", and that is not a schwa, the way I
> understand it. In other words, I say something like "I kn do it."
Isn't it [n-] in ErkAIPA?
--
Dylan Nicholson
news:2pmgkfF...@uni-berlin.de...
> Dylan Nicholson wrote:
> >>
> > Of course, that's why I said *stressed* "can". When unstressed it
> > just gets a schwa.
>
> It's not even a schwa for me in fast speech. It's the sound that is
> inescapable when pronouncing "n", and that is not a schwa, the way I
> understand it. In other words, I say something like "I kn do it."
Sounds like a schwa to me. Not all schwas are equal of course.
But surely it's the same as the 2nd vowel in say, "beacon"?
It may not be exactly the same as the first in, for example, 'contrite' -
mine has a slight 'o' quality to it there.
Dylan Nicholson
news:n009ev...@hpl.hp.com...
>
> For me, it was South African that split off first, with Australian and
> New Zealander continuing to sound alike until much later. I'm still
> not confident I can get them right all the time.
>
lose some of the most distinctive parts of their accents. But there's only
about 3 or 4 vowels that give Kiwi accents away, so in a sentence without
those, it's almost impossible to distinguish.
Skitt
> "Skitt" wrote:
>>> Of course, that's why I said *stressed* "can". When unstressed it
>>> just gets a schwa.
>>
>> It's not even a schwa for me in fast speech. It's the sound that is
>> inescapable when pronouncing "n", and that is not a schwa, the way I
>> understand it. In other words, I say something like "I kn do it."
>
> Sounds like a schwa to me. Not all schwas are equal of course.
> But surely it's the same as the 2nd vowel in say, "beacon"?
Yup, it is. I think, as Areff said, it is represented as [n-] in ErkAIPA.
> It may not be exactly the same as the first in, for example,
> 'contrite' - mine has a slight 'o' quality to it there.
Mine too. Slight.
Steve Hayes
>haye...@hotmail.com (Steve Hayes) wrote in message news:<413540f2...@news.saix.net>...
>> When I first went to London I wondered why the place was full of Australians,
>> and it took me a while to twig that that was the local accent.
>
>Only because you were In Earls Court.
Nope, Herne Hill actually, and Camberwell.
>> To me, an Australian accent is like a Cockney accent.
>
>To me, as you'd expect, they're completely unlike. But to many Brits,
>English-speaking South Africans can sound like "Australians or
>something".
That I discovered too.
>> Bournemouth, however,
>> was full of Americans, until I realised that that was the local accent.
>> Probably because it was rhotic.
>
>Can you tell the difference now?
I'm not sure - the accent may have changed since I was last there.
But at the time it was a sort of unconscious thing. I'd get this feeling that
there were lots of American tourists around, then pay attention to the people
who were speaking and realise that they were local. It was proably because
they were rhotic, and I asociated that with American speech.
The London one was probably based mainly on an a vowel - "mate" being
pronounced as "mite", which I associated with Australian English, as in Shine
Warne.
--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7734/stevesig.htm
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk
Steve Hayes
>Athel Cornish-Bowden writes:
>
>> Why I first encountered Australians, New Zealanders and (Anglo) South
>> Africans in significant numbers 40 years ago I found their accents
>> indistinguishable, though it didn't take long to learn to distinguish
>> Australians from the other two, which continued to seem very similar
>> for years. Hearing them now they sound so different that it isn't easy
>> to understand why they once seemed so similar.
>
>I've encountered a number of South Africans who seemed to speak RP,
>although I suppose it isn't precisely that. I was very surprised. I
>thought South Africans had a sort of Dutch accent because of the
>presumed influence of Afrikaans, but perhaps not.
South Africa has a lot of people who speak English as a second language, and
they tend to speak English with distinct accents, but that is getting blurred
now.
There's the "woozer" accent (from WUESA - white urban English-speaking South
African). but since the end of apartheid a lot of urban black kids are
speaking with that accent now.
There's the accent of Afrikaans-speaking urban South Africans, and
Zulu-speaking urban South Africans and so on.
Steve Hayes
>Steve Hayes wrote:
>>
>> To me, an Australian accent is like a Cockney accent.
>
>Maybe it is to you, but I don't find it at all easy to understand
>Cockney. It sounds so foreign. In Britain, the nearest accent to
>Australian to my ears is a sort of regionless
>something-approaching-RP-ish.
Actually the accent I confused with Australian was probably what is today
called Estuary, rather than Cockney. Cockney drops consonants, and substitutes
glottal stops for Ts and V for th ("Wo' abou' a Wurving'@n?" for "What about a
Worthington?" and "aw-ee-o" for "Thornton Heath Pond"). Neither Australian nor
Estuary do that. But Australian and Estuary share some vowels (which they also
share with Cockney). It's the Shine Warne thing.
Mxsmanic
> Sounds like a schwa to me. Not all schwas are equal of course.
> But surely it's the same as the 2nd vowel in say, "beacon"?
> It may not be exactly the same as the first in, for example, 'contrite' -
> mine has a slight 'o' quality to it there.
It's a schwa combined with the consonant, a syllabic 'n'. In the IPA
you put a little vertical line under the 'n' to mark this, instead of
preceding it with a schwa. Very common in English.
Lea V. Usin
"Mark Barratt" (mark.b...@enternet.hu) writes:
> This inspires a more general question (and thus a change of subject
> line). Can anyone think of a satisfactory minimal pair for /T/ (as in
> "thin") and /D/ (as in "this")? The best I've been able to come up with
> are "loth" and "loathe" which I find unsatisfactory because the first I
> would deem archaic, and also because the dictionaries claim that they
> are variants of the same word.
Breath/breathe.
--
Lea V. Usin
ac...@ncf.ca
Dylan Nicholson
news:ch6asa$9h9$1...@freenet9.carleton.ca...
both?
Greg Lee
> Andrew Gwilliam writes:
> > More nonsense. If a phoneme is consistently realised as a diphthong, I
> > see no reason to assert that the phoneme itself is not a diphthong.
> Except that it isn't. With three exceptions, all the diphthongs in
> English have monophthong allophones. The diphthong characteristic of
> the phoneme is thus not itself distinctive.
> For example, the dipthong [eI] is very common in practically all
> pronunciations of English, and it represents /e/; however, the allophone
> [e] is also very common, and one may use one or the other indifferently
> without affecting comprehension. Thus, the phoneme is /e/, and it has
> multiple allophones, not all of which are diphthongs (even if the most
> common one is).
You've used "thus" inappropriately two times, because your conclusions
don't follow from anything you've said.
One way to reach a conclusion about whether it's /e/ or /eI/ is to
identify some different prediction that one or the other assumption
makes. In /eI/, the off-glide should close the syllable, and in other
cases, closed syllables tend to be stressed. So, does /e/ attract
stress?
--
Greg Lee <gr...@ling.lll.hawaii.edu>
Mark Barratt
Steve Hayes wrote:
> To me, an Australian accent is like a Cockney accent. Bournemouth,
however,
> was full of Americans, until I realised that that was the local
accent.
> Probably because it was rhotic.
You went to Bournemouth, Steve? A shame I didn't hear about it. I'd
have been glad to show you around (assuming you mean recently). The
locals that I might have introduced you to, however, would have been
quite emphatically non-rhotic.
Bournemouth is quite a cultural melting pot, however - perhaps the
rhotic people you met actually were Americans (although Irish is more
probable).
--
Kind regards,
Mark Barratt.
Charles Riggs
>Mike Lyle wrote:
>> To me, as you'd expect, they're completely unlike. But to many Brits,
>> English-speaking South Africans can sound like "Australians or
>> something".
>
>Also Sith Efricans sound like old-fashioned RP speakers, to some degree.
>
>Americans often have trouble distinguishing Australian from "British"
>(they're hearing the similarities between AusE and that sort of general
>southeastern England standard),
Which American has that problem?
> but they also sometimes mishear northern
>England accents and Scottish accents as "Irish" (or vice versa, as the
>case may be).
Those who do, if there are any, need some ear adjustments.