Pronounciation of ice/eyes
SP
somebody stated in an Italian newsgroup that "ice" and
"eyes" do not have the same pronounciation.
I think he's wrong. Same vowel like in "I" and same "s"
sound like in "set". But he is Italian and me too. So I
thought I'd better ask competent native English speakers.
TIA
Sergio
HVS
The "i" vowels are the same, but the "s" sounds are entirely different. The
"s" sound in "ice" is like the first "s" in "disguise", whilst that in
"eyes" is like the second one -- it's pronounced as a "z".
--
Cheers, Harvey
CanEng and BrEng, indiscriminately mixed
Peter Duncanson (BrE)
They are pronounced differently.
The "I" and "eye" sounds are the same, but the "c" in "ice" has the "ss"
sound and the "s" in "eyes" has the "z" sound.
It's like the difference between the first letters of "sip" and "zip".
--
Peter Duncanson, UK
(in alt.english.usage)
Odysseus
HVS <use...@REMOVETHISwhhvs.co.uk> wrote:
<snip>
> The "i" vowels are the same,
I would say that they're the same phonemically, but the vowel in "eyes"
is usually pronounced quite a bit longer than that in "ice".
> but the "s" sounds are entirely different. The "s" sound in "ice" is
> like the first "s" in "disguise", whilst that in "eyes" is like the
> second one -- it's pronounced as a "z".
I believe the difference between the vowels is related to the nature of
the following consonants: a V tends to be longer before a voiced C and
shorter before an unvoiced: cf. "tied" _vs_ "tight", "live" (adj) _vs_
"life", &c.
--
Odysseus
John Varela
<odysseu...@yahoo-dot.ca> wrote:
>
> > The "i" vowels are the same,
>
> I would say that they're the same phonemically, but the vowel in "eyes"
> is usually pronounced quite a bit longer than that in "ice".
I agree, but I notice that /while/ pronouncing the "i" in "ice" my
tongue starts moving forward to sound the ess sound of the "c". This
causes the "i" in "ice" to glide into an "e" sound (in English, that
would be an "i" in Italian). While pronouncing the "i" sound in
"eyes" the tongue moves up to sound the "z".
--
John Varela
Glenn Knickerbocker
>I believe the difference between the vowels is related to the nature of
>the following consonants: a V tends to be longer before a voiced C and
>shorter before an unvoiced: cf. "tied" _vs_ "tight", "live" (adj) _vs_
>"life", &c.
In most Northern American accents (and some British), for long I they're
entirely different vowels: /V:i/ before an unvoiced consonant or R
(except in very few words like "pyre"), /A:i/ before other voiced
consonants.
ŹR THIS =====> <===== SPACE
INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK
http://users.bestweb.net/~notr
Ray O'Hara
"SP" <S...@notavailable.it> wrote in message
news:i733d8$nvu$1...@news.eternal-september.org...
They aren't the same where I come from.
contrex
> They aren't the same where I come from.
I believe that for practically everyone where I come from, (UK), the
'c' in 'ice' is sounded like the 's' in 'set' and the 's' in 'eyes' is
sounded like the 'z' in prize.
Don Phillipson
news:i733d8$nvu$1...@news.eternal-september.org...
> somebody stated in an Italian newsgroup that "ice" and
The last sounds in ICE and EYES are pronounced differently.
The terminal S sound in ICE is "unvoiced" like the S in
Italian ISONZO; the terminal S in EYES is "voiced" like
the Z in ISONZO. The more detailed dictionaries with
pronunciation indicate when S is voiced and when not.
--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)
Bill McCray
"I" isn't a good choice of an example of long I. Most people in my area
don't pronounce it the way most of the U.S. does. We tend to use two
versions of long I. One precedes unvoiced consonants and the other in
other cases. Since the "s" in eyes is voiced and the "c" in ice is not,
the I sound in "eyes" and "ice" are not the same for us.
The best description I can give is this: The long I before unvoiced
consonants (and the usual one in the U.S.) has two consecutive sounds,
which I characterize as I and E. The other long I has only the first
sound.
Bill in Kentucky
John Lawler
As various people have pointed out already,
they are different. In different ways.
First, "eyes" has the plural -Z morpheme, which
is pronounced voiced, as /z/, after a voiced sound,
and all vowels are voiced in English. "Ice", on the
other hand, ends in /s/. "Ice" and "eyes" are
different in English because /s/ and /z/ are different
phonemes. In fact, "ice" and "eyes" constitute a
minimal pair for the /s/~/z/ distinction. Phonemically,
they'd be "ice" /ays/ vs "eyes" /ayz/.
Second, in most English dialects, vowels, including
diphthongs like /ay/, preceding voiced consonants
are lengthened. So the /ay/ in "eyes" is longer (i.e,
it takes longer to pronounce) than the /ay/ in "ice".
Third, in many English dialects, including American
and Canadian, the diphthong /ay/ is not only short
before a voiceless consonant, but also centralized
in that position to [əy] (ASCII [@y]). So, phonetically,
"ice" /ays/ [əys] differs from "eyes" /ayz/ [a:yz].
This centralization happens in Canadian dialects
also to the diphthong /aw/, which is one of the few
pronunciation difference that distinguish American
from Canadian English. In Canadian English, the
noun "house" /haws/, which ends in voiceless /s/,
is pronounced [həws], while the verb "(to) house",
which ends in /z/, is pronounced [ha:wz], as it is
in the U.S.
So, yes, they're wrong. In at least three ways. On
the other hand, to an Italian speaker, those differences
are not going to be heard very well, any more than
Chinese tones are by English speakers.
-John Lawler
http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler
Think lobally, yack vocally.
Patok
>
> First, "eyes" has the plural -Z morpheme, which
> is pronounced voiced, as /z/, after a voiced sound,
> and all vowels are voiced in English.
That sentence was very enlightening. I became curios as to how
unvoiced vowels are even possible, and looked it up. In the process, I
finally saw a mention of the fact that I knew had to be true from
everyday English experience, but had seen no confirmation of, either in
writing, or in questioning native English speakers. It is about the
distinction between light and dark 'l' - like in "leaf" vs "goal" or in
"living" vs "loving". I /know/ they are different phonemes, but in every
free online dictionary the IPA symbols are the same 'l', and every
English speaker I ask, thinks a bit and says that it's the same sound.
But, duh, they /are/ different, native English speakers just don't
realize it. I saw the explanation here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone
--
You'd be crazy to e-mail me with the crazy. But leave the div alone.
--
Whoever bans a book, shall be banished. Whoever burns a book, shall burn.
John Lawler
> John Lawler wrote:
>
> > First, "eyes" has the plural -Z morpheme, which
> > is pronounced voiced, as /z/, after a voiced sound,
> > and all vowels are voiced in English.
>
> That sentence was very enlightening. I became curios as to how
> unvoiced vowels are even possible, and looked it up. In the process, I
> finally saw a mention of the fact that I knew had to be true from
> everyday English experience, but had seen no confirmation of, either in
> writing, or in questioning native English speakers. It is about the
> distinction between light and dark 'l' - like in "leaf" vs "goal" or in
> "living" vs "loving". I /know/ they are different phonemes, but in every
> free online dictionary the IPA symbols are the same 'l', and every
> English speaker I ask, thinks a bit and says that it's the same sound.
> But, duh, they /are/ different, native English speakers just don't
> realize it. I saw the explanation here:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone
a) English doesn't have any voiceless vowels. Other languages
do. Japanese, for example, pronounces high vowels (i, u)
voiceless when they occur between two voiceless consonants,
as in "hito", which sounds to an English speaker like "shto"
but in fact is two syllables in Japanese. A voiceless vowel
is just a whispered vowel. If you can whisper, you pronounce
a voiceless vowel. Doing it at speed in the right places takes
more practice, however.
b) Even in Japanese, voiceless vowels aren't phonemic, however.
They're allophonic, i.e, predictable by rule, and so don't have
to be noted in a phonemic orthography (as they aren't in
Japanese).
"Phonemic" and "allophonic" are opposites.
c) As for the various L's, English has two kinds, which are allophonic
and not phonemic. English has only one /l/ phoneme, but there are
at least two allophones:
o "dark", or velarized [ɫ], which occurs *after* vowels ("post-
vocalically",
in the trade), and which is the only L-sound in some languages,
for instance modern Hebrew. Velarized [ɫ] is made with the back
of the tongue flat while the front of the tongue is touching
the front
roof of the mouth.
o "light", or non-velarized [l], which is made with the back of the
tongue
raised to much the same level of the front. This is the only L-
sound
in some languages, like French or Spanish. It occurs *before*
vowels
in English.
Since [ɫ] and [l] are predictable in English, they are allophonic,
not
phonemic. In some languages where both occur, however, they are
phonemic because there are minimal pairs. In Yiddish, for instance,
polke means 'chicken leg', while poɫke means 'Polish woman', showing
that they are not predictable, and hence must be distinguished by
native speakers. In Russian and most Slavic languages, the
palatalized
/ļ/ phoneme is also "light", while the non-palatalized /l/ is
"dark".
Of the examples you give, "leaf" has a light L while "goal" has a
dark,
because one occurs before a vowel and the other after. However,
the L's in "living" and "loving" are both light because they both
occur
before a vowel. There is some distinction between the L-sounds
before
any one vowel vs another, but it's not the classic velarized
distinction.
These various L's are part of what makes Spanish, French, Hebrew,
and Russian accents in English their particular flavors. And
English
accents in other language *their* flavors.
-John Lawler http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler
"As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame,
I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a
meaningful vision of human life -- so I became
a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop
so you can meet girls." -- M. Cartmill
SP
I stand corrected. I could not find a dictionary with the
pronounciation of the plural (the dictionary form is eye, of
course). When do you pronounce the plural -s voiced and when
unvoiced?
However I must tell you that your examples in my native
Italian are wrong, even if I got your point.
1) The z in Isonzo is a completely different sound. The
Italian z is always /ts/ (also in Isonzo, according to the
Dizionario d'ortografia e pronuncia, available online, see
http://www.dizionario.rai.it) or /dz/.
2) Still according to the Dizionario d'ortografia e
pronuncia, the s in Isonzo is voiced.
This was not my original question, but I'd like to know more
about what John Lawler wrote:
QUOTE
Third, in many English dialects, including American
and Canadian, the diphthong /ay/ is not only short
before a voiceless consonant, but also centralized
in that position to [əy] (ASCII [@y]). So, phonetically,
"ice" /ays/ [əys] differs from "eyes" /ayz/ [a:yz].
UNQUOTE
Is this a rather new development? I ask this because my
Webster's Third New International Dictionary, some 20 years
old, writes for both ice and eye an i with a line instead of
the dot as the pronounciation symbol. And I thought that
Webster is THE authority for American accents.
Many, many thanks. You all taught me many useful things.
Sergio
P.S. Posting in UTF-8 code.
Patok
> On Sep 19, 12:58 pm, Patok <crazy.div.pa...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> In the process, I
>> finally saw a mention of the fact that I knew had to be true from
>> everyday English experience, but had seen no confirmation of, either in
>> writing, or in questioning native English speakers. It is about the
>> distinction between light and dark 'l' - like in "leaf" vs "goal" or in
>> "living" vs "loving". I /know/ they are different phonemes, but in every
>> free online dictionary the IPA symbols are the same 'l', and every
>> English speaker I ask, thinks a bit and says that it's the same sound.
>
>> But, duh, they /are/ different, native English speakers just don't
>> realize it. I saw the explanation here:
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone
>
From a non-native speaker's point of view, this is a distinction
without a difference. Inasmuch as the allophone differences follow the
rules of a language, as opposed to being forced by biological
constraints, and inasmuch as these rules differ between languages, they
should be looked at as phonemic.
For instance, the 'l' allophonic rules are different in Bulgarian
than in English, and a native speaker of one of them, using its rules in
the other, is being noticeably non-native (as you correctly observe).
My point is, that when learning foreign languages, the allophone
differences should be emphasized and studied at the same level as the
phonemic ones, while they rarely are. Case in point - my so long
ignorance of the "official" existence of 'l' allophones in English,
exacerbated by the dictionaries' use of the same IPA symbol.
Glenn Knickerbocker
> Case in point - my so long ignorance of the "official" existence of 'l'
> allophones in English
In this particular case, the difference isn't all that important unless
you're trying to learn a particular regional accent. If you only ever
learned the postdental L--as you might in, say, a class for singers'
diction--the worst it would mark you as is a careful speaker. If you
only ever learned the velar L, the worst it would mark you as is coming
from Chicago (Obama's frequent injunctions to "look" and "listen," for
instance, sound to me like mannerisms picked up there).
¬R
Glenn Knickerbocker
> The best description I can give is this: The long I before unvoiced
> consonants (and the usual one in the U.S.) has two consecutive sounds,
> which I characterize as I and E. The other long I has only the first
> sound.
In eastern Texas, long I sounds like /&/ in all contexts (and short A is
that "eh" sound Peter was discussing a while back), but plenty of people
will use a diphthong /&:I/ in just the one word "ice" to distinguish it
clearly from "ass." ("Eastern" ends someewhere between Deaallas and
Foat Wuth, where the more general Southern /A/ sound for long I takes over.)
ŹR
Cece
> Don Phillipson schrieb:
>
> > "SP" <S...@notavailable.it> wrote in message
> >news:i733d8$nvu$1...@news.eternal-september.org...
>
> >> somebody stated in an Italian newsgroup that "ice" and
> >> "eyes" do not have the same pronounciation.
> >> I think he's wrong. Same vowel like in "I" and same "s"
> >> sound like in "set". But he is Italian and me too. So I
> >> thought I'd better ask competent native English speakers.
>
> > The last sounds in ICE and EYES are pronounced differently.
> > The terminal S sound in ICE is "unvoiced" like the S in
> > Italian ISONZO; the terminal S in EYES is "voiced" like
> > the Z in ISONZO. The more detailed dictionaries with
> > pronunciation indicate when S is voiced and when not.
>
> I stand corrected. I could not find a dictionary with the
> pronounciation of the plural (the dictionary form is eye, of
> course). When do you pronounce the plural -s voiced and when
> unvoiced?
>
> However I must tell you that your examples in my native
> Italian are wrong, even if I got your point.
> 1) The z in Isonzo is a completely different sound. The
> Italian z is always /ts/ (also in Isonzo, according to the
> 2) Still according to the Dizionario d'ortografia e
> pronuncia, the s in Isonzo is voiced.
>
> This was not my original question, but I'd like to know more
> about what John Lawler wrote:
> QUOTE
> Third, in many English dialects, including American
> and Canadian, the diphthong /ay/ is not only short
> before a voiceless consonant, but also centralized
> in that position to [əy] (ASCII [@y]). So, phonetically,
> "ice" /ays/ [əys] differs from "eyes" /ayz/ [a:yz].
> UNQUOTE
> Is this a rather new development? I ask this because my
> Webster's Third New International Dictionary, some 20 years
> old, writes for both ice and eye an i with a line instead of
> the dot as the pronounciation symbol. And I thought that
> Webster is THE authority for American accents.
>
> Many, many thanks. You all taught me many useful things.
> Sergio
> P.S. Posting in UTF-8 code.
The -s that makes a plural is always voiced.
The 's that makes a possessive is voiced or not to match the
immediately preceding sound. If the preceding sound is a vowel or a
voiced consonant, 's is voiced; if the preceding sound is an unvoiced
consonant, 's is unvoiced.
The pronunciation respellings in Webster are pretty well known to most
Americans! Other dictionaries copy them, or use nearly the same.
Since the time of Noah Webster, American descriptions of vowel
pronuncations have used the words "long" and "short." A long vowel
says its name: A, E, I, O, and U (bate, beet, bite, boat, butte). In
the dictionary's respellings, long vowels are indicated by a macron, a
horizontal line above the vowel. The short vowels (bat, bet, bit,
bob, but) are marked with a breve, a concave arc, above the vowel in
Webster's and several others, although a few dictionaries do not use
any extra mark at all for the short vowels. (The other vowels in
English are marked in the respellings with a single dot above, a
double dot above, a carat above, a very short and upside-down T -- but
only on a, o, or u. And then there is the schwa.) British cusom is
very different, and I don't know it; the little I have heard hasn't
included enough detail for me to figure out what they mean.
Glenn Knickerbocker
>The -s that makes a plural is always voiced.
Huh? Cupz? Cookz? Catz?
A final consonant that follows an unvoiced consonant is *never* voiced in
English. (Note that by "consonant" I strictly mean something without
syllabic value. The -s in "Fishs Eddy," for instance, is voiced, but it
either is preceded by a schwa or is a sonant itself.) Cups or cup's,
cooks or cook's, cats or cat's, they're all unvoiced.
>The 's that makes a possessive is voiced or not to match the
>immediately preceding sound. If the preceding sound is a vowel or a
>voiced consonant, 's is voiced; if the preceding sound is an unvoiced
>consonant, 's is unvoiced.
There's one more complication, though: When a noun ends in a sibilant
(voiced or unvoiced, either alone or in an affricate), the -'s is
voiced--but, as in my example above, either it's preceded by a schwa or
it's syllabic. The plural is pronounced the same way and is spelled with
-es instead of just -s: fixes/fix's, fizzes/fizz's, fishes/fish's,
luges/luge's, finches/finch's, fringes/fringe's.
Also note, in all cases, a contraction with "is" is spelled and
pronounced the same way as the possessive.
ŹR http://users.bestweb.net/~notr/hassel.html
The worst thing that can happen is, tasty olives. --Stevven
Cece
> The worst thing that can happen is, tasty olives. --Stevven
Yes, you're right. Half my brain was asleep!
The possessive 's and the plural -s, as well as the singular third-
person present tense verb edning -s, are all voiced or unvoiced the
same as the immediately preceding sound. And when the word ends in a
sibilant (/s/, /z/, /S/, /Z/, /tS/, /dZ/), a schwa comes between that
sound and the marker s.
JAG (Nieuws)
<ceceliaa...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>Yes, you're right. Half my brain was asleep!
>
>The possessive 's and the plural -s, as well as the singular third-
>person present tense verb edning -s, are all voiced or unvoiced the
>same as the immediately preceding sound. And when the word ends in a
>sibilant (/s/, /z/, /S/, /Z/, /tS/, /dZ/), a schwa comes between that
>sound and the marker s.
I don't accept that it's a schwa 'twixt 'that sound and the marker s'
- it's more like an [i], unless you wish to emulate the pronunciation
in that now somewhat ancient 'Mild green Fairy liquid' tv advert:
"Your hands that judicious will be soft as your face with ..."
instead of "Your hands that do dishes...".
(Also used in a Morecambe and Wise joke.)
John
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