The contents of, let me see if I can access the campus for a second. First
of all, I would like you to write in the forum and hear you guys over here,
if you've already come to a decision about what accent you're going to lean
towards in the British accent, you know that you have to settle for RP
English and a second accent from the British Isles. Have you made up your
mind? Southern Irish. Very good option. You haven't decided? So the Irish
is very distinct and I think it's quite easy to find recorded references
that can help you prepare. And I have the feeling that both Scottish and
Irish are the ones that probably accumulate the biggest amount of examples,
both recorded and in paper. And that will definitely help you towards
preparing the accents for sure. What about the people in the forum? Have
you already decided which is the other accent that you want to choose
besides RP English? Have you made up your mind? Southern Irish. OK, so that
seems to be the winning factor here for the moment. Anyone else? Scottish
or Southern Irish? Welsh. Oh my gosh. OK, Scottish probably. Who is the
Mercedes? Do you have any any friends or relatives or have you been to
Wales to to lower the learning curve? Southern Irish. There is a 50 50
preference. I have a friend from there. Then that's that's a good that's a
good reason to to. Yeah, don't worry. I understood it. That's a good reason
to lean in one direction or in the other for sure. I'm going to download
the updated unit to. And upload it to the virtual course so you can
download it if you haven't already. We'll probably have some time to look
into that practice file. I still have to deal with some things here about
the for liability. OK, I'll try to get this done before the class. So you
don't have to be waiting around for the files to be uploaded. I've got one
more file to go and we should be set. Remember that I'm going to be on that
side. I'm going to be close to the board. If in any moment you can't hear
me very well, just let me know in the chat and I'll get closer to to the
desk. OK, I'm going to read that last message. OK. And this is a big file.
Last file. See if we have time to deal with it today. Basically, what are
we going to do today? We're going to work where we're going to cover theory
from unit one. And we're going to step inside your comfort zone for
probably the last time in the entire course. We're going to deal with RP
English. OK. And I think that in some cases, some students were saying that
they had never taken a phonetics course before. And therefore, this is not
your comfort zone either. But if you've already taken a phonetics course,
especially if you've taken it, 100 percent of chances that you're going to
feel comfortable because we're going to talk about our English. We're going
to deal with the rest of unit one. I'm curious about what I did with it. I
always find my my photocopies the moment I leave the class. So, we were...
I just had a special sheet of practice that I wanted to use, but I'll just
have to use it to follow up with it. It's not very serious. Nothing great
is lost even if I use the document. In the case of unit one, we're past the
pages of AS. Remember that the examination has two parts. Well, it has more
than two parts. It has three parts, if I'm not mistaken. Exactly, yes. The
first part is multiple choice. A question where you have to talk about...
you have to give an answer in text. And finally, a transcription of a text
in the form in writing. We're going to work on examples of examinations.
I'm going to pass this sheet around. This is the examination, model B, from
2018. As you can see, the typical questions that you get are questions from
here. Questions that you might overread, and especially in that example, or
in model A, that's in here. One of the questions is, for example, about a
slag. And if that kind of slag is referred to formality, if it's referred
to the region from where it is, social conditions. I spot that these two or
three questions that are available on the test, that come from this
section, kinds of a variety. You have to give it in text. It's easier to
explain. The four transcriptions sound pretty hefty. But you have to take
into consideration that Celia is a very, very kind teacher, correct? At the
beginning of the exam, you have to cross out the variety that you've
chosen, Welsh, Scottish, or Irish. And afterwards, the accent from the
southern hemisphere, Australian, South African, or West Indies. You
remember my tip from the other day? If you're very good at RP English,
don't think about the fourth accent. Choose South African English because
it's going to be the most similar one in terms of transcription, and the
transcription is similar. If you want to refresh RP English, you can
probably download an application or use one of these phonemic charts that
you have available. If you write phonemic chart on Google, or you access
the British Council, and you write phonemic chart RP English, this is just
a new feature you can learn with. You have another one. Great. It would be
really interesting if for every accent, you try to compose your own
phonemic chart of which vowels and which consonants are available. And
especially what you're going to find a lot of variation is in
diphthongation and the triphthongation for vowel. Triphthongation in
robotic accents disappear. And the diphthongs are severely reduced in other
varieties of English. If you're able to come up with a chart like that,
you're going to do great. Referring to Chinese and Port Variety, I'm really
sorry that the screen is so small because you can't see it very well. But
if you look at the photocopies, you can follow me as I explain it. The
types of providability in accents are normally in two types. We've heard
about this, and this is common sense. One is region. The more we move away
from an accent, the more it's going to differ. Just think about how the
accents from Madrid vary if you move towards the south, if you move towards
the east, or if you move towards the north of Spain, or if you move towards
the northwest. The same is going to happen in English. The more you move,
the regional variety is going to make the accent change significantly. The
other element is social class. And social class is much more uniform.
People from different areas are going to speak similar kinds of English
because there is a certain unwritten perception of what is correct, what is
socially correct to pronounce one way or the other. So even though the
accents are not ranked, more elegant or less elegant, there is a certain
tendency to diminish the presence or the accents of certain traits, of
certain accents, and to impose them. Take into consideration that RP, the
accents, the one that we're going to focus on, we're only going to focus on
that one, from the accents. England has an elevated social status. So in
any case, it's going to be very similar to the norm of the upper, the
middle upper, and the upper class. RP English is going to resemble a sign
of social distinctness, different to other dialects or other variations.
Referring to the word dialect, the first paragraph talks about what a
dialect has. Everybody speaks a dialect. Dialects have grammatical forms, a
regional vocabulary that is employed. There is a distinct differentiation
based, again, on region and on social class. And I'm emphasizing it a lot
because it would be a pity that if they asked what of these conditions are
not considered when talking about variation, and they write regional,
social, political. If you haven't studied, maybe that doesn't sound very
obvious, but if you stop to think about it for a moment, region and social
are the ones that are going to determine the variation of a language, and
it's going to be very easy to explain that if you have to talk about that.
Sometimes there is an effect of trying to overdo an accent, and that idea
of overdoing an accent is what is called, what it says in the last sentence
of the second paragraph. Funny enough, some people try to frame the social
scale, modify their accent in the direction of RP, and assign the wrongly
certain pronunciations. They perform hyper-corrections over their accent,
and they come up with a funny face, okay, which can be a failed attempt to
achieve a higher social statement in the way they thought. In addition to
regional and social accents and dialects, I don't know if I'm recording. I
don't know if I pressed record. I'm going to, as a matter of fact, I think
I did. Ah, yes, I did. Okay. In addition to regional and social accents and
dialects, English has different styles. So this is another keyword. We've
understood the word regional and social for variability. Dialects, it would
be interesting as a way of preparing for the test to start to compose a
glossary of what is variability, what is regional variability, what is
social variability, what is dialect, what is an accent, what is
hyper-correction, what are styles. English has different styles which are
used in different social situations, and we notice. We speak in a different
way when we're at work, and we're in a different part of the world where we
sound very elegant and very educated, and we're in a different atmosphere.
In informal situations, speakers tend to express themselves less carefully,
delighting or assimilating. So there are going to be certain effects. There
are going to be certain speaking effects, such as assimilation and elision.
Assimilation is when we join words in one word, when we coalesce words, and
elision is when we join sounds, which are going to be going in the opposite
direction of social norm. So the more relaxed and more informal we are, the
more available these become. So the more these are present, the more
informal our speech becomes. Okay, so we have to take into consideration
that certain things that are recognized mechanisms of pronunciation have an
impact on the social etiquette that I want to achieve. Most differences
have to do with the choice of words. If we use words that are very
informal, when we talk about pronunciation choices, we talk about things
like elision, assimilating, maybe rocking my dog, instead of saying pure,
say pure in RPC. Dog rocking, socially very acceptable in informal
situations. If it's a choice of words, we're going to call a choice of
words that are informal a slang. Slang is a collection of informal words
that we use in informal situations. Something similar to a slang, but it
has to do with specialization, when we talk about a subject or a topic, the
kind of language that reflects our knowledge about that topic is what we
call a register. The registers most often have to do with the vocabulary.
And they also work as a set. So there is a close relationship between
slang. Slang is normally referred to an informal collection of words that I
use in an informal situation. A collection of words that maybe, for
example, Javier would use because it's technical at his workplace, but he
wouldn't dare use at home because he would see puzzled faces on the faces
of his family member because they're words that he normally doesn't use at
home would be a specific register. When you use a collection of words to
achieve a certain register, you call that a jargon. So jargon has to do
with a professional environment, a formal situation, and slang has to do
with an informal choice of words. And there is no connection that can be
understood between a specific accent or a specific dialect and the choice
of slang register or jargon. They're separated items, okay? It doesn't have
to be. There are differences of pronunciations which cannot be explained
just by the preference of one pronunciation over another. This kind of
variation has to do with the idea that each of us speak. This is called
free variation. So free variation are the changes that I apply to my
pronunciation that don't have a clear explanation in terms of processes
that the rest of the speakers of my variety normally pronounce, okay? Down
here at the end of this page. When introducing a—when talking about
transcription practice, I might have this in the right order. I don't.
We're going to use the IPA dictionary, the International Phonetic Alphabet
Dictionary. And one of the problems that we have, one of the first problems
that you're going to face is that the symbols that we're going to use here
and the symbols that Kajal and Hannah use are not always the same, not even
for our English. So that poses an additional challenge because we didn't
have enough challenges. We want to give you another one. So one of the
first difficulties that you may find is that you're going to be faced with
a ton of phonetic symbols. And you're going to have to remember some and
draw others intentionally out of your memory because, in my opinion, you
should always give predominance to what you find in Silvia Herrera's notes.
She's going to correct your exam. Remember that. And Kajal and Hannah are
not going to—neither Kajal nor Hannah are going to have—look at your—
Is this compulsory or—? There's—I mean, for the— Because I think that
it's more important to read the notes. For me, your first part
should—your first job should be like 78%— I'm trying to complete the—
Yes, 78% of your attention should be paid on reading the notes. 20% of your
attention in terms of preparing theory— To focus on the notes. Yes, yes,
yes. I see students fast that never even have a book. And so it's possible
to do it. I think it's going to eliminate part of the nuanced information
because in the notes sometimes it says, go to page 223. I think that
it's—it's going to be confusing for us. The book is very confusing, first
of all, because of the order of the information. And I think that's the
biggest area of confusion. It doesn't seem to have a logical order. The
information is collected in a strange way. I think it must make some
sense— All of the—all of the indexes, these notes. For sure. For sure
you should pay most of your attention to the photocopies from Silvio
Barredo before paying attention to the telephone telling about it. I think
it's yours. It's yours. Yes. Don't worry. Don't worry at all. So, as we've
added understanding of the language, linguists have developed an
international system to be able to represent all the languages that are
known to man. The complete set of symbols are used for what we call
transcribing. There are also some diacritics. Diacritics are like secondary
symbols besides the phonetic symbols that help us transcribe with some
distinctions between the sounds. Normally we're going to use—don't
worry—a specific version of the IPA alphabet. I think the one that Silvio
uses is identical to the one that Eva uses in pronunciation. So if you've
already gone through the Profecio de Lengua Inglesa, you're going to feel
much more comfortable with the photocopies than if you look at a trudgelet
para. In fact, in every unit there's going to be a section that
distinguishes—this symbol is different than trudgelet para. So there is a
glossary of the differences. The way that we're going to transcribe in this
course is the same way that we transcribe in phonetics in Eva Esteva's
subject. It's called broad transcription. What does this broad
transcription mean? I think we have it around here. I think it's in the one
that I was— Is it around there? Yes, the next page. It's here now. Yeah,
we're on. Okay. Yes, page 5. I got it here. We call phonetic transcription
the way that we represent the sounds as they should be pronounced. We're
not always going to be very accurate because, as what we were saying
before, the diacritics are normally going to only be placed in certain
cases, and we're going to pay attention to the bigger picture. That's
what—in summary, that's what the broad transcription means. The broad or
phonetic or phonological transcription, every speech sound is identified as
a single phoneme and represented with the appropriate symbols. Symbols are
represented within slabs. Okay, so we would say, for example, ten for the
word ten. It would not show any symbols of articulation or any other type
of—other phenomena. For example, if the tongue had a closed-ended
quality, we can very clearly differentiate if I pronounce this word with
stymies, ten, or if I pronounce it in English, ten, where there's an
aspiration after the T. If I went for a narrow transcription, so we don't
have to show diacritics in our transcription, do we? Only if you're
indicated to do so, okay? So there would be specific instructions about
which diacritics you have to mention. Aspiration or a voicelessness in the
transcription is something that we did as an exercise in the previous
course to understand how transcription worked, and to explain this
aspiration here, for example, we devoted a lot of time in the next course.
We're not going to follow this narrow transcription system by diacritics.
Yes, the aspiration symbol. Exactly, yes. The articulatory qualities of the
speech sound. The symbols and diacritics are enclosed in square brackets.
In fact, I miswrote this. This would be in brackets. Phonetic transcription
in brackets, right? Yes, phonetic. The first one is phonetic or narrow, and
the second one is phonetic or broad. Are you ready to continue? Yes. Okay.
If there's any other questions, just let me know. We'll only use a phonetic
transcription, in particular the one you learn in the first permutación de
lengua inglesa. If you haven't taken that course, if you aren't from
previous courses, you're just studying the subject because you like English
varieties, and you have doubts, feel free to send me an e-mail, and I'll
send you extra information from the previous course so that you have a
better preparation. If you lost the notes because you took the course six
years ago and you don't have the information, don't worry. Send me an
e-mail, and I'll get you up to speed. The important thing is for you to
feel properly informed. Examples of these elements. We have a lot of the
present course, we have the phonemic. With respect to the rest of the
accents, we will use the phonetic symbols that are most frequently found in
education and publication nowadays. So, this is really interesting. We're
going to use the most frequently found phonetic symbols, and that's why I
say it. I brought the phonemic chart to exemplify RP English, and I would
recommend you to try to build a phonetic chart for the other varieties that
you study throughout the course. It could be an interesting exercise for
you to carry out during the course. For example, a good challenge for the
next class would be to think of one for Southern Irish English, for
Scottish English, for Welsh English, whichever one you choose, and to try
to understand those differences. Am I going to find the same amount of
diphthongs? Am I going to find the same amount of vowels? Am I going to
find the same amount of consonants? Do I have to take into consideration
any other consonants? Regarding intermediate vowels, this is interesting.
In modern Irish English, native speakers neutralize the phonetic
oppositions E and A, and OO and O in some unstressed environments. The
resulting weak vowels share the phonetic characteristics of both the E and
the A on the one hand, and the OO and the O on the other. More than the
phonetic characteristics, I would say they have the quality of the long
vowel and the length of the short vowel, of the weak vowel. So it takes a
bit from both parts. It turns into a strong vowel that has been weakened.
For example, we see this in word final position of the E sound, such as in
happy, handy, easy. Those word final Es are going to always be transcribed
as only E. No? Maybe I should move to the next page. So all of these,
handy, happy, or easy, all of these are going to be transcribed as E. With
no colon, and the same is going to happen with the OO. It's going to happen
with the OO, but in other positions. In positions that have... I don't
think I have an example. I'm so bad at examples. An example of a semplite
OO. Oh yeah, here. Is this neutralization? Yes. Here, this OO evaporation,
okay, we have the weakening of the vowel. It says that it's a phenomenon
that doesn't occur as commonly as in the other cases. In those cases, we're
going to use, I think this is out of the sight of the people that are
watching from home, it's going to have a special transcription with no
colon. In any case, if you've studied Pernod de Veneo Inglesa, nothing
changes. It's exactly the same rules that apply when you study it. We're
also, the other example where we see this unstressed vowel is in word
internal unstressed position. That's where we're expecting it, such as in
audio or in unstressed frequencies, such as in react or deactivate. In
unstressed suffixes. So if you see, this is going, it's always going to be
a situation of unstressed syllables. Okay, this weakening is going to be
present in unstressed syllables. Let me, very quickly before we
characterize. There's not document that I wanted. So I'm probably going to
skip that. Okay. Okay, then this part has the appendix. Yeah, this is the
same thing I was mentioning. Check if you have achieved. This is
interesting. This is the part that it says, it gives you the differences in
the Trojano-Hannah book regarding the symbols that we're going to use.
Symbols that are missing in Trojano-Hannah's book. And it gives you the
list of vowel symbols and they're missing in the preface. If you have a
look at, I think in the previous edition, it's on the section that's in
Roman numerals. In the fourth edition, the fifth edition, and in the sixth
edition I think it has the same numbering. Yes, in the fourth edition it
was. It's a different part. They're both in Roman numerals. They're
different pages. In the previous edition, the fifth edition, this page is
in Roman numerals, 13, 14, and 15. And in the newer edition, this page is
9, 10, and 11 in Roman numerals. And the symbols that are missing are the
cardinal, vowel, number one, closed, front, unrounded, also used for the
RPE, such as in C. Okay? The last cardinal vowel, centralized, fairly
front, fairly closed, unrounded vowel, as an RPE case. Okay? The cardinal
vowel number two, closed, mid, front, unrounded vowel, also used as a
conservative pronunciation for red. Cardinal vowel number three, opened,
mid, front, unrounded vowel, also used for RPE for red. Cardinal vowel
number four, opened, front, unrounded vowel. Cardinal vowel number five,
opened, back, unrounded vowel, also used for RPE, ah, rada, another way of
pronouncing the word red, rada. Cardinal vowel number six, opened, mid,
back, unrounded vowel, also used for RPE, oh, sol, sol, in a row. Cardinal
vowel number seven, closed, mid, back, unrounded vowel, the oh, the ooh,
cardinal vowel number eight, closed, back, unrounded, also used for RPE,
ooh. Um, in do, um, the ooh, it, fairly back, fairly closed, rounded vowel,
as in pool, okay? If you have a look on the sides, um, the, the, the one
that you have, the, the, the, um, symbol that you have here, next to the
line, is the symbol that you should be using in your transcriptions, okay?
Cardinal vowel number eight, oh, sorry, last cardinal vowel, ooh, last
cardinal vowel number eight, fairly back, fairly closed, rounded vowel, as
in pool, I guess, on the, um, the, the, um, cardinal vowel number ten,
closed, mid, front, rounded vowel, the oh, cardinal vowel number thirteen,
open, back, rounded, for goal, eh, the ah, cardinal vowel number fourteen,
open, mid, back, unrounded vowel, also used for the RPE in ta. Um, the
cardinal vowel number fifteen, cardinal vowel eighteen, this is like a, a
realization of the ah, the ooh, the schwa, is a cardinal vowel number
twenty-two, um, also used in RPE for letter. Um, cardinal vowel number
twenty-three, cardinal vowel number twenty-four, cardinal vowel number
twenty-five, this one is more, is, is typical of RPE, which is, it's going
through all the symbols, and it's going to make a reference to which ones
are used in RPE. Um, as you can see, maybe a good idea, and I think it
would probably be an improvement for further years, would be to highlight
the ones that have an effect on RPE, like the first one, the second one,
the, eh, the third one, the, the fourth one, the, the, the, the sixth one,
the seventh, the ones that have, ah, have a representation in RPE, as
that's going to be the first, eh, accent that we're going to cover. all of
your documents, um, I'm referring to this one, should probably have the,
the colon there, um, where am I, oh yeah, the E, the U, the A, the Ö, the
O, eh, eh, in, when, when we, when we put one single, eh, dot, like, if it
was a, a, a mid, eh, height dot, it would indicate a half-long vowel. How
specific do you have to be, could be one of your questions, how specific
can you be if you're not a native speaker? That's one of the, eh, eh, one
of the things that you might ask yourself. I would always say, unless
you're very sure, play it safe and, and go with the standard pronunciation
that you're expecting to hear or that you've heard before. Um, eh, there
are other indications, eh, for, eh, eh, the, the vowels, eh, that are more
closed and more open. Um, I'm going to go on, because I've run out of time,
and I, if we, um, don't, eh, cover the, the next section. Um, during the
course of the next two weeks, I am, I'm going to, eh, I'm going to, eh,
post, eh, two days. Eh, one is going to be during our classes, and the
other one is going to be during the classes that we don't have. So, during
the, one of the weeks will be stopped. Um, we'll have an extra class on one
of those. I have to cover two topics. One of the topics are sound in
Southern Irish English, and the other one is atrocity in General American
English. Those are the areas that I cover as an Internet student. Um, eh,
I'll, I'll send you, I'll send all of you, eh, through the, eh, the IEML
application and email telling you the dates that we're going to do those
two, um, eh, web conferences. One is going to be during our normal classes,
probably the Southern Irish English one, and the extra class is going to be
the American English one. Okay? So, I would like to call your attention to
the document, eh, that you might have downloaded called Unit 2, Theory 1,
um, English Accents of the British Isles. Um, this document, this is where
I say, here we're going to navigate through our comfort zone, okay? We're
still going to be in comfortable territory. Um, what we call RP English is,
is what we, eh, detail, um, an artificial, eh, accent that is, that is
used, eh, as a benchmark against which we compare other accents. So, in a
certain way, RP is our golden standard. We use RP as our point of
comparison. Remember that from the three other, eh, accents that we're
going to cover in this course, there is one major accent that is missing.
We are not going to take into consideration Northern Irish English. So,
that means that if you're interested in learning about Northern Irish
English, you have to take into consideration that it's not exam material.
Okay? So, it's not going to be, eh, an accent that is going to help you,
eh, gain a better understanding towards passing this subject. It's not
fully implemented, and, um, you should take that into consideration. I want
to also remind you that you have to choose another English accent. I was
polling the people at the beginning of the class, and I think that the vast
majority of the people had a preference for, you know, Scottish or Irish
English, and some of you had an interest for Welsh English. Um, it's great
to see that variety. Also, it represents, I think, the frequency with which
you're going to encounter these accents in the real world. There are many
more situations where you're going to run into Scottish or Irish people,
and you're going to run into, um, Welsh citizens. Even though there are
very interesting, um, representations, and nowadays we're very lucky thanks
to, um, thanks to, eh, tools such as YouTube, you can have endless access
to hours and hours of any kind of accent. Um, we're going to, eh, deal with
the kinds of differences that we take into consideration when we deal with
accents. And I'm going to speed through these too fast because I missed out
a key word. The first kind of difference that we're going to take into
consideration are the segmental differences. Okay? So, we have two, eh, two
barriers of differentiation. One is a segment, and the other one is a super
segment. Super segment is, has to do with connected speech. The segment has
to do with pronunciation and isolation. So, eh, this would be more of, of
the word and the sentence, and this would have to do with the elements that
are, have to do with necrosity, with intonation, um, and with a speech
pattern. Alright, we're going to go first over the segmental differences,
and in explaining the segmental differences, we can point out four
segmental differences between RP, English, and other accents. Um, the first
one is what we call systemic or phonological differences. Okay, so the, eh,
systemic or phonological differences are the ones where we find different
phonetic inventory. What I said before, my phonetic chart is always a
barrier. We have one phonetic chart for RP, and a different phonetic chart
for a systemic chart for other varieties. Um, in general, most accents of
English have two vowel phonemes in the closed back area, ooh and ooh. But
in Scottish English, there is only one phoneme. Okay? That's a typical
difference between, eh, RP English, for example, or almost any other accent
of English, and Scottish English. That's a very clear difference.
Realization or phonetic. So the second one is, uh, realization.
Realizational. Phonetic differences. Accents may show differences in the
phonetic realization of a given phoneme. For example, the pronunciation of
the vowel in the word kids is different in Australian English from its
counterpart in RP. It may also include, eh, it may also include those cases
where one variety has major allophones, which another does not have, or a
different range of allophones. For instance, in Irish English, um,
something we can talk about in BL, and I can remember that we said that
there were two allophonic differences in most of them, a dark and a clear
realization. And this is very easy to, um, to exemplify. This, if you
pronounce to yourself, um, light and milk, the tongue rolls back in milk in
most accents, but in Southern Irish English, it has such a softening
accent, all of the realizations of BL are exterior. So what that does is
that affects automatically the quality of the vowel that proceeds. To be
able to realize that light and milk, you have to change the quality of the
E. You can't say milk, you have to say milk. And that's, that is going to
have a direct application on the vowel that surrounds those environments.
In the, the, you know, say, for instance, in Irish English, the love is
usually clear in all environments, whereas in RP, two different allophones
can be distinguished, clear and dark. There are two, let's say, more
secondary, um, differences. And this is interesting because these are the
typical questions that might be in a quiz, okay? What is the other way of
calling a systemic difference? Well, a phonological difference. What is the
other way of calling a realization of difference, a dynamic difference?
Another one would be the phonotactic distribution. The phonotactic
distribution, it means the way that accents differ in environments in which
some phonemes occur or do not occur. In other words, a phoneme has a
distribution in one accent that is different from the same phoneme's
distribution in another accent. And this one is very easy to test on me.
For example, because I speak a broad variety of English, I speak something
very similar to General American. My accent is not fully General American
because I've lived in Spain too long and I've been too exposed to RP
English. So my accent is more neutral than a standard General American
accent. But I still conserve all the qualities of the rhoticity and the
vowel system of General American English. So in this case it's very easy.
The rhoticity of a language, sorry, the rhoticity of an accent, and let me
remind you what rhoticity is. When we talk about a rhotic accent, it means
that the R is pronounced in word-defining situations and pre-consonant
situations. Such as in father versus father or a pure, pure, pure. Okay?
That would also be a word-defining. Pre-consonant, I can't think of a
pre-consonant word. So bad at this, I hate myself. Let me see, I have
another. Okay, yeah, Howard. Howard is a good example. Is that a review of
the students at home? Howard. Okay, it's pre-consonant R. How do I
pronounce all of these words in a non-rhotic accent such as RP? Father,
pure. Here I would transform this into a diphthong. Howard, Howard. Whereas
in General American accent this would be father, very nasalized, pure,
Howard. Okay? All of them nasalized. Remember that those nasalization
diacritics are not necessary in your transcription. You don't have to
include them unless they're specifically included. So the rhoticity or the
non-rhoticity is the element that is mentioned in the phonotactic
distribution. Is that the only element that is present? No. There's another
one that is also very common. It's called the yawn of rawling and it has a
lot to do with social class or with the social norm. What is a yawn? The
yawn is this sound that you may... It's consonant. Yes, semi-vowel,
semi-consonant sound. Ya, that sometimes when it's followed, for example,
by a vowel. This is normally when it's in the presence of a plosive or a
nasal consonant. There are two ways of realizing. One is dropping the yawn
or the other one is including the yawn. New or new. New or new. New is in
General American. It doesn't have to do so much with... All of the accents
have a tendency. There is a general tendency in all of the accents or in
the majority of accents of dropping the yawn. It has to do more with age
groups. Older age groups tend to conserve the yawn. Younger age groups for
the moment tend to drop the yawn. So it's more social and cultural than it
is specific. In many cases, even in the same speaker, there may be
realizations of the yawn. It can have to do with realization. I don't know
if you ever noticed that the way you speak Spanish is different depending
on certain elements that surround you. If you're at work, if you're with
friends and you want to cause a good impression, the dropping of the yawn
is a more difficult viewpoint than, for example, the raucousity. A
phenomenon known as neutralization occurs in many phonetic environments. I
sometimes have this problem when I explain certain vowels in archi-English
and I have to stop thinking in the way I pronounce. Because, for example,
here's going to give the example of two words that are somewhat homophonous
for me. Mary and Mary. But in archi-English, they're Mari and Mary. Mari
and Mary. Very different in archi-English. I have exactly the same problem.
This is referring to New Zealand English. General American English has
almost the same realization of this homophonous neutralization that I do.
When I explain every year I have the same problem, the ah and this sound,
these two phonemes. In phonetics, I struggle very much because I have to
remember to pronounce these appropriately because most of them in my accent
are this phoneme. So I can't pronounce many of these words in an
inappropriate way. The lexical differences is the final difference of the
segmental differences. Lexical distribution means that a particular set of
words is pronounced in one form in one accent and in a different form in
another one. In the north of England, for instance, the lexical
distribution of the contrast oo and oo is very similar to the archi one.
However, in the northern accent, oo is used instead of archi and oo words.
So they would say kook and hook instead of kook and hook. Which in this
particular differentiation of vowels is very significant. It's very clearly
noticeable when you listen to it. Just as often, there are vowels in
unstressed syllables that vary. And we're going to see this in, when we see
American English, this is going to be one of the significant variations.
The archi word has a schwa. This word over here has a schwa in the third
unstressed syllable. It's something like ceremony. And I say ceremony. So I
change the stress of the vowel and the quality of the entire vowel. I even
added a diphthong where archi English has a schwa. So it's a completely
different realization of certain words. And it indicates there that there's
a faux diphthong in those situations in general American. So when you see
words that are omi, eri, you're going to see very different realizations,
even stress patterns, between general American and archi English. The
important point here is that there is no general pattern to observe. But
simply that some words behave in a different way. Okay? The variabilities
described are referred to individual sounds. We refer to bigger vowels and
super-segmental features. We can talk about things such as stress or
intonation. One of the classes that I'm going to have with you is the
prosody in general American English. And I can say that there is an effect
in general American English that is copied from New Zealand English and
it's called upspeak. And it follows an entire different pattern. And it
changes the intonation and the speech pattern that we use in American
English versus the standard pattern that we use of rise and fall that we
use in a certain sentence in archi English. This is interesting. And for
example, in archi or Welsh accents, we will see that differences in pitch
and stress syllables. We're going to see that those features of a
sing-songy element is going to be very present in Scottish English or in
Southern Irish English. They're very musical because they have ups and
downs. Whereas archi English has a pause and up and down, soft, relaxing
element to the entire accent. What you're going to notice in general is
that when we speak proper archi English, what we're doing is basically
we're reducing the speed of talking and we're creating speech patterns that
go up and down. For example, we use other varieties. We're going to incur
in shorter vowel lengths and other elements. These... I don't know if this
is the right one. Sorry, before we continue, what is age dropping? Sorry?
Age dropping. In general... Oh, okay, yes. Age dropping can be another
matter of lexical distribution. Simply not pronounced in the end sometimes.
In Irish English, yeah, this is a very good one. I'm very glad that you
mentioned that. A typical example of this is... I pronounce this in archi
English, I'm almost at the end. I would say one, two, three. One, two,
three. Archi English. I pronounce it in Southern Irish English, I would say
one, two, three. One, two, three. This age dropping is something that is
typical of Southern Irish English, for example. Very, very noticeable.
Very, very bizarre when you hear it for the first time. It's the same thing
that we were talking about in the day when we were referring to this local
shop here. I can't stop writing a question mark every time. Oh, yeah,
actually. So, when we pronounce this, we would say pw instead of pw. Okay?
Here, we would say tree. Age dropping is at the beginning of the word? At
the beginning of the word. It doesn't refer to that age dropping. In this
case. Yes. I don't know if there are other varieties. I can't think of any
that brought ages in a specific way. I think that happens... I think I
should pronounce the age... You know when you get that type of absurd age
dropping? When a French person tries to speak English and doesn't have
enough speaking training, I went to a... And you say, why is he dropping
the age? It's because he's so invaded by his accent that he speaks in a
flawed manner. But in referring to varieties, the age dropping is a
reference. Okay, I noticed that in this case. I think it is, but I'll check
if there are other varieties afterwards. I'll look at that. Description of
the English accents in the UK. We already started to talk about this the
other day in class. There is not a way of delimiting the accents, but there
is an accent continuum. What we're going to do is refer to original variety
and do a general overview of archi-English and historical social background
and the phonetic symbols that we're going to use in our transcription. This
is going to be an absolutely comfort area for everybody that has studied
English phonetics at the Med. Now, the spelling of English was fixed in the
18th century, but the spoken language has always been subject to change for
various reasons. And this is taken from a proof of pronunciation of the
English language where it goes on to talk about three distinctive elements.
The three distinctive elements are age, always an important factor,
communication purpose, and external or foreign influence. Age creates a
specific set of patterns and some of them can be super-segmental, like I
said before, like for example, up-speak in New Zealand or in American
English. The genre of English that we talked about before, normally it is
the differentiation between the younger speakers and the older speakers.
Because of the social norm, many of those younger speakers will develop a
change in their accent as they grow older and acquire something similar to
the accent they heard their CEO speak and they will tend to assimilate that
as the standard norm as they grow older. So this is not something that
radically changes from one generation to the next. It's something that
slowly evolves. From the point of view of communications, depending on the
regional development, if a region was poor, the region, well, if the
communication to the region was poor, if there was a build-up with a
certain group, for example, you can see that with immigrant communities
that were said to have stopped hiring, we're going to see that there's
going to be a variation in the type of English that is spoken. I'm not
specifically referring to RP in this case, just to give you an example.
Another very important element that shapes accents in general for
individuals in the case of RP English, RP English and English in general,
comes from a set of overlapping accents going one on another together. The
Danish and the Jew, the Anglo, the Saxons, the French and the Basins of the
Normans. We all study the history of English language and this is very
common. The fixation of the language happens over the course of the last
two centuries. In the 19th century, there tends to be a fixation, but there
is a certain preference that is represented from the stabilization of the
British Isles as an empire. After the 16th century, there starts to be a
favorite preference that has to do with social class and social norm. So,
one of the pronunciations of one of the South East of England is the one
that becomes a predominant accent and little by little, it turns into a
preferred standard and that's what is going to develop into RP English. I
spoke in the last class that when we refer to RP English, it receives many
names, the Queen English, the Queen English, the Queen's English. It's the
English that we're used to reading, that we're used to hearing and watching
on British channels, on British shows. It's an ideal type of English and
for that reason, it's so artificial that there are more speakers of RP
English outside of English than inside English. So, that is really an
interesting fact. If you move to page five, it's probably the most
important for the purpose of the first transcription that you find in an
examination of the phonetic symbols that we use in our transcriptions of RP
English. Basically, these are going to be the vowels and the diphthongs and
also triphthongs, but at the end of the day, triphthongs in RP English are
a bit artificial. They're just the diphthongs and the triphthongs are going
to be, you can see this is a really small print, from my trip-o-ly-nese,
British Swabian. Okay, so basically, what we're going to find are the same
phonetic chart that we can find if we download the phonetic chart from the
British Council. If we go to the phonetic English side, we have a look at
the pronunciation chart. There's going to be two symbols for the E sound.
There's going to be an E, a long E, and a short A, V, and V. There's going
to be two symbols, and they're quite separated. For the E sound, one is
going to be the E in Vest, and if you look further down, there's going to
be one that we pronounce as Vuh-l. It's more, the one that we see after
Luke, we see Vuh-l. That symbol is like a long sloth. You have to take into
consideration, and probably somebody explained this to you in phonetics
last year, this symbol is like if we added two schwa's in a row. Vuh-l and
Vest are the two E-E sounds. We have three sounds for the A. We have the
Vuh-l, Vuh-l, Vuh-l. We have the Vast, A. We have the Vuh-st. We have two
sounds for the O. We have the Lord, very similar to the Spanish realization
of O. Lord, and we have the Lock, O. We have two realizations for the O
sound. We have the O, Luke, and we have the short O, look, O, look. Okay?
This is certainly more challenging because many of the spellings of both
the O and the U, they're a double O. So that makes it different. But it's
different to pronounce, for example, look and good. Okay? We have, for the
schwa, schwa's are normally going to be word beginning or a word final. In
RQ, we're going to find many of those. For example, appointment, about, and
we're going to find a lot of word final in the presence of ER ending, such
as in father, letter, mother, and causa. Okay? Afterwards, I think I
covered all the vowels. We have the two vowels that we talked about before
in the transcription, the weak E and the weak O. Okay? Weak E normally in
word final positions, weak O in medial positions. Both, like the schwa,
unstressed vowels always. They're in unstressed syllables. So that's an
interesting transcription tip. Yes. We have eight diphthongs. Yes.
Basically, that's why the E and the O lose their first because they go to
unstressed situations. Okay? Example, when we say marry, the E is much
easier to find examples. So it's going to be a lot of unstressed syllables.
Abby, Mary, okay? So it's going to be these kind of syllables. Whenever we
find a word final position, we're always going to go for the weak E. From
the point of view of diphthongs, we have eight diphthongs, five cryptons in
Arki English. Eight diphthongs, five cryptons. Let me see if I can organize
this in a fancy way. The diphthongs are basically going to be a combination
of words that end in a schwa. I'm going to start with those for a reason.
They end in an E or they end in an O. And for me, the cryptons are the ones
that add a schwa to the end of this combination. So going top down in your
list, the first one that we find are the ones that end in an E. We have
three. I, A, OI. I, such as in my, A, such as in may, and OI, such as in
toy. Can you speak up? No? Yeah. Okay. I was listening to everything you
were talking about. Okay. In the word final, the ones that end with an OO,
you have two realizations that have two, and the first one has two ways of
being represented. The A can be like the old style, the type of A, or a
more rounded A style, OU, and OO. And this one, I have to make a confession
here, I'm not very good at pronouncing this one because actually, well, I'm
writing out of the area. If I have to confess anything, this diphthong is
the one that I find particularly more challenging because I'm American and
I have a tendency of pronouncing the same way a Spanish would pronounce, O.
But the correct pronunciation would be to add a schwa, O, O. And that's
what makes it sound more British. That schwa factor that you put inside, a
no, a no answer. Okay, so that schwa you put in the O, it really changes
between sounding Spanish or sounding American and sounding British. So be
very careful with not making this mistake. This is very typical of General
America. And you might have a tendency, because you've seen it somewhere,
of writing this, remember that the L, A diphthong is going to be the most
challenging. You must use this a lot in General America. In General
America, exactly, yes. And not this one, because you would sound very
authentic if you used this one in American English. Finally, you have the
diphthongs that end in the E. Sorry, in the, yeah, in the O, in the schwa.
So you have TIA, like, TIA. You have the ER, like in CARE. And the UR, like
in TOUR. What triphthong do you have? You have all the triphthongs that I
mentioned before ending in A or in U with a schwa at the end. I'm going to
write that on a different page and I have some space again, some space
here. So the five triphthongs that I would have would be AYLA EYLA OYLA
AWLA UWA And if you give me a second, I'll give you example words because
as I have already confessed, super bad with examples. So, the last one is
schwa at the beginning of the end. Schwa at the beginning of the end. AYLA
Such as the RP, the realization of FIRE. FIRE PRAYER EMPLOYER AWLA SLOWER
So the closer you get this O to sound as a schwa, the closer you get to
sound very RP, very Finnish. The less successful you are, impossible to
learn, for sure. It's not possible. Oh, we're running out of time. I'm not
going to rush. We're going to wrap up the RP system and I think we're going
to have enough. I'm going to give as read all the information in this next
page up to the consonants, okay? So I'm going to talk about the RP. Well,
the RP, you can read about it because that's a process that led to the
rothicity of the accents. And I'm going to leave the smoothing to you
because it's basically an elimination of part of the tritonation, okay? The
smoothing of these, the triton, what we normally do is we just lengthen the
first vowel and eliminate the intermedial vowel. That's called a smoothing
process. It turns it to, it's similar to the vowel that we have in good,
for example. I'm going to take up the lesson next day at this point in
consonants, okay? So any information that you have any questions about, I'm
going to go over this consonants and I'm going to challenge you to try to
come up with phonetic charts of your accent of choice, okay? And challenge
all the people that are tuning in from home. You can write and send me a
picture and type it up with an IPA alphabet in your word processor,
whatever you find more comfortable. You'll put one on the internet. Maybe
there's already one available in the docs and you can reuse. But just so
you start speaking in your Southern Irish, so the Irish in your, I hope
it's published, the Irish in Welsh, whatever is the accent of choice, okay?
So next day is going to be more time to step out of Arden English. Thanks a
lot. Thank you. Bye. Any questions? Sorry?