Questions and Answers
I receive a lot of questions by email from people around the
world who are using my books or who just contact me because they have found me
on the web. I do my best to answer their questions, and from now on I intend to
put at least some of the questions and my answers into this section of my
website (if the correspondents give their permission). From time to time, then,
you should see new Q&A material here.
For phonetic symbols, I use the Lucida Sans Unicode font,
which most people have on their computers. Please let me know if you have
problems with this.
To contact me, please email me at p.j.roach@reading.ac.uk
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On Oct 15 2009, Sebastián
Varas wrote:
>
> Dear Mr Roach,
>
> I'm from Argentina. I'm
in second year at University studying in order to
> become a translator. And
I would like to ask you two questions:
>
> 1) My teacher told me
that "Elision" cannot occur in main verbs. For
> example, in "old
car", it is possible to elide /d/, but in "find me" you
> cannot elide /d/. I
strongly agree with this, because if I omit a sound
> in a main verb, I may
change the meaning of it or I may omit a past
> simple tense. Still, I
have read in many books that elision IS POSSIBLE
> in verbs. How can this be
possible? Do native speakers elide sounds when
> grammar is involved?
>
> 2) My teacher told me
that "Coalescent Assimilation" is said to be
> substandard when the
syllable of a word is stressed. So, the word
> "opportunity"
/ˌɒpəˈtjuːnətɪ/ could not be pronounced as
/ˌɒpəˈtʃuːnətɪ/
> because it would be
substandard English. Is that correct?
>
> I would be very grateful
if you answer these questions.
>
> Thank you very much.
>
> Sebastián Varas.
Peter Roach's reply
1. As far as I know, elision is not restricted to
any particular
grammatical or syntactic context. You are quite
right that elision may
change the apparent meaning of a word (if you elide
the /d/ in 'find me',
it will sound like 'fine me'). But we often find
that in speaking and
listening we rely on the context in which the word
occurs - if it is quite
obvious what the word is likely to be, we can afford
to elide a consonant,
but if we need to be very careful to avoid ambiguity
we will pronounce the
word with more care and avoid the elision. Some
speech scientists refer to
this as 'hypo- and hyper-articulation'.
2. Coalescent assimilation, or yod-assimilation, is
more and more common in
contemporary British speech. This leads us to a
dilemma - should we teach
the most up-to-date pronunciation found among
younger speakers, and advise,
for example,
/ˌɒpəˈtʃuːnətɪ/, or recommend a more
careful, old fashioned
pronunciation such as
/ˌɒpəˈtjuːnətɪ/? Most teachers would prefer
to teach
the former (even though traditionally it has been
thought to be “substandard”),
but unfortunately students have to take
examinations, and many examiners are
very conservative in their views. So it's often
safer to
recommend the
conservative pronunciation.
In the latest 'English Pronouncing Dictionary', for
words like
'opportunity' we give both pronunciations, but put
the more conservative
one first (i.e. it is preferred). In less common
words, we only give the
conservative pronunciation - see, for example,
'intuitive'.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
On Jun 26 2009, Boris Vidal
wrote:
Dear Mr Roach,
Let me ask you something that
strikes my attention concerning the sound /w/
1. In a book entitled
"Phonetics and Phonology: Reader for first year
English Linguistics" by
Claire-A Forel and Genoveva Puskas, the sound /w/
is said to be a bilabial
approximant.
2. In the book entitled
"Teaching pronunciation" by Marianne Celce-Murcia,
the phoneme /w/ is said to be
a glide voiced bilabial sound.
3. In the book "Gimson's
pronunciation of English", the phoneme /w/ appears
to be a labial-velar
approximant.
4. In the book "An
Outline of English Phonetics" by Daniel Jones, the
phoneme /w/ is described as a
labio-velar semi-vowel.
5. And in your book
"English Phonetics and Phonology", it is described as a
bilabial approximant.
Why is it considered or
described as velar? On what grounds do some of
the phoneticians describe it
as velar? Is there something special in the
phoneme that might lead
linguists to consider it velar?
Thanks a lot in advance,
Boris
Peter
Roach's answer
1. The use of "glide",
"semivowel" and "approximant": this is largely a
matter of the age and approach of the work being
cited. "Glide" for sounds
such as /j/ and /w/ is more often used by
phonologists than by
phoneticians. "Semivowel" is now an
outdated term that is little used.
"Approximant" is the most widely used term
nowadays.
2. "Labial", "labial-velar",
"labio-velar": the main thing to remember here
is that /w/ is a sound with constrictions of the
vocal tract in two places.
The PRIMARY constriction is at the lips (hence the
term "labial"), but
there is a SECONDARY constriction in the velar
region, since the back of
the tongue is raised as for the [u] vowel. The
construction of labels for
consonants with such combinations of primary and
secondary articulations is
difficult, so some writers will prefer
"labio-velar" and others
"labial-velar". You can read about this in
more detail (with reference to
/w/) in J. Laver (1994), Principles of Phonetics,
pp. 138-9. When
consonants are placed on a two-dimensional chart it
is difficult to show
clearly that a consonant has a secondary
articulation, so in my book I just
mark /w/ in the "bilabial" column.
Best wishes,
Peter Roach
On June 17th 2009 I received two messages from
Chile with related questions. Here they are, with my reply:
(1) Hi Mr Roach
I'm a teacher of English down here in Chile, South America.
I was wondering if you could answer one question which came up today in one
of my classes while reviewing phonetic transcription.
In the word Australia: why does the /j/ appear in the phonetic transcription
at the end of the word? Why is the /i/ not being used instead of /j/?
The same happens in the word university and many others, the /j/ is used in
many words and not /i/?
Thanks,
Boris
(2) Dear Mr. Roach,
I would be grateful if you could answer the following question:
Why isn't the last syllable in the word Australia transcribed as the word
beer or fear? Instead of i we may have a j.
Why does the syllable in the word mill*io*naire have a j as well and not an
i?
I'm looking forward to your answer.
Kind regards,
Marcelo Andrade
Puerto Montt, Chile.
Peter Roach's answer
I think the questions are essentially about
transcriptions such as ɪə,
i.ə and jə.
The answer must be based on two things:
1.
Different people pronounce words in different ways. Some people say
'Australia' with three syllables, the last being -jə,
while others say it with four, the last two syllables being
i
and ə.
Both pronunciations are correct. The Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary
prefers the four-syllable pronunciation; the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary
marks it to indicate that the i
and ə
may be pronounced as separate syllables, or compressed
into one syllable (which we would transcribe jə).
The LPD has a useful note on compression on p. 173. The word 'millionaire' may
also be pronounced with three syllables, as in the CEPD and LPD, in which case
the middle syllable is transcribed jə
(ɪə
would also be possible), or with
four, in which case the word would contain i.ə
(the dot .
is an IPA convention to indicate a syllable boundary).
2.
Sometimes the issue is one of transcription conventions rather than of phonetic
facts. It is often difficult to give guidelines for when to use ɪə,
when to use i.ə
and
when to use
jə.
Single-morpheme words like 'beer' and 'fear' are usually transcribed with ɪə. In names like 'India', and in words like
'windier' (=more windy) it is more usual to use i.ə.
Hpwever, you could transcribe 'India', 'Australia', 'windier' with ɪə
or jə
instead - it's essentially a matter of deciding on which transcription one
prefers and then trying to be consistent.
------------------------------------------------------
On June 6th 2009 Toofan Javanshir wrote:
Dear
Peter Roach,
Having recently read your interesting book on “English Phonetics and
Phonology,
the Third Edition”, a couple of questions arose in my mind. Your
book
deals mainly with British or BBC Accent as it is the word you have used
yourself; however, it is very useful in getting a general view on how
articulation of sounds, particularly English sounds, takes place. I think
not
only is it efficient in getting acquainted with BBC Accent, but also
with
the nature of English sounds in general and also American Accent or
rhotic
accents.
I’m
an English student in Iran and since I follow American Accent, a couple
of
questions arose in my mind reading your book. Proceeding in reading the
book
as I did, I tried to compare different matters with American Accent and
therefore some questions remained unanswered in my mind. One of the most
important questions being in determining the place of articulation and also the
manner of articulation of a particular sound which I find in American Accent and
most likely not existing in British Accent, as far as I am concerned, and that
sound being a kind of /t/ in the American pronunciation of some words like:
‘moun*t*ain’, ‘impor*t*ant’, ‘cer*t*ain’, and so on. As you know,
the pronunciation of this sound in American is different from its British
counterpart. I do not know how to show its pronunciation difference here, being
sure, however, that you are familiar with the difference and what I mean. I feel
myself that it is a kind of velar sound as the soft palate lowers itself to let
the air pass through the nasal cavity. Considering this, could it also be
considered as one of the nasal sounds?
Please
write to me about the place of articulation, manner of articulation,
the
phonetic symbol existing for this particular sound, whether or not it
could
be considered as one of the nasal sounds, and any complementary point
which
you might know that would help me in fully understanding the nature of this
sound.
Peter Roach's reply:
Thank you for your question. You are quite right that the /t/ sound in the words you mentioned are not like
the alveolar plosive that you get in words like 'tea', 'attend'. However, I don't think the sound is a nasal, and in fact
it's not much different from what you find for the pronunciation of /t/ in British English in these contexts.
What we most often hear is a glottal stop (voiceless glottal plosive), whose phonetic symbol is like a question mark: ʔ.
So in 'mountain', the first syllable is /maʊn/, ending with the tongue touching the alveolar ridge and the soft palate lowered.
Then there is a glottal stop, after which voicing begins, so that the final /n/ in produced. In this context, the soft palate
does not need to be raised during the glottal stop as it would be for a /t/. We could transcribe the word as maʊnʔn.
In the word 'certain', American speakers usually pronounce the 'r' found in the spelling. Then the 't' will be pronounced,
usually as a glottal stop. So we could transcribe this as sɜːrʔn. The word 'important' could be
transcribed as ɪmpɔːrʔnt. But the glottal stop is not a phoneme of English, so our phonemic transcription should
still use the /t/ symbol instead.
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On May 27 2009, Mohsen Pornour wrote:
I am a PhD student in Applied Linguistics studying
at the University of Malaya, Malaysia. My field of research is second language reading, but I
did my Masters on
English word stress and vowel quality patterns.
It's been a long time
since a simple word started causing me a lot of
confusion.
I started asking many phoneticians a simple question, but I haven't received a convincing reply yet.
The word is 'iron' and the question is
"Is 'iron' a monosyllabic or bisyllabic word?
As you know, the British
pronunciation of the word is /aIən/. Is the
vowel
in the word a triphthong, like the vowel in 'fire' /faIə/? Can we conclude that 'iron' is monosyllabic?
How about the American pronunciation of the word,
/aIərn/? As you know, there is no schwa between /r/ and /n/ sounds. In fact, no
dictionaries have put a vowel (schwa in this case) between the two sounds. And /n/
cannot be a syllabic
consonant here.
Can we conclude that the
word 'iron' is monosyllabic in both
accents?
Peter Roach’s reply:
Thank you for your interesting question. I'll try to
give you an answer.
When we were revising the 'English Pronouncing
Dictionary' for Cambridge
University Press, we had to work out a set of rules
for transcribing words
in a consistent way. One of our major problems was
what to do about
triphthongs. You can read whay I have to say about
triphthongs in general
in the web Glossary of my book 'English Phonetics
and Phonology' if you
download the Glossary at
http://www.cambridge.org/elt/peterroach
It was clear to us that in some words the triphthong
was the nucleus of a
single syllable, for example in 'fire', 'Ireland',
while in others it was
two syllables, for example 'drier', 'supplier'. The
difference in these
cases is between single-morpheme and two-morpheme
words, the morpheme
boundary often being also a syllable boundary, in our opinion. We also
thought that more familiar words, like 'iron', were
more likely to be
monosyllabic than less familiar words, such as
'ion'. So in the Cambridge
English Pronouncing Dictionary, 'iron' is
monosyllabic while 'ion' is
bisyllabic. There are many names containing the aI@
triphthong,
such as ‘Isaiah’.
I
think the more familiar the name is, the more likely it is that the triphthong
will be monosyllabic.
I have to admit, though, that our rules have not
been applied with 100%
consistency.
I am at the moment
working my way through the dictionary
in
preparation for the next edition and I will try to improve the consistency of the syllabic decisions.
-----------------------------------------
On May 19 2009, Mohamed Hassan
(Saudi Arabia) wrote:
Dear
Mr Roach,
I
would appreciate it so much if I could have your comment on the
transcription
of "commence & commencement" in the Cambridge Advanced Learners’
Dictionary. I have
never
heard these words pronounced with the "t" sound in them.
Mohamed
Hassan
Peter Roach's reply:
Thank
you for your question. This transcription has what
we call
the "epenthetic /t/" that occurs commonly in English. In my
pronunciation,
there is no /t/ in 'commence', but many speakers do have
this
sound between /n/ and /s/, and such a pronunciation is not wrong. You
might
like to look up the word 'epenthesis' in the Glossary of my book
'English
Phonetics and Phonology'. You can find this on the
website
at
http://www.cambridge.org/elt/peterroach
I hope
this helps,
-------------------------------------------------
A set of questions from Rasim Jehjooh in Baghdad:
Q1.
Do the allophones in R.P. change the form of the CV system of the English
syllable in
narrow transcription
in R.P. pronunciation .
Eg. put
/pʊt/ CVC in
phonemic transcription can
be [ phʊʔt
] CCVCC in phonetic transcription .
Q2.
Can we follow broad
transcription in showing R.P.
pronunciation?
Q3.
Do we consider aspiration
and glottalization as consonant
sounds in R.P. sound system?
Q4.
If these allophones change
the form
of CV system , how can I classify
them into
the structure
of onset and coda?
PR:
These questions are useful for making us consider the difference between
phonetic and phonemic representations of English sound structure. Phonemic
transcription gives us a simple and economical way of representing speech, but
we quickly find out when we study phonetics and phonology that the physical
reality that we represent when we use phonetic transcription often
contains many more segments (pieces of sound) than we might have thought. You
are quite right in saying that the word 'put' may contain a segment of
aspiration noise at the release of the p closure, and of glottalisation
just before the t. The problem is that in transcribing phonetically there
is really no limit to how many segments you can find in a piece of speech: each
cycle of vibration in a vowel, for example, could count as a segment, giving
perhaps ten in the course of a vowel.
OK,
now let's look at your questions.
Q1:
Allophones are simply different realisations of phonemes. What you are referring
to is the phonetic segment; it would be true to say that counting
phonetic segments in narrow transcription would result in a different number of
segments from the number resulting from counting phonemes. I don't know of any
writer who uses the general symbols C and V to denote phonetic segments -
they are used in phonology to denote phonemes.
Q2:
we could certainly use broad phonetic transcription to represent "RP"
or any other accent. Sometimes it's useful to do this to explain points about
pronunciation, but most of the time it is found more convenient to use phonemic
transcription.
Q3:
This is a difficult question. Aspiration and glottalisation do not form part of
the inventory of English phonemes ("the RP sound system"). However, if
you are looking at their status as phonetic segments, both could be considered
marginal or uncertain as consonants. The aspiration could be looked on as a
voiceless beginning to a vowel (the ʊ
in
'put' in this example), so as a phonetic segment it is more like a vowel.
Glottalisation at the end of a vowel is in its way also more like a vowel - that
is, a vowel with creaky voice, ending in silence. So I think the answer to Q3 is
"no".
Q4:
As far as I know, consideration of onsets and codas is always done in terms of
phonemes, or phonologically distinctive segments, and not in terms of phonetic
segments. So a p acting as an onset will be a single-consonant onset with
or without aspiration.
------------------------------------------------------
I've had a number of questions from Ismael Tohari
in Saudi Arabia. Here are some of them:
Q1
I.T.: I read that 'In many varieties 'hoarse' and 'horse' are
pronounced differently.' I was wondering how the word 'hoarse' was pronounced differently from 'horse' though
they usually have the same transcription. How was 'hoarse' pronounced before?
P.R.: First point: if 'horse' and 'hoarse' have the same transcription, they are pronounced the same.
The question of a difference between 'horse' and 'hoarse' arises in the case on some accents of Scottish
and American English where /r/ is pronounced at the end of the syllable, but the vowels in the two words are different.
In most other accents (e.g. BBC/RP) the two vowels are the same (they are said to have “merged”). You can read about the
"'horse-hoarse' merger" in Wikipedia at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_vowel_changes_before_historic_r#Horse-hoarse_merger
In an old-fashioned version of the RP/BBC accent of British English, 'hoarse' and 'horse' would both have had a diphthong
symbolised as /ɔǝ/, rather than the modern /ɔ:/.
Q2
I.T.: Is it because of the fact that 'y' and 'w' are semi-vowels that they are not doubled
when adding 'ing', for example
Playying , sayying, sawwing
P.R.: That's an interesting question. Of course, it's a question about spelling, not pronunciation, and I'm not an expert
on spelling.
However, it would be reasonable to conclude that English spelling treats 'j' and 'w' as part of a vowel rather than as a
consonant, even though 'j' and 'w' are referred to as consonants..
I.T.: And why are they called semi-vowels, not semi-consonants?
You could start by looking at the explanation of 'semivowel' in the English Phonetics and Phonology Glossary at
http://www.cambridge.org/elt/peterroach/resources/Glossary.pdf
The Wikipedia entry for 'semivowel' is at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semivowel
- it implies that there is a difference between semivowels (e.g. /j/ and /w/) and approximants (a class which
includes /j/ and /w/ but also /l/ and /r/).
The term 'semiconsonant' is rarely used - I can't remember seeing it in any modern book on phonetics. There is, though, no
reason why a segment that is partly like a vowel and partly like a consonant should not be named 'semiconsonant'.
In fact, if you Google the word 'semiconsonant' you will find that a few websites do use the term, with the same
meaning as our 'semivowel', but this does not seem to be in material written by a phonetics expert.
-------------------------------