sainthood

I’m aware of the danger of the “recency fallacy” that leads commentators on pronunciation to claim that a pronunciation is getting more common when it really isn’t.
But I do feel tempted to claim, though admittedly without proper evidence, that the strong form of Saint is becoming commoner, where I would expect the weak. I would never use the strong form in names of saints or in placenames based on them. For me St Matthew, St John, St Agatha, and likewise St Albans, St Helens, St Leonards-on-Sea all have sənt, or forms still further reduced such as sn̩t, sn̩. It’s sn̩ Thomas’s Hospital and sm̩ Paul’s Cathedral.
My impression is that people have recently (= in the last twenty years or so) started pronouncing these with the strong form seɪnt.
OK, I know Americans often do this. But I’m talking about Brits.

My late father used to like to recite a verse referring to pairs of apostles who share the same saint’s day in the calendar of the Anglican church (1 May and 28 October respectively, since you ask.)

Let us emulate the aims
of St Philip and St James
and be very very good
like St Simon and St Jude.

And all the Sts were reduced.
(His mispronunciation of good as ɡuːd instead of ɡʊd, to make it rhyme with Jude, was intentional.)

Do we blame the decline of religion, that we don’t talk about saints very much any more? Or do we attribute it to American influence?
Correction: we’re phoneticians. We don’t blame, we observe and seek a reason.

Sure thing

Tami Date (pictured, right) has a remarkable talent for asking me questions about intonation that I don’t exactly have the answer to.

While listening to a CD based on one of the junior high school textbooks authorized by the [Japanese] Ministry of Education and Science, I came across the following:
Mother: Don’t forget to do your home work.
Daughter: I’ve already done that.
Mother: That’s great. Oh, will you pick up your little brother? He’s at Aunt Peg's house.
Daughter: Sure, I'll pick him up.
As for the underlined sentence, it sounded to me as if there was a high pitch or stress on I’ll. I don't know which term is more appropriate. In fact, if it is the former, as you write in your book, I take it as adding emphasis to the whole IP, whereas, if it is the latter, it seems to me there is no legitimate reason for I’ll to be stressed. Karen Chung says: I’LL pick him *UP. (rising intonation).
The capital letters indicate stressed syllables.
The symbol [*] indicates the nucleus.
Since the textbook has a pretty wide circulation across the nation, I think such an apparently unusual intonation is no petty matter to dismiss out of hand, because it must be a source of puzzlement and anxiety to most teachers, who are usually expected to model-read new material in class as well as play the CD. How about the following?
(1) A: Are you coming?
B: Sure, I'm coming.
(2) A: Do you know her?
B: Sure, I know her.

On balance, I think that the most likely pattern for these utterances is fall plus rise. But there could alternatively be a high head or a high prehead followed by a rise.
\Sure. || \I’ll | pick him /up.
or: \Sure. || 'I’ll pick him /up.
or: \Sure. || ¯I’ll pick him /up.
and likewise with the other two examples.

The problem is that the answers contain no new lexical or grammatical items. So there is no non-given item to place the nucleus on. Even the polarity remains the same as in the interlocutor’s question. These answers just mean “yes, OK”.
If yes or OK or (AmE) sure were all we had, it could have a rise (throwaway, routine, “encouraging further conversation”) or a fall (definite, neutral).

I have to say, though, that I don’t feel very pleased with my explanation so far. Probably this is yet another case where we need some input from the pragmatics people to unravel conversational situations that phoneticians like me feel we’re not very good at describing.
Or perhaps we just say they’re yet more intonational idioms.

French/English interference

At the Chambéry conference Nicolas Ballier of Paris Treize put forward an interesting hypothesis to explain two common errors French people make in pronouncing English. They tend to mispronounce rain as ʁɛn on the one hand and law as lo (or anglicized into ləʊ) on the other.
Ballier says it’s all to do with syllable structure expectations.
For many French speakers their vowels e and ɛ are in complementary or nearly complementary distribution, with the higher one, e, being used in open syllables and the lower one, ɛ, being used in closed syllables. Since rain is a monosyllable closed by its final consonant n, they tend to say it with their ɛ (which we perceive as our short e, the vowel of DRESS), rather than with their e (which we would tend to perceive as our eɪ of FACE).
In the case of law, on the other hand, we have an open syllable. The French vowels o and ɔ, too, are in complementary or near-complementary distribution, with the higher o again being preferred in open syllables and the lower ɔ in closed syllables. Although English law would sound much better with French ɔ than with French o, particularly if phonetically modified towards English-style ɔː, nevertheless the syllable structure inhibits its use.
If this is correct, we would also expect a tendency to use a DRESS-type vowel instead of FACE in make, place, same, plate, fail, etc., and conversely a GOAT-type vowel instead of a mid-open vowel in saw, draw, jaw etc. The letter r in the spelling acts to counteract this trend in words such as more, four, score etc., in which either a phonetic r of some kind or a virtual one in the mind causes these syllables to be felt as closed.
We would also predict a tendency to use a LOT-type vowel in words where English has the GOAT vowel in a closed syllable, as in ghost, rope, coat, home.
Obvious, when you think about it. But for some reason I’d never thought about it before.
To the extent that some French speakers preserve the distinction between les le and lait lɛ, paume pom and pomme pɔm, this ought not to happen. But I suspect that not very many do preserve these and similar minimal pairs.

corpus preferences

At the moment I am in France for an international conference on English Pronunciation: Issues and Practices, held at the Université de Savoie in Chambéry. Quite apart from everything else, it is good to see so many former students and old friends again.
One of the most interesting presentations I have attended was by José Mompean, who has done a corpus-based study of words with variable pronunciation. Among these words are several for which I did preference polling, as reported in LDOCE. His study was based on BBC correspondents and news presenters, as represented in the sound files available on the BBC website, and involved counting up the number of times a word was said this way or that.
Most of his statistics agree reasonably well with mine. Where they don’t, this can be readily understood given that he is looking at the performance of people from a very specific professional background, while I was looking at the opinions of people of various social backgrounds from all over Britain.
For example, my 2008 polling figures for the word poor were pʊə 26%, pɔː 74%. Mompean’s are pʊə 32%, pɔː 68%. Allowing for sampling error, these are virtually identical.
For stress placement in the word controversy, on the other hand, my 2008 survey had initial stress ˈkɒn- 40%, second syllable stress -ˈtrɒv- 60%; Mompean found initial ˈkɒn- 73%, second syllable -ˈtrɒv- 27%. The explanation for this discrepancy may be that BBC announcers have been explicitly trained or encouraged to use initial stress in this word, whereas the general public are under no such pressure.

ɘ

Elias Mourão wrote:

For a long time I've been intrigued by an IPA symbol, reversed e. It apears in the middle of the vowel chart and is described as a close-mid central unrounded vowel. I bought the IPA Handbook hoping I would get a proper explanation of it, but the book simply repeats what I already knew about it. Unfortunately it does not give an example of its use. Can this symbol be used for any English word? Could you give me example?

I replied

The symbol ɘ is little used. It is a possible allophone of English ə
(e.g. perhaps in the word “recognize”). It would be a phonetically
more explicit way of writing German ə, as in “bitte”, which is clearly
closer than the corresponding English sound. However, since there is no contrast among short mid central vowels, we normally write ə no matter what the precise vowel height.

I could have gone on to say that in my view the middle of the IPA chart represents an excessive enthusiasm for a non-Jonesian extension of the Cardinal Vowel scheme. In this scheme Daniel Jones first gave us the primary cardinal vowels i e ɛ a ɑ ɔ o u, supplemented by the secondary cardinals y ø œ ɒ ʌ ɤ ɯ. Later the missing one, the open front rounded secondary 4 (c.v. no. 12) was assigned the symbol ɶ, though it is not clear whether there is any use for this symbol in transcribing a real language. (The best candidate for it known to me is the open allophone of Danish /œ/ used next to the Danish uvular r. But no language, as far as I know, distinguishes four front rounded vowel phonemes.)
Considerably later (I speak from memory, since I do not have access to books today) Jones added the two close central vowels to fill the gap between i and u, y and ɯ, namely ɨ and ʉ. Their inclusion is justified by languages such as Russian, which needs the symbol ɨ, and Swedish, which needs ʉ.
But Jones never defined any non-peripheral cardinal vowels. For most languages there is at most one mid central vowel, which can be adequately represented by the schwa symbol, ə, which has always been rather vaguely defined. A few languages have two mid central vowels. German and Danish distinguish a higher/closer ə (as in German bitte ˈbɪtə) from a lower/opener ɐ (as in German bitter ˈbɪtɐ). Non-rhotic English distinguishes a strong long ɜː (as in the noun insert ˈɪnsɜːt) from the weak short ə (as in the noun concert ˈkɒnsət). English and German justify the presence on the chart of two other non-peripheral lax vowel symbols, ɪ and ʊ. Certain other languages (e.g. Dutch) may need the symbol ɵ.
But as far as I can see we don’t need ɘ and we don’t need ɞ. The only reason to include them on the chart is a desire to label every intersection of lines on the chart, rounded and unrounded.
We have never taught the symbols ɘ and ɞ or drilled the corresponding sounds at UCL. I wonder if students have been taught them and drilled on them anywhere else. I suspect not.

Reading about intonation

A few weeks ago a Japanese translation of my intonation book was published, under the title 英語の イントネーション.
My phonetic colleague Takehiko Makino commented

To be frank, the fact that you need a translation for this book, which is written in such clear, easy English, shows the (low) level of proficiency among Japanese teachers of English. I doubt if they ever need a knowledge of intonation when they cannot read the book in English!

—which seems to me to be a fair comment. Japanese learners’ oral ability typically lags some way behind their reading ability. People whose English is not good enough to be able to read the book in the original English probably also can’t speak English well enough to need intonation. After all, intonation is pretty irrelevant for someone who can hardly string a sentence together with reasonable fluency.
I suspect that the explanation is this: many Japanese learners know that their pronunciation is not very good, and feel embarrassed about this fact. So they willingly buy books about pronunciation (including intonation), in the hope that this will help them to improve. As an author, I obviously benefit from this line of thinking, because it helps the sales of my books. Some people might say, though, that they would do much better by listening to lots of spoken English and doing plenty of practice speaking the language themselves.
Or they could painstakingly work through the English-language original.
When I am learning a language I have sometimes talked to the cat, talked to the mirror, talked to myself, held imaginary conversations in my head, done mental simultaneous interpretation of a speech. It all helps. Reading books in your own language about the language you are learning may be interesting and increase your general knowledge, but it is not the best way to acquire conversational fluency.
Or perhaps readers disagree.

More about nasals, palatal and velar

As we saw yesterday, the palatal nasal ɲ is spelt as gn in French and Italian, as ñ in Spanish, and as nh in Portuguese. In Catalan and various African languages it is spelt ny. You might think that this would be straightforward for English speakers to process, but experience shows this isn’t necessarily the case.
Malawi (or Malaŵi, to be pedantic) used to be called Nyasaland, where Nyasa ɲasa, also spelt Nyassa or Niassa, means ‘lake’ in various Bantu languages in that part of Africa. What is now known as Lake Malawi was then called Lake Nyasa. But would the British say ˈnjæsə(lænd), as intended? No, they tended to go for naɪˈæsə. That is, they misinterpreted the letter y as standing for a vowel rather than a consonant. They did the same with the Tanzanian political leader Julius Nyerere. Compare today the name Myanmar (blog, 11 Oct 2007).
Quite apart from its use to spell a palatal nasal, the digraph gn is well known to be ambiguous in English. The g is silent (or ‘zeroed’, as Carney has it) in sign, reign, impugn, but not in signal, pregnant, pugnacious.
Most English-speaking classicists, I think, say ɡn in Latin words such as agnus, dignus, regnum. But choral singers and Catholics tend to be influenced by Italian and say nj. In classical Latin gn appears to have stood for neither ɡn nor ɲ, but rather for ŋn, thus aŋnus, diŋnus, reŋnũ (Allen, Vox Latina, CUP 1965). Allen says (p. 24) that according to C.D.Buck ŋn was changed in late classical times to ɡn as a spelling pronunciation. Subsequently the Romance languages changed ɡn to ɲ (etc).
A discussion of gn would not be complete without mention of the gnu, immortalized by Flanders and Swann with the jocular pronunciation ɡəˈnuː. (Watch and listen here.)

We don’t use the word gnu in ordinary conversation, since we call the animal in question a wildebeeste. According to the COD, gnu originated as a Bushman word nqu. As far as I know, modern Khoisan orthographies do not use the letter q; but if we interpret it following the spelling conventions of Zulu and Xhosa, that would mean a retroflex nasal click ŋ͡ǃ at the beginning.