what do raised letters mean?

What does it mean if certain phonetic symbols are printed small and raised above the line? How does the IPA define their meaning? Here’s what it said in the 1949 booklet The Principles of the International Phonetic Association. I’m not sure how far back this convention went, but I think it was valid for most of the twentieth century.At the Kiel Convention of the IPA in 1989, however, this was revised. You see the outcome of the Kiel deliberations in the current IPA Chart and the 1999 Handbook of the International Phonetic Association. Now there is no general rule such as previously existed, but just a listing of the following diacritics (and only these):

ʰ	Aspirated	tʰ dʰ
ʷ	Labialized	tʷ dʷ
ʲ	Palatalized	tʲ dʲ
ˠ	Velarized	tˠ dˠ
ˤ	Pharyngealized	tˤ dˤ
n	Nasal release	dn
l	Lateral release	dl

Thus in the current official IPA raised symbols may denote

• phonation features, more specifically VOT (ʰ),
• secondary articulations (ʷ, ʲ, ˠ,ˤ), or
• types of plosive release (ⁿ, ^l).

The old convention, by which ʃ^s denoted an s-like variety of ʃ, is no longer recognized. Nor is the use of ʳ (or ʴ or ʵ or ʶ) for an r-coloured vowel.

It is worth mentioning that at no time has the IPA used raised symbols to denote quick transitional sounds, although that is what people often wrongly infer as the meaning of this convention. Nor does ^ə denote a “weak” schwa, as one of my recent correspondents assumed. (In English every ə is weak, anyway, in my terminology.)

All uses of raised alphabetic symbols other than those listed above are ad hoc conventions that must be defined by the author who uses them. (That’s why I defined what I meant by ˀ the other day when I used it to show the Danish stød.)

In LPD I use raised symbols to denote optional sounds that the EFL learner is advised to ignore (“although native speakers sometimes include them” — see the panel on Optional Sounds, p. 567 in the third edition).
I use them in particular for

• the əC alternative to a syllabic consonant, thus hidden ˈhɪd ^ən
• possible epenthetic plosives, thus emphasis ˈem^pf əs ɪs;
• possible epenthetic schwa before a liquid, thus fail feɪ^əl.

David Attenborough

The only well-known public figures with whom I have a personal family connection are the Attenborough brothers, the actor Richard (Lord Attenborough) and the naturalist and television presenter Sir David. Their late aunt, née Clegg, was married to my late uncle Gilbert. So both they and I called her Aunt Margaret.

I have just been watching the first part of David Attenborough’s new television series, First Life. Brilliant, like all his work. (And what an example to us all, still to be so productive at over 80 years of age!)

As you might expect, Sir David speaks RP. (If you didn’t already know, you surely wouldn’t be able to place him as coming from the east Midlands.) He also has an excellent clarity of diction. I find him a real pleasure to listen to. Given this, here are some notes on his pronunciation that I jotted down as I viewed the programme.

fungi	ˈfʌŋɡaɪ
glacier	ˈɡlæsiə
paleontologist	ˌpæliənˈtɒlədʒɪst (not -ɒn-)
stromatolite	strəˈmætəlaɪt
kilometre	ˈkɪləˌmiːtə
believes	bəˈliːvz (not bi-)
virtually	ˈvɜːtʃəli (not -tʃuə-)
sexually	ˈseksjuəli
manufacture	ˌmænəˈfæktʃə (not -nju-)
circulatory	ˌsɜːkjəˈleɪtəri
possible	ˈpɒsɪbl̩ (not -səb-)
Newfoundland	ˈnjuːfəndlənd, ˌnjuːfəndˈlænd (inconsistently)
Ediacara	ˌiːdiˈækrə (not -kərə)

Plus one very unusual pronunciation: unless my ears deceived me, he pronounced for the first time as fɒ ðə ˈfɜːst ˈtaɪm. I know that in for it, for us we sometimes get fɒr (see LPD), but I hadn’t previously registered the possibility of fɒ rather than fɔː, fə in for the.

Danish

Occasional comments on this blog made by a Danish reader remind me of my impression that of all the languages of Europe the one with the most difficult phonetics (for the outsider) is Danish.

It is the only (standard literary) European language whose vowels I feel despairingly uncertain about identifying, and even the consonants are not without problems.

Why should this be?

• No two published sources seem to agree on the makeup of the vowel system or how to write the vowels in IPA. I try to follow the system used by Peter Molbæk Hansen in his Udtaleordbog (Gyldendal, 1990) — but he recognizes thirty distinct vowels (16 short, 14 long) as against the 20 [sic] or 17 [count them] listed in the Wikipedia article on Danish language or the 27 listed in its article on Danish phonology. (At least the latter article acknowledges that the vowel system is “unstable”, with various potential ongoing mergers.)
  
• Vowels undergo striking lowering when adjacent to /r/, which is uvular. After a vowel, (historical) /r/ gets vocalized and sometimes absorbed by the vowel, leading to further difficulties in identification.
  
• Several sets of adjacent vowels are very similar to one another.
  

  ˈmiːlə	mile
  ˈmeːlə	mele
  ˈmɛːlə	mæle
  ˈmaːlə	male

  That looks fine, but then you find that the eː is considerably closer than cardinal 2, the “ɛː” is about cardinal 2, and the “aː” is about cardinal 3. Everything is pushed forward and up. (I also get the impression that the “iː” is slightly centralized — a push-chain?)
  
• All the plosives are voiceless, but with a contrast of aspiration, often verging on affrication. Postvocalically they are strikingly lenited, sometimes disappearing completely. There’s a suburb of Copenhagen called Amager which is ˈɑmɑːˀ. It must once have had a velar consonant corresponding to the written g. Someone who comes from Amager is an amager (uncapitalized), which is ˈɑmɑːˀɑ. Clear? Furthermore, the word mad ‘meal’ is supposed to be /mað/ (i.e. [mɛð̞]. But that final approximant sounds to me awfully like a lateral.
  
• There is a phonation phenomenon known as stød, represented in the examples just given by the ad hoc symbol ˀ. This is the phonologically contrastive use of creaky voice on a vowel or vowel plus sonorant. There are plenty of minimal pairs, such as mor moːɐ̯ ‘mother’ vs mord moːˀɐ̯ ‘murder’.
  
• As with English, the spelling does not enable you to predict the pronunciation with any certainty.
  

Any comments comparing Danish to a throat disease will be deleted.

gnot again!

Intentionally wayward spelling pronunciation (blog, yesterday) can also be exploited for comic effect. Nothing illustrates this better than Flanders & Swann’s famous song about the gnu. (I apologize, I’ve discussed this before.)

ˈaɪm ə ɡəˈnuː …

ju ˈrɪəli ˈɔːt tə kəˈnəʊ wəˈhuːz wəˈhuː

əʊ ɡəˈnəʊ ɡəˈnəʊ ɡəˈnəʊ, ˈaɪm ə ɡəˈnuː

We know that really in words spelt gn- the g is silent (= there is no associated sound g): gnaw, gnarled, gnat, gnash, gnome. So I suppose we really should be saying nuː, or possibly njuː. But in serious discourse this animal is usually called a wildebeest (which we can debate whether to pronounce with w or with v). In even more serious discourse we can use its scientific name, Connochaetes (though the OED for some reason thinks it is Catoblepas).

The etymology of gnu is given in the OED as “Hottentot word”. But in the Concise Oxford this is replaced by the slightly more precise “Bushman nqu, probably via Dutch gnoe”. Neither “Hottentot” nor “Bushman” is the name of a language in polite circles these days: the first we call Khoe, Khoekhoe or Nama, while the second term refers to any of a number of languages, including !Kung (!Xũũ) and !Xóõ. I wonder from which of the Khoisan languages, then, the word derives.
_ _ _

The sports reporter on the Today programme (BBC R4) this morning was having trouble with the name of a racehorse, Abriachan. This came up at 06:25 and was followed by a brief impromptu studio discussion of what might be the correct pronunciation. An hour later, it was time to repeat the report, and I’m glad to say that by then the producer had tracked down the trainer of the racehorse, who was able to tell us all over the phone that it was named after a village in the Scottish Highlands, pronounced əˈbriːəxən.

They could just have consulted Wikipedia.

non-spelling pronunciation

The inconsistencies of English spelling and the indeterminacies of its relationship to pronunciation mean that in English we frequently get the phenomenon of spelling pronunciation.

Spelling is, with rather few exceptions, fixed, while pronunciation varies. (That is why a high proportion of words in a pronunciation dictionary have more than one pronunciation shown.)

A speaker who is familiar with the written form of a word but not with its spoken form may, on the basis of the spelling, infer a pronunciation different from the traditional or generally used one. This is spelling pronunciation. Well-known examples include often with a t-sound and clothes with -ðz. In the case of backwards the spelling pronunciation with w has entirely displaced the earlier ˈbækədz, ˈbækɚdz. In the case of falcon, formerly ˈfɔːkən, my own pronunciation ˈfɔːlkən and the newer ˈfælkən represent successive stages of spelling pronunciation, as first the letter l and then the letter a receive their usual ‘value’.

There is an extensive discussion, with many other examples, here.

I particularly relish the Italian spelling pronunciation of Colgate toothpaste as kolˈɡaːte.

There are two related phenomena. One is pronunciation spelling, in which a new spelling is applied, reflecting the pronunciation better than the traditional spelling does. Popularly this is sometimes called phonetic spelling. An example would be the proper name Leicester ˈlestə, ˈlestɚ respelt as Lester. Another is though respelt as tho. Jack Windsor Lewis uses nonce respellings such as he’rd for heard and dou’t for doubt. Spelling reform projects typically involve systematic application of the principle of writing as we speak.

The other related phenomenon has no generally agreed name, but we could perhaps call it ’non-spelling pronunciation’. This is the adoption of a new pronunciation that does not match the traditional spelling. An example is the mɪsˈtʃiːviəs variant of mischievous that we discussed last week and that so upset the Daily Telegraph’s feature writer. Another is the widespread pronunciation of Westminster with -ˈmɪnɪstə instead of -ˈmɪnstə. Non-spelling pronunciation does particularly upset purists, and even from me tends to receive a warning triangle in LPD.

I suppose that if such pronunciations become established they are likely to lead to correspondingly changed spellings, thus mischievious and Westminister.

Non-spelling pronunciation followed by respelling is readily seen in the case of the word pronunciation, traditionally prəˌnʌnsiˈeɪʃn̩. Morphological regularization, ɡiven the base form pronounce prəˈnaʊns, produces prəˌnaʊnsiˈeɪʃn̩, which in turn gives rise to the unorthodox spelling pronounciation.

I have frequently had on-air conversations with radio presenters asking me about “pronounciation”, and I must confess that in reply I tend to pronounce pronunciation with extra clarity and care.

trahison des clercs?

An article in Friday’s Telegraph mentioned that

some listeners to Today yesterday morning detected a certain trahison des clercs in the moderate opinions of Professor John Wells, the successor of Daniel Jones (alias Henry Higgins) at University College, London. He wouldn't say kil'ometre himself, he admitted, but that was because he was getting on a bit. (He is 71.) He knew better than to say mischievious, but he breathed no word of criticism of those who did.

What had I said to give rise to this comment? I had done no more than make an objective report on some findings from the pronunciation preference polls I had conducted as part of the research behind LPD. As I truthfully stated, of the (British) people I asked about kilometre, only 37% had expressed a preference for ˈkɪləmiːtə, while 63% had preferred kɪˈlɒmɪtə. (By the way, the corresponding figures for Americans were 16% and 84%.) For mischievous, I reported that 65% of British respondents to my questionnaire had said that they preferred the pronunciation ˈmɪstʃɪvəs, 20% had voted for mɪsˈtʃiːvəs, and 15% had expressed a preference for mɪsˈtʃiːviəs.

By reporting objectively on the views of a representative sample of native speakers of English, how could I incur the charge of trahison des clercs, of betraying the educated? True betrayal would be to suppress the honest and accurate reporting of people’s opinions.

Unfortunately there are those who expect expert commentators to do no more than reinforce their own prejudices. But I report what I find.

I’m glad to say that the article did finish on a more realistic, if patronizing, note.

Professor Wells also knows enough to realise that if all the world says … kil'ometre, there is nothing that can be done about it.

speech and writing

Speech is sounds, vibrations in the air arising from movements of the human organs of speech under the control of the brain/mind (or of an electrical device simulating this). Sounds can be heard, but not seen directly.

Writing is marks on paper or some other surface, or patterns of light and dark on a screen. Letters can be seen, but not heard directly.

It is incredible how difficult people find it to grasp the difference.

Several times last week, in our discussions of pronunciation, interviewers or commentators raised the matter of text messaging and the innovative spellings associated with it. But that is not speech! Other than occasional initialisms such as lol spoken aloud as lɒl, txtng has nothing at all to do with pronunciation. It is a matter of writing, not speech.

Other commentators, under the heading of pronunciation, complained not only about “text talk” but also about misplaced apostrophes.

Apostrophes, whether misplaced or not, are not part of speech. They are part of our writing system. Why don’t people get it? Even highly educated journalists?

Perhaps one reason for the confusion is the common sense of ‘pronounce’ in the sense of ‘say letters aloud’ (er... you can’t actually do that), i.e. ‘say the sounds corresponding to written letters’.

The letters ng are pronounced ŋ, or sometimes ŋɡ or ndʒ.

Spanish has a letter ñ, which is pronounced as a palatal nasal.

But this rests on the fallacy that writing is primary, speech secondary. It implies that when we speak we are merely supplying sounds appropriate to the written form of the words we use.

If that were so, how could the illiterate ever speak at all? How is it that children learn to talk before they learn to read and write?