the BBC pronunciation unit

If you’re employed by the BBC, or work for an independent programme maker producing BBC programmes, then you are entitled to consult the BBC Pronunciation Unit for “professional advice about pronunciations in all languages”.

The staff of the Unit are all multilingual trained phoneticians, and do an excellent job.

Their advice covers anything from what, in a British context, might be called recherché and exotic…...through the not-quite-so-exotic......to names you’d think most educated BrE NSs would be familiar with (though presumably someone had asked). (That should, of course, be Oxford, not Cambridge.)

As you can see, their indications of pronunciation do not include IPA transcriptions, but do offer a choice of two respelling systems.

One, “BBC Modified Spelling”, has been in use for many years. Some of the symbols it uses have diacritics: ī for the vowel of PRICE, ō for the vowel of GOAT, and oo with a breve (not available in Unicode) for the vowel of FOOT; breves are also used on ă ĕ ĭ ŏ ŭ to represent schwa. The voiced dental fricative is shown by underlining, th, and underlining is also used for the digraphs zh (IPA ʒ) and hl (IPA ɬ). Stress is shown by a superscript acute mark.

The other scheme is a newer one. It avoids diacritics, but at the expense of being perhaps less transparent. The letter y is used in two different senses, representing in some cases the PRICE vowel and in others the palatal glide. PRICE can also be written igh. Schwa is written uh or uhr. Stress is shown by capitalization.

Symbols that might be open to interpretation are accompanied by a brief explanation.
Respelling systems based on orthographic conventions have one great advantage over IPA or IPA-style transcription systems. They are less phonetically explicit, more abstract. Instead of worrying about whether GOAT has a diphthong with a rounded first element (oʊ), a diphthong with an unrounded first element (əʊ) or a monophthong (oː), we just agree that ō (or oh) stands for whatever vowel you use in GOAT words.

However, respelling systems for English face particular difficulty in finding satisfactory symbols for
• the PRICE vowel, for which neither y nor igh is unambiguous, while ī has a diacritic
• the MOUTH vowel, for which both ou and ow are ambiguous (cf. soul, show)
• the GOAT vowel, for which oh may wrongly suggest a short vowel and oa, ou, ow are ambiguous (cf. broad, loud, now)
• schwa. If oh represents a long vowel, how can we make it clear that uh represents a short weak one?

_ _ _

This blog will now be suspended for a week. (I may see some of you in Łódź.) Next posting: 19 December.

ejectives in English

Timo Partanen writes from Finland commenting on what he thinks are ejective varieties of English /k/ that he has noticed in the speech of some native speakers. In particular he mentions a snooker player interviewed on YouTube, Judd Trump (listen here).

Mr Trump comes from Bristol, though I must say his accent doesn’t sound stereotypically Bristolian. In this clip he produces several striking, noisy, and somewhat palatalized velar ejectives for k when before a pause. Notice think at about 2:00 and again at about 3:09, and back at 2:50 and more strikingly at 3:20.

Timo asks

Is this phenomenon to be analysed as ejectives, evidently developed from plosive aspiration, or have I made a mistake? Might this be characteristic of British English, perhaps of some of its particular dialects?

Good question. What’s the answer?
• The segments in question do indeed appear to be ejective, i.e. produced with an airstream mechanism that is glottalic rather than the usual pulmonic.
• Rather than having developed directly from aspirated plosives, I would say that kʼ developed from the glottal reinforcement that is frequently found with English voiceless plosives and affricates in this environment. Reinforcement involves making a glottal closure just before the oral closure and overlapping in time with it, ʔp ʔt ʔtʃ ʔk. If the glottal closure is held until after the oral release, it masks the latter, giving Cantonese-style no-audible-release plosives pʔ tʔ tʃʔ kʔ. If it is held throughout the oral articulation, ʔpʔ ʔtʔ ʔtʃʔ ʔkʔ, the further step of raising the glottis to compress the air in the oral cavity is straightforward: pʼ tʼ tʃʼ kʼ.
• Yes, it is characteristic of some British English. I don’t think anyone really knows just who does it and who doesn’t. Cruttenden mentions it several times in his revision of Gimson’s Pronunciation of English, claiming (p. 167 in the 7th edition) that it is

rather more common in some dialects (e.g. South-East Lancashire) than in RP.

I discussed this matter briefly in my Accents of English (1982), where I wrote (vol. 1, p. 261)

Preglottalization is not particularly associated with the south of England rather than the north. Indeed, my subjective impression is that in [the prepausal] environment it is at least as common in northern accents as in southern (thus [stɒʔp, kwaɪʔt, lʊʔk]). An emphatic articulation of the glottal component will readily convert this into an ejective, thus [stɒpʼ, kwaɪtʼ, lʊkʼ]; both northerners and southerners may be found who use these forms under appropriate stylistic conditions.

When explaining ejectives in Practical Phonetics (Pitman, 1971), I said (p. 3)

Some people use ejectives in English when words ending in p, t, k, or tʃ … come at the ends of sentences.

The ejective variants do seem to be confined to pre-pausal position: you don’t get them in the middle of a fluent utterance. They are occasional, optional variants of the usual pulmonic stops. Impressionistically, ejectives are more frequent with k than with p, t, or tʃ, but that may just be because the two words think and back are particularly frequent in pre-pausal position.

Graham Pointon wrote on the topic in his blog some years ago. He thinks it’s a rather recent phenomenon. I wonder.

coroners and their courts

I had a phone call yesterday from a BBC local radio station, wanting me to comment on the shock-horror news that Camden Council had erected a sign saying “Coroners Court”, with no apostrophe.
I wasn’t terribly keen to accept the invitation. Local radio interviews are time-consuming, have a small audience, and are unpaid. Nevertheless I chatted for a short while with the production assistant. In our conversation I took my usual line (blogs, 17 May 2011 and 3-6 Oct 2008), saying I didn’t really think that missing apostrophes were a matter worth getting hot under the collar about, and that in this case there was anyhow some question about whether it needed an apostrophe, and — if it did — whether it should go before or after the s. It would really be better if we abolished all possessive apostrophes.

The production assistant was dismayed at my reaction. She had me down as a stickler for orthographic accuracy, a defender of supposedly fixed rules. She was hoping that I would forthrightly condemn the Council’s illiteracy. When she realized that I wasn’t going to do so, she brought the conversation to a close and said they would look for someone else to comment on the matter.

That was fine with me. It does, though, demonstrate the point that radio producers often have an agenda. If you’re not going to go along with that agenda, they may not want to interview you after all.

The case of Coroner’s/Coroners’/Coroners Court is not unambiguously clear-cut. We do indeed normally write Coroner’s Court, because each court has just one Coroner. Or do some such courts have two or more coroners? If so, the court in question would be a Coroners’ Court. And what is the plural? With several courts, there are presumably several coroners, which justifies the spelling Coroners’ Courts: is Coroner’s Courts OK too?

In the case of the Coroners’ Courts Support Service (pictured: note the two apostrophes) I suppose you could actually argue for Coroners’ Courts’ Support Service. In the other direction, I note that the webpage of the Coroners’ Society has a link to the Coroners’ Court [sic] Support Service.

It reminds me of the inconsistent naming of London tube stations, where the station after Earl’s Court as you go towards Heathrow is Barons Court (no apostrophe). King’s Cross is supposed to have an apostrophe, but not Colliers Wood or Golders Green.

Even when wielding an editor’s blue pencil, where I do try to ensure correct use of apostrophes, I wouldn’t change Sports Day to Sport’s Day or Sports’ Day — would you? I’m really not sure where to put the apostrophe, if any, in Gardener’s/Gardeners’/Gardeners Question Time. In the same spirit, I can live with Coroners Court, too.

clossal slebs

Several times recently I have noticed the newspapers referring to ‘slebs’, by which they mean ‘celebrities’. Duly on guard against the recency illusion that leads us to think things we’ve just noticed must therefore be new phenomena, I checked in the OED. I find that the first citation there is from 1996, so a good fifteen years ago.
Shortening a word in colloquial speech is nothing new. Compare bus, phone, mic, etc., and also street cred (credibility) and now peep(s) (people). But what I want to discuss here is the loss of the schwa from səˈleb(rəti) (= DJ’s sɪˈlebrɪtɪ): the word is shortened not to its bare stressed syllable leb, but to sleb.

Most cases of compression involving schwa loss are found in the phonetic environment of a following liquid plus a WEAK vowel, as in historically hɪˈstɒrɪk(ə)li, camera ˈkæm(ə)rə, factory ˈfækt(ə)ri. Hence we regularly find compression in the adjectives moderate ˈmɒd(ə)rət and separate ˈsep(ə)rət, with their weak-vowelled suffix, but not in the related verbs to moderate ˈmɒdəreɪt and to separate ˈsepəreɪt, where the phonetic environment is a following STRONG vowel.

So what we have in ‘sleb’ is not mainstream compression, because the vowel in -ˈleb- is strong. Comparable examples that spring to mind are the colloquial possible loss of schwa in terrific təˈrɪfɪk ~ ˈtrɪfɪk, colossal kəˈlɒsl̩ ~ ˈklɒsl̩, correct kəˈrekt ~ krekt, and perhaps pəˈhæps ~ præps (OED p’raps dated 1745). I can’t recall seeing any discussion of this in writing anywhere, though it’s something I’ve talked about in practical phonetics classes often enough. (There's probably something in Gillian Brown or Linda Shockey’s books on the phonetics of colloquial English.) In the rough-and-tumble of rapid conversational speech I suspect that this reduction can be found for any word with the initial string obstruent—schwa—liquid. But it is presumably much rarer in words such as career, collide, forensic, giraffe, Goliath, Jurassic, Korean, peruse, salacious than in the everyday words mentioned in the previous paragraph.

Very occasionally the reduction becomes lexicalized, as for those speakers whose citation form for police is pliːs rather than pəˈliːs (or dialectal ˈpoʊliːs etc.). There’s also pram, from perambulator, for which the OED’s first citation is dated 1884. Usually, though, we remain aware of the difference in pronunciation in pairs such as plight – polite, crowed – corrode, Clyde – collide, even if we sometimes pronounce them identically.

velar or uvular?

Commenting on my recent posting about Tokyo Sexwale (22 Nov), Roger Lass writes

…You mention the ‘velar fricative’ in Afrikaans. I must say that in over 25 years here in contact with Afrikaans I've rarely heard one except in a few hyper-posh varieties, or occasionally (but rarely) before front vowels in an uncommon version of the German ‘ich/ach rule’. The normal reflex of the early Germanic voiced back fricative, spelled <g>, is virtually always uvular, either a fricative or especially in initial position before a stressed vowel a voiceless uvular trill. This falls in with the voiceless back fricative < IE *k, so uvulars in goed, nag. Very similar if not identical to what is often called /x/ in Dutch but is also uvular in most varieties.

Afrikaans generally does not palatalise this before front vowels, but keeps it uvular, as in my experience do standard Dutch and Yiddish. All are languages that have a uvular not velar fricative (in Yiddish of course only from Germanic and Slavic voiceless back fricatives). It appears that uvulars may not be sensitive to palatal influence because of tongue shape. I've also noticed that many varieties of German, more than not in my experience, have a not very noisy uvular but definitely not velar fricative for <ch>, which does palatalise. As I recall, but am open to correction, there are varieties of Swiss German with a uvular trill for <ch>, and they don't palatalise.

In SA English speakers saying Sexwale (as well as Afrikaans loans with the same segment) have a uvular. The same is true of English speakers, in America, the UK and SA with Yiddish loans having this segment.

Thanks, Roger, for these observations.

I’d like to add two points: one about transcriptional practice, one about the facts.

The 1949 IPA Principles booklet, from which I quoted a few lines in last Wednesday’s blog about a (30 Nov), also has this (p. 12-13):

As with vowels, it is desirable to substitute more familiar consonant letters for less familiar ones, when such substitution can be made without causing ambiguity. … In accordance with [this] principle … the sound χ can generally be represented by the letter x. This cannot, however, be done in such languages as Eskimo or Kabardian, where the velar and uvular sounds occur as separate phonemes.

The 1949 booklet contains transcribed specimens of both Dutch and Afrikaans, both using the symbol x without further qualification.

Fifty years later, in the 1999 IPA Handbook, Carlos Gussenhoven says this about Dutch:

Roughly south of a line Rotterdam-Nijmegen, which is marked by the rivers Rhine, Meuse and Waal, /x, ɣ/ are velar, while to the north the corresponding voiceless fricative is post-velar or uvular.

And let’s not forget that velar—uvular is a continuum rather than an either/or disjunction.

Erg goed!

i2Speak

Judging by the correspondence I receive, many people still find it difficult to enter IPA symbols on their computers.

I have recently read favourable reports of a little keyboard programme called i2Speak, “an online Smart IPA Keyboard that lets you quickly type IPA phonetics without the need to memorize any symbol code.”

This is a clever and user-friendly free programme that you do not need to install on your computer: you just call up a web page. You use it to create your text, and then copy-and-paste the text to where you want to have it.

The web page places a virtual keyboard on your screen. You can switch between modes such as ‘Smart IPA’, ‘IPA English’, and ‘SAMPA English’, and also within each access special keyboards for ‘Vowels’, ‘Diphthongs’, ‘Non-pulmo[nic]’, ‘Supra[segmentals]’ and so on, some of them bearing labels with phonetic terminology (‘Plosive’, ‘Nasal’, ‘Trill’ etc.). You can select the font and the font size. When ready, you press ‘Copy’ to transfer the resulting character or text onto the clipboard.

I2speak, although admirable, is not without some strange quirks and faults.
• The characters ɕ and ʑ (alveolopalatal fricatives) can only be brought to the display panel both together, where you must then delete the one you don’t want.
• The tie bar in the labialvelar k͡p is in the wrong place, after the two alphabetic letters instead of straddling between them, giving kp͡.
• Under ‘ejectives’ you can enter p’ k’ s’ directly, but not t’; but there are two separate buttons for inserting just the ejective diacritic ’.
• Among the Diphthongs labelled “England” you will find ɒɪ and ɛə but not the ɔɪ and eə that most of us use. The diphthongs (sic) labelled ‘USA’ include ɛɪɚ, which I cannot offhand ever recall having seen used for mainstream AmE.
• You can choose among a number of different fonts, but for some reason Segoe UI is not one of them. Yet that is the font I prefer for general use, and the font in which this blog appears (providing you have it installed, which will be the case if you are using a recent version of Windows).

You cannot enter connected English phonetic text using the ‘smart IPA’ or the ‘IPA English’ keyboard without also using your mouse, because there is no setting in which a single keyboard setting contains both the phonetic characters that you need (such as ɒ ʊ ə θ ʒ ŋ) and the ordinary alphabetic characters (such as p t k f v s z). For comparison, with Mark Huckvale’s Unicode Phonetic Keyboard I can write a continuous phonetic text such as I published on Monday entirely from the physical alphanumeric keyboard, never needing to switch mode by using the mouse.

Neither i2Speak nor any other available keyboard device would enable you to enter a text with assorted non-IPA characters, such as we had in yesterday’s blog. For that I used good old MS Word, where for an unusual character you just enter the Unicode number, select it, and press Alt-x. I composed the whole of yesterday’s text in Word, then copied everything en bloc and pasted it into blogspot.

fun with symbols

Yesterday’s posting called for the small-cap-A symbol. I coded it straightforwardly in HTML as <small>A</small>. But blogspot accepts far fewer HTML tags in comments than it does in postings, so Paul, commenting, successfully entered it as a distinct Unicode entity, U+1D00.

Many, though by no means all, alphabetic small capitals are available in the Unicode range 1D00 to 1D7F. This block is known as Phonetic Extensions, and carries the introductory note

These are non-IPA phonetic extensions, mostly for the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet (UPA).
The small capitals, superscript, and subscript forms are for phonetic representations where style variations are semantically important.
For general text, use regular Latin, Greek or Cyrillic letters with markup instead.

As well as small caps (ᴀ ᴁ ᴄ), superscripts (ᴬ ᴭ ᵃ) and a few subscripts (ᵢ ᵣ ᵤ), the block contains various other typographically interesting characters. (I have no idea what they are used for in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet — though see here.)

Here among the small caps you will find a ‘reversed N’, ᴎ, a sideways Ø (ᴓ) and a sideways ü (ᴞ). There is a ‘Latin letter voiced laryngeal spirant’ (ᴤ) and a ‘Latin letter ain’ (ᴥ).

Not everything here is from the UPA. There is also a special ligature ᵫ, which I can see appealing to English lexicographers who prefer respelling to proper phonetic symbols, as will ‘Latin small letter th with strikethrough’, ᵺ. There is also something called ‘insular g’, ᵹ, labelled ‘older Irish phonetic notation’.

Although they are not official IPA symbols, users of IPA will be happy to find here the lax high vowel symbols ‘with stroke’, ᵻ ᵼ ᵾ ᵿ: two of these are used in the Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation, though the first, ᵻ, bears the Unicode warning ‘used with different meanings by Americanists and Oxford dictionaries’.

A further Unicode block, Phonetic Extensions Supplement (1D80 to 1DBF) covers various former IPA symbols from which recognition was withdrawn at the Kiel Convention in 1989: those for consonants with velarization ᵬ ᵭ ᵮ ᵯ ᵰ ᵱ ᵲ ᵳ ᵴ ᵵ ᵶ and palatalization ᶀ ᶁ ᶂ ᶃ ᶄ ᶅ ᶆ ᶇ ᶈ ᶉ ᶊ ᶋ ᶌ ᶍ ᶎ, and for both vowels and consonants with retroflexion ᶏ ᶐ ᶑ ᶒ ᶓ ᶔ ᶕ ᶖ ᶗ ᶘ ᶙ ᶚ. So we can now find in Unicode everything we might need in order to digitize the 1949 IPA Principles, Jones’s The Phoneme, and various English-language accounts of Russian phonetics.