When I was at school we were taught that the vowels in English are the letters a,e,i,o,u and sometimes y. Which is kind of true, those are the letters English uses to write vowels - but it turns...
When I was at school we were taught that the vowels in English are the letters a,e,i,o,u and sometimes y. Which is kind of true, those are the letters English uses to write vowels - but it turns out there are 20 vowel sounds in spoken English.
This is one reason English is so hard to spell/read, we have to write all those sounds using just 5-and-a-bit letters. Many other languages do not do this, they have one glyph per vowel sound and that means you can often pronounce a word just by reading it. But look at the ways English spells out this one short-i vowel sound (note the pronunciation may vary depending on accent/dialect, this is just an example):
/ɪ/:- village, effect,sit, captain, Monday
EDIT: British English. American English has fifteen vowels. Which is possibly one reason the Yanks think we sound so fancy.
Huh, I don't think I've ever heard an accent that would pronounce the 'ay' in Monday as a short i sound, or at least I can't think what accent that would be. Maybe a regional UK accent? In my area...
Huh, I don't think I've ever heard an accent that would pronounce the 'ay' in Monday as a short i sound, or at least I can't think what accent that would be. Maybe a regional UK accent? In my area (southeastern US) it is generally a long 'a' sound or maybe a long 'e' (note: I wish I was better with the ipa alphabet. It's so cool and laid out in such a logical way, but I've never been able to get the hang of it). 'Effect' would almost always be the common ə (uh) sound.
I'm not arguing with your point or anything, I just find regional variation like this really interesting. It's also one of the reasons that I don't think any kind of English spelling reform that tries to make vowel sounds more precise is going to work, because there is so much regional variation that the majority of English speakers would still be spelling words differently than they pronounce them.
I did think that one was a bit odd. The author of the article is Nigerian, perhaps the ay/i sound happens in Nigerian English. I shall ask my Nigerian friend next time I see him. I love the way...
I did think that one was a bit odd. The author of the article is Nigerian, perhaps the ay/i sound happens in Nigerian English. I shall ask my Nigerian friend next time I see him.
I love the way langauge varies by region. Sometimes to the point you can pin down where people live to within a few miles. One of my favourite words/concepts is isogloss/isophone, and I used to live near one. There was a geographical feature in the town I grew up in which meant that people living south of the feature could pick up a certain regional TV station and people to the north of it, a different one. The difference was the difference between Birmingham and Manchester (UK) in terms of local news and local accents. The upshot of this was a noticable difference in accent from the north to south sides of a small (50k) town.
Totally agree on IPA though. I cannot seem to get a handle on it no matter how often I try.
I love hearing about these types of hyperlocal language variations. Your example of different sides of a town picking up different TV stations is exactly the kind thing that fascinates me. It's...
I love hearing about these types of hyperlocal language variations. Your example of different sides of a town picking up different TV stations is exactly the kind thing that fascinates me. It's such a tiny thing to cause a noticeable difference in accent!
My wife and I have a similar story that we like to tell about discovering a local language difference, although ours was vocabulary rather than accent. We both grew up in the same small town in central/southwest Georgia, and when we left for college we both had similar realizations. See, we had both grown up referring to garbage cans (the outdoor kind, so I guess a dustbin or wheelie bin?) as "hobos". So our parents would say, "Take that trash out to the hobo" or, "roll the hobo out to the road". We both thought of that as a perfectly normal way of referring to a garbage can, but we both had encounters after leaving our home town with people being very confused why we were talking about taking the garbage to a homeless person! I wound up asking my Grandmother about it, and she told me that the town we lived in used to have "Hobo" brand garbage cans, and even though they hadn't done that for years a lot of folks in town still called them that. I've never encountered another person that wasn't from my small town that called them that, although it's possible that there are other little towns where people still use that word to mean garbage can, even if it's been decades since they've used that brand.
There are so many regional accents in the UK but as @mat says the short i for y at the end of a word is pretty common in the UK, especially the further north of you go. To hear an example, here's...
Huh, I don't think I've ever heard an accent that would pronounce the 'ay' in Monday as a short i sound, or at least I can't think what accent that would be. Maybe a regional UK accent?
There are so many regional accents in the UK but as @mat says the short i for y at the end of a word is pretty common in the UK, especially the further north of you go.
What a lovely accent! I love those big round u sounds. I've found that I really like a lot of northern English accents, there's something really appealing about the vowel sounds especially. I do...
What a lovely accent! I love those big round u sounds. I've found that I really like a lot of northern English accents, there's something really appealing about the vowel sounds especially.
I do wonder if the 'ay' sound would also shift to an i sound, I scrubbed through the conversation at the end a bit and didn't hear it.
It definitely can. Sorry. I've been looking but I still haven't found an example of someone saying days of the week with any kind of regional accent :(. All I can find is people demonstrating very...
It definitely can. Sorry. I've been looking but I still haven't found an example of someone saying days of the week with any kind of regional accent :(.
All I can find is people demonstrating very neutral accents like you'd hear on the BBC.
The trouble with accents and dialects in the UK is they can change in a very short distance.
For example Manchester to Liverpool is about 50km.
Yeah I've always envied that about the UK a bit, things are much more spread out here in the US and there have been so many major migrations and so much mobility that a lot of the really unique...
Yeah I've always envied that about the UK a bit, things are much more spread out here in the US and there have been so many major migrations and so much mobility that a lot of the really unique local accents have been dying out or at least blending more with a few larger regional accents.
Sorry if it sounded like I was doubting you, I don't know much about regional accents in the UK but it's something that's really interesting to me!
This makes "bat" sound like "bet", "bet" sound like "bit", and "bit" sound like "but" to foreign ears. For example "six" is [səks] in New Zealand English but [sɪks] in Australian English.
Yeah I did actually think about that after I posted. It would have made sense with 'effect' being pronounced with a short 'i' sound too. @mat replied that the author of the article is Nigerian,...
Yeah I did actually think about that after I posted. It would have made sense with 'effect' being pronounced with a short 'i' sound too. @mat replied that the author of the article is Nigerian, which isn't an accent I'm particularly familiar with, so maybe that's the disconnect.
Edit: Also, I love the Kiwi accent so much. It's one of my absolute favorites to hear, and it's nice to have a term now for one of my favorite features which is that really interesting vowel shift.
Now that I think about it some more, South African ("Seth Efrikin") English pronunciation also has major vowel shifts in it too, but actually does have a noticeable a->i shift in some...
Now that I think about it some more, South African ("Seth Efrikin") English pronunciation also has major vowel shifts in it too, but actually does have a noticeable a->i shift in some circumstances. So, given the author of this article is Nigerian they're likely familiar with that accent, and perhaps that's specifically where they got that from.
I read a batman that featured this old nursery rhyme: Solomon Grundy, Born on a Monday, Christened on Tuesday, Married on Wednesday, Took ill on Thursday, Grew worse on Friday, Died on Saturday,...
Solomon Grundy,
Born on a Monday,
Christened on Tuesday,
Married on Wednesday,
Took ill on Thursday,
Grew worse on Friday,
Died on Saturday,
Buried on Sunday,
That was the end,
Of Solomon Grundy.
Yeah I would read that as rhyming with more of a long 'e' then a short 'i' but it might be somewhere between in truth. Some southern accents pronounce that 'ay' ending that way, although it's not...
Yeah I would read that as rhyming with more of a long 'e' then a short 'i' but it might be somewhere between in truth. Some southern accents pronounce that 'ay' ending that way, although it's not always consistent even with day names. I'm much more likely to hear someone pronounce Monday or Tuesday that way than Friday, which is more likely to have that long 'a' sound. I'd love to know why that is. I think it might be a result of different variations on southern English mixing and shifting, but I'm not an expert at all.
Ah, that would explain why, in all the examples this post gives for each vowel sound, I noticed at least one that did not follow the rules they set out in my American accent (Western US, pretty...
Ah, that would explain why, in all the examples this post gives for each vowel sound, I noticed at least one that did not follow the rules they set out in my American accent (Western US, pretty close to General American). "Talk" and "ward", "ask" and "palm", "police" and "aesthetic", and "put" and "wolf" do not have the same vowel sound for me, for example.
Honestly, I have no idea. It came up in a discussion on FB about whether this article applied to American English and I did some quick googling and the number 15 came up on enough pages with...
Honestly, I have no idea. It came up in a discussion on FB about whether this article applied to American English and I did some quick googling and the number 15 came up on enough pages with enough sane looking domains to convince me it was probably true. I didn't have time to click through and actually read anything on the topic.
My go to example for English being hard is "ough". Though -- oh Through -- oo Tough -- uff Thorough -- uh Cough -- off Bough -- ow Bought -- aw Hiccough -- up
This is one reason English is so hard to spell/read, we have to write all those sounds using just 5-and-a-bit letters
My go to example for English being hard is "ough".
Though -- oh
Through -- oo
Tough -- uff
Thorough -- uh
Cough -- off
Bough -- ow
Bought -- aw
Hiccough -- up
In Irish English you also get lough, with an "ock" sound (as in loch) I do feel bad for people trying to learn English. I once worked with a Estonian guy who spoke Finnish, German, Italian,...
In Irish English you also get lough, with an "ock" sound (as in loch)
I do feel bad for people trying to learn English. I once worked with a Estonian guy who spoke Finnish, German, Italian, Russian and English as second languages. He was insistent that English was the hardest to learn by far, and I believe him.
Hiccough is particularly fucky. OED reckons that spelling comes from people trying to back-form it from cough for some unfathomable reason. Hiccup is the original spelling by a couple of centuries. People shouldn't be allowed near word..
I donʼt know English very well, but I like a video from Dr Geoff Lindsey: Why these English phonetic symbols are all wrong. It could partly explain: Why some cannʼt handle IPA; Phonology isnʼt...
Phonology isnʼt just a table of sounds but also rules for changing or connection with other sounds. For example, the article should explain not only how pronounce long vowels but also add phonology examples and why theyʼre occurence in this positions.
When I was at school we were taught that the vowels in English are the letters a,e,i,o,u and sometimes y. Which is kind of true, those are the letters English uses to write vowels - but it turns out there are 20 vowel sounds in spoken English.
This is one reason English is so hard to spell/read, we have to write all those sounds using just 5-and-a-bit letters. Many other languages do not do this, they have one glyph per vowel sound and that means you can often pronounce a word just by reading it. But look at the ways English spells out this one short-i vowel sound (note the pronunciation may vary depending on accent/dialect, this is just an example):
/ɪ/:- village, effect,sit, captain, Monday
EDIT: British English. American English has fifteen vowels. Which is possibly one reason the Yanks think we sound so fancy.
Huh, I don't think I've ever heard an accent that would pronounce the 'ay' in Monday as a short i sound, or at least I can't think what accent that would be. Maybe a regional UK accent? In my area (southeastern US) it is generally a long 'a' sound or maybe a long 'e' (note: I wish I was better with the ipa alphabet. It's so cool and laid out in such a logical way, but I've never been able to get the hang of it). 'Effect' would almost always be the common ə (uh) sound.
I'm not arguing with your point or anything, I just find regional variation like this really interesting. It's also one of the reasons that I don't think any kind of English spelling reform that tries to make vowel sounds more precise is going to work, because there is so much regional variation that the majority of English speakers would still be spelling words differently than they pronounce them.
"G'day mayte. Haow ya goin'?"
"Orroit fer ah Mundi, Oi recken. Haow woz yer weekend?"
I hear it all the time here in Australia.
Oh that's really interesting, goes to show how little I know about Australian English I guess!
I did think that one was a bit odd. The author of the article is Nigerian, perhaps the ay/i sound happens in Nigerian English. I shall ask my Nigerian friend next time I see him.
I love the way langauge varies by region. Sometimes to the point you can pin down where people live to within a few miles. One of my favourite words/concepts is isogloss/isophone, and I used to live near one. There was a geographical feature in the town I grew up in which meant that people living south of the feature could pick up a certain regional TV station and people to the north of it, a different one. The difference was the difference between Birmingham and Manchester (UK) in terms of local news and local accents. The upshot of this was a noticable difference in accent from the north to south sides of a small (50k) town.
Totally agree on IPA though. I cannot seem to get a handle on it no matter how often I try.
I love hearing about these types of hyperlocal language variations. Your example of different sides of a town picking up different TV stations is exactly the kind thing that fascinates me. It's such a tiny thing to cause a noticeable difference in accent!
My wife and I have a similar story that we like to tell about discovering a local language difference, although ours was vocabulary rather than accent. We both grew up in the same small town in central/southwest Georgia, and when we left for college we both had similar realizations. See, we had both grown up referring to garbage cans (the outdoor kind, so I guess a dustbin or wheelie bin?) as "hobos". So our parents would say, "Take that trash out to the hobo" or, "roll the hobo out to the road". We both thought of that as a perfectly normal way of referring to a garbage can, but we both had encounters after leaving our home town with people being very confused why we were talking about taking the garbage to a homeless person! I wound up asking my Grandmother about it, and she told me that the town we lived in used to have "Hobo" brand garbage cans, and even though they hadn't done that for years a lot of folks in town still called them that. I've never encountered another person that wasn't from my small town that called them that, although it's possible that there are other little towns where people still use that word to mean garbage can, even if it's been decades since they've used that brand.
There are so many regional accents in the UK but as @mat says the short i for y at the end of a word is pretty common in the UK, especially the further north of you go.
To hear an example, here's an interesting video on the Yorkshire accent.
If you're impatient - a timestamped link for the /ɪ/ for y section
What a lovely accent! I love those big round u sounds. I've found that I really like a lot of northern English accents, there's something really appealing about the vowel sounds especially.
I do wonder if the 'ay' sound would also shift to an i sound, I scrubbed through the conversation at the end a bit and didn't hear it.
It definitely can. Sorry. I've been looking but I still haven't found an example of someone saying days of the week with any kind of regional accent :(.
All I can find is people demonstrating very neutral accents like you'd hear on the BBC.
The trouble with accents and dialects in the UK is they can change in a very short distance.
For example Manchester to Liverpool is about 50km.
Yeah I've always envied that about the UK a bit, things are much more spread out here in the US and there have been so many major migrations and so much mobility that a lot of the really unique local accents have been dying out or at least blending more with a few larger regional accents.
Sorry if it sounded like I was doubting you, I don't know much about regional accents in the UK but it's something that's really interesting to me!
Closest I can think of to that is a Kiwi accent, since their vowel pronunciations have chain shifted.
Yeah I did actually think about that after I posted. It would have made sense with 'effect' being pronounced with a short 'i' sound too. @mat replied that the author of the article is Nigerian, which isn't an accent I'm particularly familiar with, so maybe that's the disconnect.
Edit: Also, I love the Kiwi accent so much. It's one of my absolute favorites to hear, and it's nice to have a term now for one of my favorite features which is that really interesting vowel shift.
Now that I think about it some more, South African ("Seth Efrikin") English pronunciation also has major vowel shifts in it too, but actually does have a noticeable a->i shift in some circumstances. So, given the author of this article is Nigerian they're likely familiar with that accent, and perhaps that's specifically where they got that from.
p.s. I adore the kiwi accent too. ;)
I read a batman that featured this old nursery rhyme:
Solomon Grundy,
Born on a Monday,
Christened on Tuesday,
Married on Wednesday,
Took ill on Thursday,
Grew worse on Friday,
Died on Saturday,
Buried on Sunday,
That was the end,
Of Solomon Grundy.
Yeah I would read that as rhyming with more of a long 'e' then a short 'i' but it might be somewhere between in truth. Some southern accents pronounce that 'ay' ending that way, although it's not always consistent even with day names. I'm much more likely to hear someone pronounce Monday or Tuesday that way than Friday, which is more likely to have that long 'a' sound. I'd love to know why that is. I think it might be a result of different variations on southern English mixing and shifting, but I'm not an expert at all.
Ah, that would explain why, in all the examples this post gives for each vowel sound, I noticed at least one that did not follow the rules they set out in my American accent (Western US, pretty close to General American). "Talk" and "ward", "ask" and "palm", "police" and "aesthetic", and "put" and "wolf" do not have the same vowel sound for me, for example.
Yeah as a southerner 'ask' and 'palm' are very different in my accent, lol. We really put that 'a' in ask waaaay up in the front.
Really curious :which vowels is American English lacking?
Honestly, I have no idea. It came up in a discussion on FB about whether this article applied to American English and I did some quick googling and the number 15 came up on enough pages with enough sane looking domains to convince me it was probably true. I didn't have time to click through and actually read anything on the topic.
My go to example for English being hard is "ough".
Though -- oh
Through -- oo
Tough -- uff
Thorough -- uh
Cough -- off
Bough -- ow
Bought -- aw
Hiccough -- up
In Irish English you also get lough, with an "ock" sound (as in loch)
I do feel bad for people trying to learn English. I once worked with a Estonian guy who spoke Finnish, German, Italian, Russian and English as second languages. He was insistent that English was the hardest to learn by far, and I believe him.
Hiccough is particularly fucky. OED reckons that spelling comes from people trying to back-form it from cough for some unfathomable reason. Hiccup is the original spelling by a couple of centuries. People shouldn't be allowed near word..
I donʼt know English very well, but I like a video from Dr Geoff Lindsey: Why these English phonetic symbols are all wrong.
It could partly explain: