On Monday 21st June I was watching Sky News HD. One of the newsreaders was reporting on the events organised at Stonehenge by druids, pagans, and hippies on the longest day of the year: the summer solstice. As I was listening, I noticed that the newscaster pronounced the word solstice as ˈsɔːlstɪs and I said to myself: isn't it ˈsɒlstɪs in RP? I looked it up in all the pronunciation dictionaries I have at home (LPD3, CPD, ODP, and OGP) but could find no trace of the variant ˈsɔːlstɪs. So I thought the journalist got confused with words like salt or fault, words that is which have a vowel followed by l plus a voiceless consonant and which can have both ɔː and ɒ in RP (although younger speakers today tend to use the variant with ɒ). As John Wells argued in his blog of the 16th February 2010, "there are certainly varieties of English English in which there is great confusion among back vowels before dark l". Some people, for example, say bolster with əʊ, others with ɒʊ, and others still with ɒ.
But what about solstice? Is there anyone out there who pronounces it with the THOUGHT vowel instead of the usual LOT?
But what about solstice? Is there anyone out there who pronounces it with the THOUGHT vowel instead of the usual LOT?
Alex
ReplyDelete1 Doesn't it partly depend on whether the speaker is thinking of the o as 'short' or as 'long as in solar?
2. You may well want to cross-reference again between your blog and John's. John himself told me this trick when I made a general enquiry:
Here's a link with spaces to disable it
< a href="http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com/2010/09/cat-that-malts.html" >John's blog< /a >
Remove the spaces next to the angle brackets and you get
John's blog.
Jack Windsor Lewis has sent me this comment:
ReplyDelete"Hi Alex
Just noticed your blog on solstice. Tried to put a comment but it claimed my URL had illegal stuff in it so here it is:
"I looked it up in all the pronunciation dictionaries I have at home (LPD3, CPD, ODP, and OGP) but could find no trace of the variant ˈsɔːlstɪs." In your list of 'Useful Links" on your website you very properly give Merriam-Webster Online. If you look there you find three forms of solstice \ˈsäl-stəs, ˈsōl-, ˈsȯl-\. In their pronunciation key they give \ȯ\ as aw in law. So it seems that your mystery version may be due to American influence. Pity you didnt gather the name of the newsreader."