Some more CELTA phonology

I've spotted another mistake in The CELTA Course Trainee Book by Scott Thornbury and Peter Watkins (see my blog for 4th July 2010). On page 155 the authors discuss how vowel sounds are produced in English and then provide their own definition of a 'diphthong': "a glide from one vowel to another".

Now, this definition is not complete. If it were so, then the words Lyons - the place in France - (ˈliːɒ̃) and neon (ˈniːɒn) would both contain a diphthong - but they DO NOT because they are characterised by two separate syllables.

A diphthong is then a movement (or glide) from one vowel to another within a single syllable.

The same mistake can also be found on page 13 of The TKT Course (2005, CUP) by Mary Spratt, Alan Pulverness, and Melanie Williams.

Magic Italy?

Since yesterday morning, a video has been doing the rounds both on YouTube and in the national news bulletins. You can watch it here. In it, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi enhances the beauty of Italy by referring to it as "magica Italia". The video is very nice and the idea of trying to encourage Italians as well as foreigners to take their holidays in our country is laudable.

There's just one thing that bugs me: it's the English translation of the expression "magica Italia" which comes at the end of the video clip. Whoever translated "magica Italia" as "magic Italy" doesn't know that in English the adjective "magico" can be translated in two different ways: magic and magical. The former is the more common and is used in a number of fixed expressions like a magic wand, the magic word, magic tricks, magic spells, expressions that is which are generally related to magic or supernatural powers. The latter, on the other hand, is used in place of magic especially in metaphorical senses like 'wonderful', 'exciting', 'romantic', 'enjoyable', as in a magical country, or magical landscapes.

If you think I'm talking nonsense, you can either read page 230 of Swan's (2005) Practical English Usage, published by Oxford University Press, or check the use of magic and magical in the British National Corpus or in the Corpus of Contemporary American English. That's what I did myself, too, and the answer is that I could only find examples of magical + country and none of magic + country. Which means that the phrase "magic Italy" in the video is WRONG and needs correcting to "magicAL Italy".

PS: Here's a video by the BBC. Notice how Duncan Kennedy, after referring to Berlusconi's "magica Italia" with the expression "Magic Italy", he calls it, immediately switches to Italy's magicAL sights towards the beginning of his report.

CELTA phonology

On page 156 of The CELTA Course Trainee Book (Cambridge, 2007) by Scott Thornbury and Peter Watkins, the authors discuss the vowel and consonant sounds of English and remark that "[f]or teaching purposes, the sounds of English are often displayed in the form of a phonemic chart":

In the phonemic chart on the left are listed the vowels and consonants of RP, whereas in the one on the right you can see the symbols corresponding to the sounds of North American English. (It should be noted though that on page 155 the authors refer to RP using the wrong expression "Standard British English", thus confusing an accent of English with a dialect.)
As is evident from the image above, the systems of transcription used in the charts are similar but not the same. The one on the left in fact conforms to the principles of the International Phonetic Association (IPA); the one on the right doesn't, as it follows a different AmE tradition, namely that of Trager and Smith. This tradition analyses the English long vowels and diphthongs as consisting of a short vowel plus one of the semivowels (called "peak satellites") j, w, h, the latter being realised postvocalically either as a schwa offglide or as the lengthening of a mid or low vowel. In addition, stress is marked by putting acute or grave accents over vowels (é, è), not by putting marks high up before the stressed syllable as in the IPA.
For me both systems of transcription are perfectly ok; it's just that I don't think it's necessary having to teach or learn two relatively different systems of notation at the same time. Indeed, it's a complete waste of time! Also, it seems as though Thornbury and Watkins were suggesting that you can only use IPA for RP and the Trager-Smith system for General American, which just isn't true. Either system will do! Wouldn't it be much easier then for both teachers and students alike to go for just one system without having to resort to using two systems in order to highlight the differences in vowel realisation and inventory between RP and General American? Phonetics and phonology is already a very complex part of the teaching of English: why do you want to make it more complicated than it is?
By the way, if I had to choose between one system or the other, I would definitely go for the IPA one. The Trager and Smith tradition in fact isn't trendy any longer and it wasn't so even when John Wells in the 1980s was writing his Accents of English.
Why then teach the Trager and Smith notation system when almost all the pronunciation dictionaries and EFL textbooks on the market nowadays make use of the IPA script?

Solstice

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?

Zoo

I was wondering how Italians pronounce the term zoo: is it ˈdzɔo or dzɔ? If you look this word up in a dictionary such as Lo Zingarelli (2007) or Il Devoto-Oli (2011), the only pronunciation they give is ˈdzɔo. I assume this is because they are rather prescriptive dictionaries. But I don't say ˈdzɔo. I say dzɔ. And I'm not the only one: my parents, brothers, grandmother, aunt all say dzɔ. Are we all wrong then?

The only dictionary I have been able to find which also provides the variant I use is the Dizionario di Pronuncia Italiana (DiPl, 2009) by Luciano Canepàri. The author considers ˈdzɔo as the main pronunciation (by which he means that that is the correct one) and regards dzɔ as frequent but slipshod, highlighting that it should be avoided as it may indicate that the speaker is not well educated.
I don't regard myself as uneducated at all! My parents and my brothers aren't either! So which form do you think you mostly use? Which form do you prefer? Would you consider a speaker uneducated if they used the variant I do?

NB: To see the IPA phonetic symbols in the text, please ensure that you have installed a Unicode font that includes them all, for example LUCIDA SANS UNICODE or Charis SIL. (Click here for free download.)

Shame on you!

Last May I was walking down the lovely streets of the town I live in and I was given a leaflet in English advertising guided tours of the Etruscan tombs scattered in the neighbouring area. As soon as I started reading it I noticed that the level of the translation was absolutely appalling. That is why I have decided to post and comment on parts of it here. At first I thought they were just typing errors, but I was wrong. See for yourself:

• "The colours of the etruscans": do you know that nationality words in English are ALWAYS written with a capital letter?
• "Extraordinary opening of the tomb of the Bulls": do you mean "exceptional opening"?

• "october", "friday", "saturday": the days of the week and the months of the year, too, are ALWAYS written with a capital letter!

• "Friday and Saturday h. 15:30": it should be "Friday and Saturday at 3.30 pm (or 15.30, or 15:30). You can only use 'h.' ['hour(s)'] when you say for example '15 hundred (hours)'.
• Notice again that the months of the year are written with a small letter.
• "Start to Sala Grande Biblioteca Comunale Barriera di San Giusto": is this going to be a race or are they just taking you on a guided tour? It is obvious that it should be something like "We leave/are leaving from Barriera di San Giusto". Why didn't you translate "Sala Grande Biblioteca Comunale"? Was it too difficult?
• "with yours cars": everyone knows that adjectives used attributively in English NEVER take any plural ending! 'Yours' is a pronoun, NOT an adjective!
  
• "For informations call to": apart from the fact that when you want to contact someone in English you call them, NEVER call to them, here what really gets me is the 's' on the end of the term 'information'. Everyone should know that 'information' is one of those UNcountable nouns that NEVER take a plural ending (except when it means 'a charge lodged with a magistrates' court).
• What kind of office is the "I.A.T. Office"? I don't even know in Italian!
• "Municipal Library": is it the mayor's own library or just the local one?
• "Mob.: 331-8785257": is this the mobile number of a mob of protesters? By the way, mobile numbers in English are normally written into groups of two or three digits and are not usually separated by hyphens!
  
• "From 9 to 18:00": I think it'd be much better to say "from 9 am to 6 pm".

• "To reach Tarquinia": maybe you mean "How to reach/get to Tarquinia"?
• "highway until Civitavecchia and then Aurelia way": it should be "Take the highway as far as (NOT until, as you use this preposition with time expressions!) Civitavecchia and then the Via Aurelia. Is the Aurelia way a new lifestyle?
• "Aurelia way to the south direction": "Take the Via Aurelia (out) towards the south".
• "in both cases there are about 45 km": where?
• "Tarquinia is on the railway Roma-Ventimiglia": I thought Tarquinia was located upon a hill, not on a set of tracks!
• "train station is 3 km far from the town": it should be "the train station is...".

I think my little cat can speak better english than whoever did this translation! Oops, sorry! It should be 'better English', shouldn't it?

Why should we teach English phonetics and phonology?

Unlike most European languages, English is not a phonetic language: words can have identical vowel letters and be pronounced in different ways, e.g. great, treat, and threat; viceversa, words with phonologically identical vowels may have different spellings, as in sea, seize, precede. Hence the importance of teaching both pronunciation and spelling.

If we go down to the phonetic level, English appears to be idiosyncratic too, since it includes various features that are unusual from the point of view of universals:

1. a large and elaborate vowel system including complex processes of length alternation and weakening (think of compete, competitive and competition). Maddieson (1984) has estimated that only 4.1% of the world's languages have over 17 vowel sounds. RP, for instance, has about 20, which makes its system one of the less common and more complex types.
2. a consonant system that includes dental fricatives - not very common sounds in the world's languages (see John Wells's blog here) - and voiced sibilants, which tend to be problematic for many learners.
3. word stress placement that is free, i.e. arbitrary and frequently unpredictable.
4. an intonation system that seems to be more complex and to have a much higher functional load than that of most other languages.

It is because of such considerations that some have argued that for international purposes we ought to use Esperanto rather than English. For reasons that I'm not going to discuss here, this has never worked and English has become the language we use internationally.
Nowadays, everyone is expected to speak a bit of English, but trying to find someone in Italy who can speak it 'clearly' - intelligibly -, without mangling it, is no easy task at all. That is where phonetics and phonology comes in. Phonetics and phonology is a subject which is generally not taught in schools or universities in Italy, and if it is, it is taught badly. I think EFL students and teachers should both have a thorough knowledge of the phonetics and phonology of English so that they can understand native speakers better and can make themselves understood, thus avoiding misapprehensions. As Peter Roach (2009, p.6) has highlighted in his book English Phonetics and Phonology: A Practical Course (4th edition),

Pronunciation exercises can be difficult, of course, but if we eliminate everything difficult from language teaching and learning, we may end up doing very little beyond getting students to play simple communication games.

As far as native speakers of English working in ELT are concerned, they too should have a knowledge of English phonetics and phonology (most don't!). This would help them understand their students' problems much better. It's like medical diagnosis, Peter Roach has said in one of his interviews with Anne Linthe from Cambridge University Press: "if somebody came to you and asked for advice because they were getting headaches, or they were getting persistent pains in their knees or something, you could think of some homely advice that you would give them and it might well result in them improving. But it's not the same as knowing how the body works, and the nature of human illnesses and that kind of thing".
None of my past teachers ever taught me phonetics and I started to get interested in the subject only at university. It was not until then that I realized how fascinating this subject was and how essential it is for any student wanting to learn (and understand!) a foreign language - especially English!