Il figlio

I’m reading Patricia Ashby’s new book Understanding Phonetics (2011, Hodder Education). Marc Swerts (Tilburg University, The Netherlands) describes it as being “an excellent introduction into the field of phonetics” and “an impressive account of the articulatory, acoustic and perceptual aspects of human speech sounds” (back cover).

I quite agree. The book is just fantastic, and I’m already using it with my undergraduates at the Università degli Studi della Tuscia. 

Petr Rösel recently discussed some of the features of Dr. Ashby’s Understanding Phonetics on his blog, Kraut’s English phonetic blog. You can read his article here, if you’re interested. 

As is almost inevitable with textbooks containing phonetic symbols, sometimes typos are made which might be a bit embarrassing for the author(s). In Understanding Phonetics, for example, we find this on page 44:

“Use of the subscript box diacritic as in [s̻] indicates laminal, and use of the subscript inverted bridge diacritic as in [s̻] [sic] indicates apical”.   

    

And this on page 57:

“The voiced alveolar trill [...] is used in Spanish [...] as in parro [sic] ‘grapevine’ [para]”. 

But on pages 63-64 we read:

“English has three central approximants [...] and one lateral approximant [...]. Dutch, French and German also have just one lateral approximant. Spanish and Italian, however, each have two. In addition to alveolar [l], as in Spanish la, el [la, el] ‘the’ and Italian [lo, li] ‘the’ [sic], they also have the voiced palatal lateral, [ʎ], as in Spanish calle [ˈkaʎe] ‘street’ or Italian figlio [ˈfiʎo] [sic] ‘son’”.

I wonder if these are mere typos or real mistakes on the part of the author. The Italian articles are il, lo, la (for singular) and i, gli, le (for plural). Li as an article is not to be found in Standard Italian today, although some people still sometimes use it in dates, as in Roma, li 12/11/2011. It is, though, very common in the broad accents of the area in and around Rome, where a phrase like, for instance, i romani (‘the Romans’) can be heard as li ɾoˈmani.  

As my readers will also know, the palatal sounds ʎ, ɲ, ʃ, and the alveolar affricates ts and dz are, in Standard Italian pronunciation, always pronounced double when in intervocalic position. This means that figlio is ˈfiʎʎo and not *ˈfiʎo.

Patricia ends the section on approximants noting that “in a large number of Italian accents, there is considerable friction involved in the pronunciation of [ʎ], creating a voiced palatal lateral fricative (for which there is no established IPA symbol)” (p.64). Quite right! That’s how I sometimes find myself pronouncing words like foglie (‘leaves’, n.) or parlagli (‘talk to him/her’). This type of pronunciation is also extremely common in and around Naples.   

ʃɒktəʊbə

nəʊ taɪm fər ə rɪəl blɒɡ pəʊs ðəs wiːk, səʊ hɪəz ə lɪŋk tu ən ɑːtɪkl̩ baɪ deɪvɪd krɪstl̩ ɒm blendz (ɔː pɔːʔmæntəʊ wɜːdz) ɪn ɪŋɡlɪʃ. ði ɑːtɪkl̩z rɪleɪtɪd tə ðə riːsn̩ʔ njuːz stɔːri əv ði ʌnsiːznəbl̩ snəʊ wɪtʃ hɪʔ ði əmerɪkən iːs kəʊst ɔːlməʊst ə wiːk əɡəʊ naʊ.

ən fə ðəʊz əv ju ɪntrəstɪd ɪn ðə hɪstri əv ði ɪŋɡlɪʃ læŋɡwɪdʒ, hɪəz ə lɪŋk tu ənʌðər ɑːtɪkl̩ baɪ ðə seɪm ɔːθə.

hæv ə veri naɪs ɡaɪ fɔːks deɪ, evrɪbɒdi.

The Oxford Advanced American Dictionary online

It’s been advertised as a “new website for learners of American English”. It is the Oxford Advanced American Dictionary (OAAD) website. The site went live about two weeks ago and is available for consultation free of charge. 

The OAAD has many features in common with the OALD, the former coming from the same stable as the latter. 

As far as phonetics is concerned, the OAAD offers learners a “Pronunciation Guide” (very similar to the one we find in OALD) with information regarding the transcription of American vowel and consonant sounds, as well as stress, and strong and weak forms. 

Unlike the OALD, transcriptions in the OAAD also include the symbol for the (usually voiced) alveolar tap, t̬, as in ˈlɪt̬l or ˈsɪt̬i. In the OALD, words like these are transcribed with a plain t, the pronunciation also matching the transcriptions supplied. This is not so, though, for many other words, such as, for instance, parting, pronounced by the same American speaker as ˈpɑrt̬ɪŋ in both dictionaries but transcribed as ˈpɑːrtɪŋ in the OALD and ˈpɑrt̬ɪŋ in the OAAD.  

This is one of the main reasons why some of my EFL students, after starting to use both dictionaries together, began to complain about the OALD. Some of them, noticing the discrepancy between the pronunciations offered and the corresponding transcriptions, simply decided to try and imitate what they could hear on the recordings rather than pay attention to the symbols used. 

Another characteristic of the phonetic transcriptions provided in the OAAD is that the long vowels have no length marks. So, for example, today’s “Word of the Day”, foolhardy, is transcribed ˈfulˌhɑrdi, as one would find in most textbooks by American scholars. 

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the name of the phonetics editor for the dictionary – not even on the Oxford University Press website. Does anybody know who that is? 

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On a rather different note, what do you think about this video clip entitled “Englishmen going to Italy”, which has been doing the rounds in Italy recently? 

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And finally, a special treat for Halloween for my English Phonetics students at the Università degli Studi della Tuscia:

Some more howlers from PONS

I’ve decided to scan some more bits of pages from the PONS phrasebook we looked at last weekend. Here they are for you:

page 82

 

 

 

page 88

page 107

page 144

Not much I can add, really!

Yet another phrase book in IPA!

I was so impressed by the quality of the Italian-Spanish phrase book I talked to you about last weekend that on Monday I went to a famous bookshop in Rome to look for a similar book but with English transcriptions. And I managed to find one! It’s called Travel Kit Inglese: Dizionario di viaggio e di conversazione (2010; Accademia Universa Press). 

The book is divided into 17 chapters, two of which contain a short introduction to English grammar and a small bilingual dictionary. As with the phrase book in Spanish, each word/sentence is transcribed phonemically and there is also an audio CD which contains the whole text of the book.

But unlike the phrase book published by Giunti, Travel Kit Inglese is not as accurate as far as phonetics goes. Each page of the book contains at least three or four transcription errors, some of which are just terrible blunders. Have a look at this:

Noticed anything in particular? Apart from the incorrect transcriptions provided for inch, pint, foot, and ounce, what struck me as unacceptable was the fact that the phonetics editor for the book (whose name is not mentioned in the introduction) mistook the word gallon (pronounced ˈɡælən) for galleon, which is obviously ˈɡæliən. Degrees is dɪˈɡriːs rather than -ˈɡriːz, and for some reason Fahrenheit is fɑːnhaɪt, instead of ˈfɑːrənhaɪt or ˈfær-.

  

On page 26, which is about organizing a trip abroad, we read this:

How many mistakes can you spot? Here the strong form of am is used rather than its weak form and so it is for the preposition of. In the utterance at the bottom, weə is without its linking r, which is what native speakers would naturally use in this context, and no stresses are provided for some of the content words which come before boating. What is worse is that the transcription furnished here represents exactly what one hears on the CD, as the voice of the speaker used in the recordings is not a real one but a computerized one. And we know what can happen with synthetic speech: it often fails to reproduce weak forms and intonation properly.  

  

In the section dedicated to the topic “eating out”, I notice the word restaurant is always transcribed as ˈrestərɔ̃ːŋ (p.106). Although this is a possible variant, which Roach et al. (2006) decided to prioritise in CPD, I find it amusingly old-fashioned. Even Jack Windsor Lewis as early as 1972 regards this type of pronunciation as highly unlikely. In his Concise Pronouncing Dictionary of British and American English he notes (pp.xv-xvi):

“Now rarely heard, except from the elderly, is the substitution of non-nasal vowel followed by ŋ for a nasal vowel in words borrowed from French: `pɑŋsɪɔŋ for `põsɪõ (pension) is now likely to sound amusingly old-fashioned possibly even incomprehensible to many educated speakers below retirement age. One or two popular words such as meringue and charabanc have settled into such pronunciations firmly but in most words with French nasal vowel origins a nasalized English vowel is heard”. 

The book also sometimes utilises symbols which are not exemplified in the introduction (for example i and u), and some of those symbols which are exemplified in the introduction are simply defined poorly. The schwa, for instance, is described as a “suono vocalico atonico, cortissimo e senza qualità” (p.22) (‘an unstressed vowel sound, very short and without quality’). 

In conclusion, I think the only use I can make of this book now that I’ve bought it is to show students how never to transcribe English speech or describe sounds! What do you think?

UPDATE: Have a look at what John Wells has to say about Travel Kit Inglese here.