Update:
2011-12-31 11:37 PM +0630
TIL
ENGLISH PRONOUNCING DICTIONARY
Information panels
informR-S.htm
Daniel Jones. Edited by Peter Roach, James Hartman and Jane Setter. Cambridge
University Press, 2003.
Scanned by Maung Kan Tun and edited by U Kyaw Tun, M.S. (I.P.S.T., U.S.A.). Not for
sale. Prepared for students of TIL Computing and Language Center, Yangon, MYANMAR .
index.htm |Top
DJPD16-indx
Information panels R to S
60. Retroflex |
61. Rhotic | • Rhotic consonant | 62.
Rhyme/Rime | 63.
Rhythm |
64. Rounding | 65.
Schwa | Silent E | 66.
Soft palate |
67. Spreading | 68.
Stress | 69.
Stress shift |
70. Suffix | 71.
Syllabic consonant |
72. Syllable |
Contents of this page
p456. In a retroflex articulation the
tip of the tongue is curled upward and backward.
Examples for English
The /r/ sound of some British and American accents is sometimes described as being
retroflex, though in BBC pronunciation the degree of retroflexion is relatively small.
In US English and some accents of
south-west England it is common for vowels preceding /r/
(e.g. /ɑː/
in <car>, or /ɜː/
in <bird>) to be affected by the consonant so that they have a retroflex quality
for most of their duration. This 'r-coloring' is most common in back or central
vowels where the forward part of the tongue is relatively free to change shape.
In other languages
Other languages have retroflex
consonants with a more noticeable auditory quality, the best known examples
being the great majority of the languages of the Indian subcontinent. [See
/r/-sound in
Burmese-Myanmar and Pali-Myanmar.] The sound
of retroflex consonants is fairly familiar to English listeners, since
first-generation immigrants from India and Pakistan tend to carry the retroflex
quality into their pronunciation of English consonants which are
ALVEOLAR in BBC pronunciation.
Contents of this page
p458. In rhotic varieties of English pronunciation the /r/
PHONEME is found in
all phonological contexts.
[See also
Treatment of /r/
in the Introduction]
Examples for English
In BBC pronunciation, /r/
is found before vowels, and never before consonants or before a pause (see also
LIAISON), e.g.:
<red> /red/ <there is> /ðər ɪz/
<around> /əˈraʊnd/
| |
<red> |
/red/ |
|
<there is> |
/ðər ɪz/ |
| |
<around> |
/əˈraʊnd/ |
|
|
|
In US English and other rhotic accents, on the other hand, /r/
may occur before consonants and before a pause, e.g.:
| |
<cart> |
/kɑːt/ |
(us) |
/kɑːrt/ |
|
<car> |
/kɑːʳ/ |
(us) |
/kɑːr/ |
While the BBC accent is non-rhotic,
many accents of the British Isles are rhotic, including most of the south and
West of England, much of Wales and all of Scotland and Ireland. Most speakers of
American English speak with a rhotic accent, but there are non-rhotic areas
including the Boston area, lower-class New York and the Deep South.
UKT: This section and the
section in the Introduction are important for Burmese speakers since Burmese,
unlike American English and Pali, is a non-rhotic language. Myanmars found it
extremely difficult to pronounce English words with /r/ in the word-final
position. Even the /r/
as the ONSET in the
syllable is pronounced as /j/
-- the equivalent of English [y].
Contents of this page
UKT: British English is non-rhotic, and so is Burmese. Thus, for me, who is
bilingual in Burmese and English, rhotic consonants are difficult to grasp.
Resorting to Pali-Myanmar (i.e. Pali spoken in Myanmar) offers some help, but
not to my satisfaction, because Pali spoken in Myanmar unlike the Pali spoken
elsewhere is relatively free of {ra.} and {ra.ris} sounds.
Rhotic consonants, or "R"-like sounds, are non-lateral
liquid consonants. This class of sounds is difficult to characterise
phonetically, though most of them share some acoustic peculiarities, most
notably a lowered third
formant in
their sound spectrum. However, "being r-like" is a strangely elusive feature,
and the very same sounds that function as rhotics in some systems may pattern
with
fricatives,
semivowels or even stops in others. The most typical rhotic sounds found in
the world's languages are the following:
•
Trill (popularly known as rolled r): The airstream is
interrupted several times as one of the organs of speech (usually the tip of
the tongue or the
uvula) vibrates, closing and opening the air passage. If a trill is made
with the tip of the tongue against the upper gum, it is called an apical
(tongue-tip)
alveolar trill; the
IPA symbol for this sound is
[r]. If it is made with
the uvula against the back of the tongue, it is a
uvular trill; the IPA symbol for this sound is
[ʀ]. The
bilabial trill, however, is not considered a rhotic.
Many languages, for example
Russian,
Italian or
Spanish, use trilled rhotics. In the
English -speaking world, the stereotyped (if not actually very common)
Scottish rolled [r] is well-known. The "stage pronunciation" of
German specifies the alveolar trill for clarity. Rare kinds of trills
include
Czech ř [r̭] (fricative trill) and
Welsh rh [r̥] (voiceless trill).
•
Tap or flap (these terms refer to very similar articulations): Not
unlike a trill, but involving just one brief interruption of airflow. In many
languages taps are used as reduced variants of trills, especially in fast
speech. Note, however, that in Spanish, for example, taps and trills contrast,
as in pero /ˈpeɾo/ ("but") versus perro /ˈpero/ ("dog"). In some
English dialects (for example
American,
Australian) flaps do not function as rhotics but are realizations of
intervocalic apical stops (/t/
or /d/, for example in
rider or butter). The IPA symbol for this sound is
[ɾ].
•
Alveolar or
retroflex approximant, as in most accents of English (with minute
differences): The front part of the tongue approaches the upper gum, or the
tongue-tip is curled back towards the roof of the mouth ("retroflexion"). No
or little friction can be heard, and there is no momentary closure of the
vocal tract. The IPA symbol for the alveolar approximant is [ɹ] and the symbol
for the retroflex approximant is [ɻ].
•
Uvular or
velar approximant or fricative: The back of the tongue approaches the
soft palate or the uvula. The standard
/r/'s in
French,
German, and
Danish are variants of this type of rhotic. If fricative, the sound is
often impressionistically described as harsh or grating. This includes the
voiced uvular fricative,
voiceless uvular fricative,
voiced velar fricative,
voiceless velar fricative, and the
velar approximant. In northern England, there used to be accents which
employed the voiced velar fricative, which was called a "burr." In southern
England, the velar approximant is considered a prestigious kind of
lisp, though it does not occur in many other national dialects.
In broad transcription rhotics are usually symbolised as /r/ unless there are
two or more types of rhotic in the same language. The IPA has a full set of
different symbols which can be used whenever more phonetic precision is
required: an r rotated 180° [ɹ] for the alveolar approximant, a small
capital R [ʀ] for the uvular trill, and a flipped small capital R
[ʁ] for the voiced uvular fricative.
Contents of this page
p458. In the phonological analysis of the
syllable, this is a way of referring to the vowel in the middle of the syllable
forming its 'peak' plus any sounds following the peak within the syllable (the
CODA).
Examples for English
In the word <spoon> the rhyme (or
rime) is /uːn/,
in <tea> it is /iː/
and in <strengths> it is /eŋθs/
or /eŋkθs/.
Note
The spelling <rhyme> also refers to a
pair of lines that end with the same sequence of sounds in verse. If we examine
the sound sequences that must match each other, we find that these consist of
the vowel and any final consonants of the last syllable: thus <moon> and <June>
rhyme, and the initial consonants of these two words are not important (of
course, we do find longer-running rhymes than this in verse, e.g. <ability>
rhyming with <senility>).
Contents of this page
p459. The way events in speech are
distributed in time.
Examples for English
Obvious examples of vocal rhythms are
chanting as part of games or physical activities. In conversational speech the
rhythms are vastly more complicated, but it is clear that the timing of speech
is not random. An extreme view (though a quite common one) is that English
speech has a rhythm that allows us to divide it up into more or less equal
intervals of time called 'feet', each of which begins with a stressed syllable:
this is called the 'stress-timed rhythm hypothesis', e.g.:
London -- 'london
a return to London -- a re | 'turn to | 'london
a day return to London -- a | 'day re | 'turn to | 'london
Languages where the length of each
syllable remains more or less the same as that of its neighbours whether or not
it is stressed are called 'syllable-timed'.
Most evidence from the study of real
speech suggests that such rhythms only exist in very careful, controlled
speaking, but it appears from psychological research that listeners' brains tend
to hear timing regularities even where there is little or no physical
regularity.
Contents of this page
p464. A term used to describe lip
configuration in speech sounds.
UKT: Lip-rounding
Lip rounding refers to the configuration of the lips:
• Rounded = pursed/ protruded lips, many back vowels
• Unrounded = lips are neutral or pulled back a little, no front vowels are
rounded in English.
http://staff.washington.edu/aglaspey/2.pdf
Lip-rounding in American English consists of three types: slight,
tight and none. Slight lip-rounding is used on [sh, ch, r, j]. Tight
lip-rounding is used to create the [w] sound. [L] is made with none. This
information is extremely useful for non-native English speakers whose native
sounds are created using different articulatory muscles. For example, the
difference between [r] and [ L ] can be taught using training in lip-rounding
and tongue placement. --
http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Lip-rounding
Examples for English
Practically any vowel or consonant may
be produced with different amounts of lip-rounding. The lips are rounded by
muscles that act rather like a draw-string round the neck of a bag, bringing the
edges of the lips towards each other. Except in unusual cases, this results not
only in the mouth opening adopting a round shape, but also in a protrusion or
"pushing forward" of the lips. In theory, any vowel position (defined in terms
of height and frontness/backness) may be produced rounded or unrounded, though
we do not necessarily find all possible vowels in natural languages. BBC English
has four rounded vowel monophthongs, whle US English has three:
<pot> /pɒt/ (US) /pɑːt/
(unrounded) -- /
/
/{pau.-t}/
<core> /kɔːʳ/ (US) /kɔːr/ -- /{ko:}/
<put> /pʊt/ -- /
/
/{pwut}/
<coo> /kuː/ -- /
/
/{ku:}/
<cool> /kuːl/ -- /
/
/{ku:l}/
Consonants, too, may have rounded lips (in
[w], the basic consonantal
articulation itself consists of lip-rounding): this lip-rounding in consonants
is regarded as a 'secondary articulation', and it is usual to refer to it as
'labialization'. In British English, it is common to find
/ʃ/, /ʧ/
and
/r/
with lip-rounding.
In other languages
Swedish is described as having a
rounded vowel without lip protrusion.
http://www.ling.mq.edu.au/units/ling210-901/phonetics/vowelartic/lip_posture.html
Contents of this page
p475. An unstressed central vowel.
Examples for English
One of the most noticeable features of
English pronunciation is the phonetic difference between stressed and unstressed
syllables. In most languages, any of the vowels of the language can occur in any
syllable whether that syllable is stressed or not. In English, however, a
syllable which bears no stress is more likely to have one of a small number of
weak vowels. The most common weak vowel is one which never occurs in a stressed
syllable, the schwa vowel (symbolised ə
(U0259)), which is generally described as being unrounded, central (i.e. between
back and back) and mid (i.e. between close and open) e.g.:
<appease> /əˈpiːz/ <China> /ˈʧaɪ.nə/
<syllable> /ˈsɪl.ə.bḷ/ <mother> /ˈmʌð.əʳ/ (US) /ˈmʌð.ɚ/
| |
<appease> |
/əˈpiːz/ |
|
<China> |
/ˈʧaɪ.nə/ |
|
|
| |
<syllable> |
/ˈsɪl.ə.bḷ/ |
|
<mother> |
/ˈmʌð.əʳ/ |
(us) |
/ˈmʌð.ɚ/ |
Statistically, schwa is reported to be
the most frequently occurring vowel of English (over 10% of all vowels.)
Contents of this page
Silent E -- collection by UKT
Silent E (sometimes
described by teachers as a "magic E") is a writing convention in
English spelling. When reading, the silent letter [e] at the end of a
word signals a
specific pronunciation of the preceding vowel letter, as in the difference
between "rid" /rɪd/ and "ride" /rəɪd/. This orthographic pattern followed the
phonological changes of the
Great Vowel Shift in late Middle English. Educators have erroneously described this difference with
the terms "short vowel" and "long vowel," both borrowed from studies of the
Great Vowel Shift, when vowel length was still a meaningful distinction.
Analysis of common spellings and pronunciations shows that the 'silent E' most
often -- but not without exceptions-- signals a different phoneme than
a word spelled without it.
When silent E occurs in an English word, it
converts a vowel to its "long" equivalent. If English were spelled with the
traditional Romance language [UKT: e.g. French and Spanish] vowel values of the
Latin alphabet, often these vowels would be written with another letter
entirely. Moreover, alternatives exist in English for most spellings that use
silent E. Depending on dialect, English has anywhere from thirteen to more than
twenty separate vowel sounds (both monophthongs and diphthongs). Silent E is one
of the ways English spelling is able to use the Latin alphabet's five vowel
characters to represent so many vowels.
<mad> → <made>
/mæd/ → /meɪd/
Compare with <maid> /meɪd/
from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_E
Contents of this page
p496. The rear part of the roof of the
mouth.
Most of the roof of the mouth consists
of 'hard palate', which has bone beneath the skin. Towards the back of the
mouth, the layer of bone comes to an end but the layer of soft tissue continues
for some distance, ending eventually in a loose appendage that can easily be
seen by looking in a mirror. This dangling object is the 'uvula', and the layer
of soft tissue attached to it is called the soft palate (it is sometimes known
as the 'velum'). In normal breathing the velum is allowed to hang down so that
air may pass above it and escape through the nose, but for most speech sounds it
is lifted up and pressed against the upper back wall of the throat so that no
air can escape through the nose. This is necessary for a
PLOSIVE, for example,
so that air may be compressed within the vocal tract. However, for
NASAL
consonants (e.g., [m], [n]) the soft palate must be lowered since air should
escape only through the nose in these sounds.
In nasalised vowels (such vowels are
found in considerable numbers in French, for example) the soft palate is lowered
and air escapes through the mouth and nose together.
Contents of this page
p502. A term used to describe lip
positions in speech, produced by pulling the corners of the mouth away from each
other, as in a smile.
Phonetics books tend to be rather
inconsistent about this, sometimes implying that any sound that is not rounded
has spread lips, but elsewhere treating lip-spreading as being different from
NEUTRAL lip shape.
Vowels with spreading are often referred to as 'unrounded'.
Examples for English
The English vowel
/iː/
(U0069 U02D0)is thought of as having strong lip spreading, while
/ɪ/
(U026A) has spreading to a lesser degree.
UKT
To my Burmese ear /iː/ rhymes with like [eD;]
meaning "near", and /ɪ/ rhymes with [eD]
meaning "red". There is no way of writing the Burmese word [ed]
unless you want to put in a stress symbol /'ni/ . Note that this is my present
position and that this remark may change on further study of phonetics to the
aim of revising Romabama my system of transcription of Burmese in Roman
characters. -- note written on 030918.
Contents of this page
p511. A property of syllables which
makes them stand out as more noticeable than others.
UKT: See also
Stress in
the Introduction.
Examples for English
Stress is a large topic, which cannot
be covered in its entirety here. However, some examples follow.
The position of stress can change the
meaning or word class of a word, and so forms part of the phonological
composition of the word, e.g.:
<import> (n.) /ˈɪm.pɔːt/ (US) /-pɔːrt/
(v.) /ɪmˈpɔːt/ (US) /-ˈpɔːrt/
<record> (n.) /ˈrek.ɔːd/ (US) /-ɚd/
(v.) /rɪˈkɔːd/ (US) /-ˈkɔːrd/
UKT: See
HOMOGRAPHS |
LENGTH .
It is necessary to consider what
factors make a syllable count as stressed. It seems likely that stressed
syllables are produced with greater effort than unstressed, and that this effort
is manifested in the air pressure generated in the lungs for producing the
syllable and also in the articulatory movements in the vocal tract. These
effects of stress produce in turn various audible results: one is 'pitch
prominence', in which the stressed syllable stands out from its context (for
example, being higher if its unstressed neighbours are low in
PITCH, or lower if these
neighbours are high; often a pitch glide such as a fall or rise is used to give
greater pitch prominence). Another effect of stress is that stressed syllables
tend to be longer -- this is very noticeable in English, less so in some other
languages. Also, stressed syllables tend to be louder than unstressed, though
experiments have shown that differences in loudness alone are not very
noticeable to most listeners. It has been suggested by many writers that the
term 'accent' should be used to refer to some of the manifestations of stress
(particularly pitch prominence), but the word, though widely used, has never
acquired a distinct meaning of its own.
One of the areas in which there is
little agreement is that of 'levels' of stress. Some descriptions of languages
manage with just two levels (stressed and unstressed), while others use more. In
English, one can argue that if one takes the word <indicator> as an example, the
first syllable is the most strongly stressed, the third syllable is the next
most strongly stressed and the second and fourth syllables are weakly stressed,
or unstressed. This gives us three levels: it is possible to argue for more,
though this rarely seems to give any practical benefit.
Contents of this page
p511. A change in the position of the
stress in a word when that word is combined with others in a phrase.
Examples for English
The
RHYTHM of English prefers patterns
in which two stressed syllables do not come together. In order to avoid this,
stress in some polysyllabic words may move to an earlier syllable when combined
with another in a phrase, e.g.:
<Heathrow> /hiːθˈrəʊ/ (US) /-ˈroʊ/ <academic> /ˌæk.əˈdem.ɪk/
<Heathrow Airport> /hiːθ.rəʊ ˈeə.pɔːt/ (US) /ˈroʊ ˈeə.pɔːt/ <academic dress> /ˌæk.ə.dem.ɪk ˈdres/
In this dictionary, words which change
their stress in this way are shown with an example demonstrating the stress
shift.
Contents of this page
p516. A suffix is an element placed at
the end of a word to modify or alter its meaning. Unlike
PREFIXES, it is
possible for a suffix to alter the original pronunciation of the word stem on to
which they are affixed. This depends on whether the suffix is stress-neutral,
pre-stressed or stress-attracting.
Examples
Some suffixes do not change the
pronunciation of the word stem. These are known as 'stress-neutral' suffixes.
Some words containing stress-neutral suffixes follow:
<eleventh> /ɪˈlev.əntθ/ <dramatise> /ˈdræm.ə.taɪz/ (US) /ˈdrɑː.mə-/
<happily> /ˈhæp.ɪ.li/ <fatherhood> /ˈfɑː.ðə.hʊd/ (US) /-ðɚ-/
A suffix which attracts stress is
known as 'stress-attracting'. Some words containing stress-attracting suffixes
follow:
<Japanese> /ˌʤæp.əˈniːz/ <engineer> /ˌen.ʤɪˈnɪəʳ/ (US) /-ˈnɪr/
<nineteen> /ˌnaɪnˈtiːn/
A 'pre-stressed' suffix is one in
which the affixation of the suffix causes stress to be assigned to a syllable
before it. There are a number of different types of pre-stressed suffixes. Here
is an example where the stress falls on the syllable immediately before the
suffix:
<despotic> /dɪˈspɒt.ɪk/ (US) /desˈpɑː.t̬ɪk/
In other words, the stress falls two
syllables ahead of the suffix:
<insecticide>
/ɪnˈsek.tɪ.saɪd/
There are also 'mixed' pre-stressed
suffixes where the stress may fall either one or two syllables before the
suffix.
The suffix-ation is actually a
combination of the stress-neutral -ate and the pre-stress suffix -ion.
In words containing -ation, the strongest stress is always on the
penultimate syllable, e.g.:
<condemnation> /ˌkɒn.demˈneɪ.ʃən/ (US) /ˌkɑː-/
Contents of this page
p522. A consonant which can stand
alone as a syllable.
UKT: See also
Syllabic consonants in the Introduction. See also
Alpha-syllabary
or abugida -- a system of writing on which Myanmar script is based.
Examples for English
The great majority of syllables in all
languages have a vowel at their centre, and may have one or more consonants
preceding and following the vowel (though languages differ) greatly in the
possible occurrences of consonants in syllables). However, in a few cases we
find syllables which contain nothing that could conventionally be classed as a
vowel. In English, syllabic consonants appear to arise as a consequence of a
weak vowel becoming lost, and some appear to have become obligatory in
present-day speech, e.g.:
<bottle> /ˈbɒt.l̩/ (US) /ˈbɑː.t̬ḷ/
In many other cases in English it
appears to be possible either to pronounce
/m n ŋ l r/as syllabic consonants
or to pronounce them with a preceding vowel, e.g.:
<button> /ˈbʌt.ṇ/
<orderly> /ˈɔːdḷ.i , -də.li/ (US) /ˈɔːr.dɚ.li/
<history> /ˈhɪs.tṛ.i , -tə.ri/ (US) /-tṛ.i , -tɚ-/
In this dictionary, the use of a
superscript schwa (ə)
indicates the possibility of a syllabic consonant.
The matter is more confusing because
of the fact that speakers do not agree in their intuitions about whether a
consonant (particularly /l/
) is syllabic or not: while most would agree that, for example, <cuddle> and
<cycle> are disyllabic (i.e. contain two syllables), <cuddly> and <cycling> are
disyllabic for some people (and therefore do not contain a syllabic consonant)
while for others they are trisyllabic.
In other languages
For syllables not to contain a vowel
is a normal state of affairs in some languages (consider the first syllables of
the Czech names <Brno> and <Vltava>). In Japanese some consonants appear to be
able to stand as syllables by themselves, according to the intuitions of native
speakers who are asked to divide speech up into rhythmical beats.
Contents of this page
p522. A fundamentally important unit
-- the most basic unit in speech. Here we are concerned with the phonological
notion of the syllable.
Examples for English
Phonologists are interested in the
structure of the syllable, since there appear to be interesting observations to
be made about which phonemes may occur at the beginning, in the middle and at
the end of syllables. In English, it is possible to have from zero to up to
three consonants in the
ONSET of a syllable, and from zero to up to four in the
CODA.
The study of sequences of phonemes is
called 'phonotactics', and it seems that the phonotactic possibilities of a
language are determined by syllabic structure. This means that any sequence of
sounds that a native speaker produces can be broken down into syllables without
any segments being left over. For example, in <Their strengths triumphed
frequently>, we find the rather daunting sequences of consonant phonemes
/ŋθstr/
and /mftfr/
, but using what we know of English phonotactics we can split these clusters
into one part that belongs to the end of one syllable and another part that
belongs to the beginning of another. Thus the first one can only be divided
/ŋθ | str/
or
/ŋθs | tr/
and the second can only be /mft | fr/ .
Phonological treatments of syllable
structure usually call the first part of a syllable the ONSET, the middle part
the 'peak' and the end part the CODA. The combination of peak and coda is called
the RHYME. Syllable breaks,
however, may be problematic, when approximants occur at syllable boundaries.
Contents of this page
/r/-sound in Burmese-Myanmar and Pali-Myanmar
In spite of many
similarities between the Indian languages and the Burmese language (the language
of the majority of the population of Myanmar), one salient point of difference
is the total absence of the /r/ sound in the present day Burmese language.
However, since the /r/
sound is present in the accent of the people on the west coast of Myanmar (the
Rakhines), it is probable that the /r/
sound was originally present in the Burmese language. On the other hand there is
also the probability that the Rakhines, because of the geographical proximity,
have picked up the /r/
sound from the Indians.
Go back to r-sound-Bur-Pali-Myan-b
Contents of this page
End of TIL file