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ENGLISH PRONOUNCING DICTIONARY

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 .

Information panels N to P
43. Names of people and places | 44. Nasal consonant | 45. Nasalisation | 46. Neutral | 47. Neutralisation | 48. Onset | 49. Palatal | Palatal, palato- | 50. Palato-alveolar | UKT: Peak | 51. Pharyngeal | IPA-characters | 52. Phone | 53. Phoneme | 54. Phonetics | 55. Phonology | 56. Pitch | 57. Plosive | 58. Postalveolar | 59. Prefixes |

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43. Names of people and places

p359. It can be difficult to work out the pronunciation of some English words, and something like between ten to thirty percent of words in any text will have irregular spellings. Proper nouns for people and places can have really unexpected pronunciations. Here, we look at a few of the most interesting ones.

IPA_pharyngeal

Examples

Family names are well known for having interesting realisations. This can be because some letters are not pronounced, but, in some cases, the way a word is written looks almost entirely different to the pronunciation, e.g.:

It is a similar situation for place names, e.g.:

Welsh place names can be very difficult to decipher for people who do not know the rules that govern the spelling of Welsh. Although Welsh is written using the same alphabet as English, the values of the letter are frequently different, e.g.:

There is some regularity amongst suffixes in some place names. The suffix <-ham> in British place names, for example, is usually pronounced /-əm/ , as in <Birmingham>. However, in the North American place name <Birmingham>, <-ham> is pronounced /-hæm/. Another common suffix in British place names, <-cester>, is usually pronounced /-stəʳ/ (us)  /-stɚ/, e.g. as in <Worcester> above (although note also <Cirencester>, in which one possible realisation is /-ses.təʳ/ (us)  /-ses.tɚ/). Finally, the suffix <-wich> in e.g. <Warwick> is usually pronounced /-ɪk/ in British place names, although there are exceptions.

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44. Nasal consonant

p360. A consonant in which the air escapes only through the nose. For this to happen, two articulatory actions are necessary: firstly, the SOFT PALATE (or 'velum') must be lowered to allow air to escape past it and, secondly, a closure must be made in the oral cavity to prevent air from escaping through it. The closure may be at any place of articulation from BILABIAL at the front of the oral cavity to 'uvular' at the back (in the latter case there is contact between the tip of the lowered soft palate and the raised back of the tongue).

UKT: See diagrams of Speech organs. English has three commonly found nasal consonants, whereas Burmese has five: (bilabial) /m/ {ma.}, (alveolar) /n/ {na.} and {Na.}, (palatal) /ɲ/ {ña.}, and (velar) /ŋ/ (nga.}.
   "Voiceless nasal consonants do exist (in world's languages) (for example in Burmese), but they are quite rare." -- http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Fall_1998/ling001/mawu/node2.html . Though the author did not specify which Burmese consonant he was referring to, the only nasal consonant that could be termed "voiceless" is  /ɲ/ {ña.}.

Examples for English

English has three commonly found nasal consonants: bilabial, alveolar and velar, for which the symbols /m n ŋ/ are used. /ŋ/ cannot occur at the beginning of a syllable, e.g.:

UKT: Some syllables are made up of three parts: an ONSET (beginning), a PEAK (middle), and a CODA (end). The peak and the coda constitute the RHYME (or RIME) of the syllable. -- see CODA.

There is disagreement over the phonemic status of the velar nasal: some claim that it must be a phoneme since it can be placed in contrastive contexts like <sum>/<sun>/<sung>, while others state that the velar nasal is an ALLOPHONE of /n/ which occurs before /k/ and /g/.

UKT: Whatever the phonemic status of the velar nasal /ŋ/ maybe, the B-Myanmar (nga.} is a phoneme in its own right. Unlike the English [ng], the Burmese (nga.} can occur in the ONSET, and the pronunciations of syllables formed from /ŋ/ (nga.} are quite different from those formed from /n/ {na.}, for example {nga:} <fish> is very different from {na:} <ear>. Yet my American friends have told me they cannot differentiate between the three: {nga:} <fish> ; {ña:} <to be wedded> ; {na:} <ear>.

In English we find 'nasal release' of PLOSIVE consonants: when a plosive is followed by a nasal consonant the usual articulation is to release the compressed air by lowering the soft palate. This is particularly noticeable when the plosive and the nasal are 'homorganic' (share the same place of articulation), as for example in <topmost>, <Putney>. The result is that no plosive release is heard from the speaker's mouth before the nasal consonant, e.g.:

Nasal release can also result in a SYLLABIC CONSONANT, e.g.:

In Burmese -- collection by UKT

• "Many pairs of consonants distinguished by the voiced-voiceless contrast are found in different languages. Welsh has voiced and voiceless LATERAL consonants, while Burmese has voiced and voiceless NASAL consonants." -- from DJPD16, see VOICING.

• Nasals are stops and sonorants, that is there is a complete blockage of the mouth, and the voice resonates freely without friction. They are almost always voiced. Burmese has voiceless nasals hm hn hng, as do some languages near it such as Hmong. In Old English there were a few words like hnutu, modern 'nut', which might have been pronounced as a voiceless nasal, or might have been a sequence h + n with a stronger h -- From: http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=nasal
(UKT: I cannot make out what exactly the author meant by voiceless nasals hm hn hng. Did he meant {hum:}, {han:}, and {hing:}? If the answer is yes, then he meant the syllables. On the other hand he he meant conjunct phonemes: {mha.} , {nha.} and {ngha.}?

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45. Nasalisation

p360. The addition of nasal escape of air to a sound which would not normally have it.

UKT: Burmese and Indic languages have an instrument, a modifying character, for nasalisation. In B-Myanmar it is {thé:thé:tin} and in Hindi-Devanagari it is ANUSVARA. The symbol or the diacritical mark is the same: a dot (Sanskrit: bindu) above the character to be nasalised. See http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Devanagari
   See also Combining Marks in Devanagari, The Unicode Standard, Version 4.0, issued by the Unicode Consortium and published by Addison-Wesley. Chapter 9
"Devanagari and other Indic scripts have a number of combining marks that could be considered diacritic. One class of these marks, known as bindus, ... These marks indicate nasalization ... " -- http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.0.0/ch09

Examples for English

The best known examples of nasalisation in English are nasalised vowels. In most vowels the airflow escapes entirely through the mouth, but often, in a vowel preceding or following a nasal consonant, we find air escaping also through the nose.

This is a kind of coarticulation, e.g.:

Nasalised vowels are not phonemically contrastive in English.

In other languages

Nasalised vowels are phonemically contrastive in a number of languages, such as French, which has pairs of words such as <beau - bon> /bo - bō/ and <mais - main> /mɛ - mɛ̄/.

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46. Neutral

p364. A term used to describe lip configuration in speech sounds, in which the lips are neither rounded nor spread (see ROUNDING and SPREADING). The term 'unrounded' is also commonly used but can apply equally to spread lips.

Examples for English

The English vowels /ə/ (schwa) and /ɜː/ are thought as having a neutral lip configuration.

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47. Neutralisation

p364. The loss of contrast between PHONEMES.

Examples for English

In its simple form, the theory of the phoneme implies that two sounds that are in opposition to each other (e.g. /t/ and /d/ in English) are in this relationship in all contexts throughout the language. Closer study of phonemes has, however, shown that there are some contexts where the opposition no longer functions: for example, in a word like <still> /stɪl/, the /t/ is in a position (following /s/ and preceding a vowel) where voiced (LENIS) PLOSIVES do not occur. There is no possibility in English of the existence of a pair of words such as /stɪl/ and */sdɪl/, so in this context the opposition between /t/ and /d/ is 'neutralised'. One consequence of this is that one could equally well claim that the plosive in this word is a /d/, not a /t/. (See also ASPIRATION.)

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48. Onset

p380. In the analysis of syllable structure (and occasionally in other areas), the first part of a syllable.
UKT: See CODA .

Examples for English

In English the onset may be zero (when no consonant precedes the vowel in a syllable), one consonant, or two, or three, e.g.:

There are many restrictions on what clusters of consonants may occur in onsets: for example, if an English syllable has a three-consonant onset, the first consonant must be /s/ and the last one must be one of /l r j w/.

UKT: B-Myanmar {sa.} and {hsa.} that correspond to English [s] /s/ can only be followed by {wa.} as {wa.hswè:}-conjuncts, {swa.} and {hswa.}, in the onset. This makes transliteration of English words that begin with [s] into Burmese an impossibility.
   Conjuncts with  [y] /j/ {ya.} ( {ya.pin.});  [r] /r/ {ra.} ( {ra.ris}); and [h] /h/ {ha.} ( {ha.hto:}) are not allowed, and of course, there is no such thing as a conjunct with [l] /l/ {la.}.

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49. Palatal

p393. A palatal consonant is one in which the tongue makes contact with or approaches the highest part of the hard palate. The hard palate is mainly composed of a thin layer of bone and is dome-shaped, as you can feel by exploring it with the tip of your tongue.

UKT: Burmese has two palatal consonants:  /ɲ/ {ña.}, and /j/ {ya.}.

Examples for English

In English, the only phoneme described as palatal is /j/, e.g.:

UKT: In <beautiful>, [eau] is behaving as the conjunct of {ya.}.

However, phonetically a voiceless palatal fricative [ç] (U00E7) can also occur for the consonants in the sequence /hjuː/

Palatal, palato-  by UKT
DJPD16 states "the only phoneme described as palatal is /j/ ". However other languages such as Burmese may have phonemes described as palatal or palato- . The following list is from American Mathematical Society http://www.ams.org/STIX/glyphs/proposal/reference/stixiso-02.html

01.	voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative	(U0255)	/ɕ/
02.	voiced palatal plosive	(U025F)	/ɟ/
03.	bilabial-palatal approximant	(U0265)	/ɥ/
04.	voiceless fricative simultaneously palato-alveolar and velar	(U0267)	/ɧ/
05.	palatal nasal	(U0272)	/ɲ/	UKT identification: {ña.}
06.	voiceless palato-alveolar fricative	(U0283)	/ʃ/	UKT: there are 3 conjuncts, which can be pronounced as {sha.}
07.	implosive palatal stop	(U0284)	/ʄ/
08.	palatalized voiceless palato-alveolar fricative	(U0286)	/ʆ/
09.	palatal lateral	(U028E)	/ʎ/
10.	voiced alveolo-palatal fricative	(U0291)	/ʑ/
11.	voiced palato-alveolar fricative	(U0292)	/ʒ/
12.	palatalized voiced palato-alveolar fricative	(U0293)	/ʓ/
13.	voiced palatal fricative	(U029D)	/ʝ/
14.	voiced alveolo-palatal affricate	(U02A5)	/ʥ/
15.	voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate	(U02A8)	/ʨ/

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50. Palato-alveolar

p394. Palato-alveolar sounds are made between the upper teeth and the front part of the palate.

In the description of English, this term has been largely replaced by POST-ALVEOLAR.

In other languages

It has been proposed that there is a difference between palato-alveolar and 'alveolo-palatal' that can be reliably distinguished, though others argue that factors other than the place of articulation are usually involved. The latter sounds are placed further forward in the mouth than the former: an example of an alveolo-palatal consonant is that of Polish /ɕ/ (U0255) in <Kasia> (compare /ʃ/ (U0283) in <kasza>.

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UKT. Peak

• A syllable consists of an ONSET, PEAK (peak of sonority -- sometimes called a NUCLEUS), and CODA. Based on: -- http://www.ingilish.com/englishsyllablestress.htm

• The most prominent sound is the syllable peak, which is by definition syllabic. -- http://www.utexas.edu/courses/lin372k/21.pdf

• In the case of <cat> /kæt/, the Onset, Peak and Coda each consist of one segment: the consonant (C) /k/ occupies the Onset, the vowel (V) /æ/ – the Peak, and the consonant /t/ is the Coda of this syllable. However, there are syllables in English where either or both marginal elements (i.e. O and/or Co) are absent – only the Peak is an obligatory element in all languages, and in English both the Onset and the Coda are optional. (There are languages, though, where the Onset is obligatory, as well as such that allow no Codas.) Consider the following examples:
<sea> /si:/ -- Onset = /s/ ; Peak = /i:/ ; Coda = Ø (none)
<on> /ɒn/ -- Onset = Ø ; Peak = /ɒ/ ; Coda = /n/
<eye> /aɪ/ -- Onset = Ø ; Peak = /aɪ/ ; Coda = Ø
-- http://www.personal.rdg.ac.uk/~llsroach/phon2/mitko/syllable.htm

• Syllable structure, which is the combination of allowable segments and typical sound sequences, is language specific.
Onset -- initial segment of a syllable -- Optional
Rhyme -- core of a syllable, consisting of a nucleus and coda -- Obligatory
Nucleus -- central segment of a syllable -- Obligatory
Coda -- closing segment of a syllable -- Optional
--- http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsASyllable.htm

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51. Pharyngeal

p407. Description of a sound made by constricting the muscles of the pharynx (and usually also some of the LARYNX muscles to create an obstruction to the airflow from the lungs.

Examples for English

English does not have any pharyngeal phonemes.

In other languages

The best known languages that has pharyngeal consonants is Arabic, most dialects of which have voiced and voiceless fricatives.

UKT: IPA characters for pharyngeal phonemes
from American Mathematical Society http://www.ams.org/STIX/glyphs/proposal/reference/stixiso-02.html

IPA characters for pharyngeal phonemes - by UKT
from American Mathematical Society http://www.ams.org/STIX/glyphs/proposal/reference/stixiso-02.html

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52. Phone

p409. A unit at the phonetic level in the study of speech. The term PHONEME is very widely used for a contrastive unit of sound in language. However, a term is also needed for a unit at the phonetic level, since there is not always a one-to-one correspondence between units at the two levels.

Examples for English

The English word <can't> is phonetically /kɑːnt/ in British English and /kænt/ in US English (4 phonemic units), but may be pronounced [kɑ̄ːt] or [kǣt] with the nasal consonant phoneme absorbed into the preceding vowel as NASALISATION (3 phonetic units). 

UKT: /ɑ̄/(U0251 U0304); /ǣ/(U00E6 U0304)

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53. Phoneme

Phoneme

p409. A fundamental unit of phonology, usually said to be the smallest unit of speech. It has been defined and used in many different ways.

UKT: To show that a character is a phoneme, the character is enclosed within / / known as phoneme brackets. See 2.9 Use of /i/ and /u/ .

UKT: Re-write from: http://linguistlist.org/~ask-ling/archive-1998.4/msg00247.html
A phoneme is a contrastive unit of sound-structure, a morpheme is a contrastive unit of grammar. Consider the following words:  <bed>, <dead>, <fed>, <led>, <red>, <said>, etc. are all words which in their sound-structure (not their spelling) are distinguished by the initial consonant.  What is important about the /l/-sound in <led> is that it is not a /d/-sound or an /r/-sound, etc. etc., because it must contrast with these to make different words from <dead>, <red>, etc.  This establishes /l/ as a contrastive unit of sound structure, a phoneme.
   [For further thought: /l/ is not an object, it is a class.  The precise sound of the [ l ] sound in <led> will be different from the precise quality of the [ l ]-sound in <load> and the precise quality of the [ l ]-sound in <pull> and the precise quality of the [ l ] sound in <health>.  All these different [ l ]-sounds are members of the class /l/.]
   Now think of the words <want>, <wants>, <wanted>, <wanting>.  Each of the last three can be divided into two chunks, want and s, ed, ing.  Each of these chunks has its own meaning (<want> means 'want', s means 'a single person, neither you nor I', ed means 'past', ... ing ... has a recurrent meaning in <wanting>, <seeing>, <killing>, <hearing>, etc.).  Each also is a grammatical unit.  And they contrast:  s, ed and ing contrast with each other since <wants>, <wanted> and <wanting> are different words, <want> contrasts with <hear>, <kill>, <see> in the words cited just above.  So each of these is a contrastive unit of grammar.
   [For further thought 1:  Each of the contrastive units of grammar, the morphemes, is made up of one or more of the contrastive units of sound-structure, the phonemes.  The phonemes don't mean anything, they just allow you to distinguish items which do have meaning. The morphemes have meaning.]
   [For further thought 2: A morpheme like the {s} in <wants> is not an object, it is a class.  In <wants>, {s} is pronounced /s/, but in <mends> it is pronounced /z/.  The different pronunciations are both members of the class {s}.]
   [For further thought 3:  I have used different notations for sounds, phonemes and morphemes, enclosing each in different kinds of bracket.  This is standard notation.  [s] means s considered as an actual sound, /s/ means s considered as a phoneme, and {s} means s considered as a morpheme.  This is confusing only because we have here a morpheme made up of one phoneme: {want} couldn't be a phoneme!]

Examples for English

Virtually all theories of phonology hold that spoken language can be broken down into a string of sound units (phonemes), and that each language has a small, relatively fixed set of these phonemes. Most phonemes can be put into groups, for example, in English we can identify a group of PLOSIVE phonemes /p  t  k  b  d  g/, a group of voiceless FRICATIVES /f  θ s  ʃ  h/, and so on.

An important question in phoneme theory is how the analyst can establish what the phonemes of a language are.

The most widely accepted view is that phonemes are 'contrastive' and one must find cases where the difference between two words is dependent on the difference between two phonemes. For example, we can prove that the difference between <pin> /pɪn/ and <pan> /pæn/ depends on the vowel, and that /ɪ/ and /æ/ are different phonemes.

Pairs of words that differ in just one phoneme are known as 'minimum pairs'. We can establish the same fact about /p/ and /b/ by citing <pin> and <bin>.

Tests like these are called 'commutation tests' and can only be carried out when a provisional list of possible phonemes has been established, so some some basic phonetic analysis must precede this stage.

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54. Phonetics

p410. The scientific study of speech. It has a long history, going back certainly to well over two thousand years ago. The central concerns in phonetics are the discovery of how speech sounds are produced, how they are used in spoken language, how we can record speech sounds with written symbols and how we hear and recognise different sounds.

In the first of these areas, when we study the production of speech sounds we can observe what speakers do ('articulatory' observation0 and we can try to feel what is going on inside our vocal tract ('kinaesthetic' observation). The second area is where phonetics overlaps with PHONOLOGY: usually in phonetics we are only interested in sounds that are used in meaningful speech, and phoneticians are interested in discovering the range and variety of sounds used in this way in all the known languages of the world.

This is sometimes known as 'linguistic phonetics'. Thirdly, there has always been a need for agreed conventions for using phonetic symbols that represent speech sounds; the International Phonetic Association has played a very important role in this. Finally 'auditory' aspect of speech is very important. The ear is capable of making fine discrimination between different sounds, and sometimes it is not possible to define in articulatory terms precisely what the difference is. A good example of this is in vowel classification. While it is important to know the position and shape of the tongue and lips, it is often very important to have been trained in an agreed set of standard auditory qualities that vowels can be reliably related to (see CARDINAL VOWELS). Another important area is acoustic phonetics which studies the physical properties of speech sounds.

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55. Phonology

p410. The study of the sound systems of languages.

The most basic activity in phonology is 'phonemic analysis', in which the objective is to establish what the PHONEMES are and arrive at the 'phonemic inventory' of the language. Very few phonologists have ever believed that his would be an adequate analysis of the sound system of a language: it is necessary to go beyond this. On can look at 'suprasegmental' phonology -- the study of STRESS, RHYTHM and INTONATION. (UKT: See Prosody) One can go beyond the phoneme and look into the detailed characteristics of each unit in terms of 'distinctive features'. The way in which sounds can combine in a language is studied in 'phonotactics' and and in the analysis of syllable structure.

For some phonologists the most important area is the relationships between the different phonemes -- how they form groups, the nature of the contrasts between them and how those oppositions may be neutralised (see NEUTRALISATION). For others, the most important activity is to discover the rules which affect the phonemes of the language and the way they are produced, and to express these rules as economically as possible.

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56. Pitch

p414. An auditory sensation which places sounds on a scale from low to high.

UKT: See Pitch in Prosody from: http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ling201/test2materials/prosody.htm

When we hear a regularly vibrating sound such as a note played on a musical instrument, or a vowel produced by the human voice, we hear a high pitch if the rate of vibration is high and a low pitch if the rate of vibration is low. Many speech sounds are voiceless (e.g. [s]) and cannot give rise to a sensation of pitch in this way. The pitch sensation that we receive from a voiced sound corresponds quite closely to the frequency of the vocal folds. However, we usually refer to this vibration frequency as 'fundamental frequency' (which we can measure) in order to distinguish it from the subjective impression of pitch.

Pitch is used in many languages as an essential component of the pronunciation of a word, so that a change of pitch may cause a change in meaning: these are called 'tone languages'. In most languages (whether or not they are tone languages) pitch plays a central role in INTONATION.

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57. Plosive

p416. A sound produced by forming a complete obstruction to the flow of air out of the mouth and nose. Normally, this results in a build-up of compressed air inside the chamber formed by the closure. When the closure is released, there is a small explosion that causes a sharp noise.

Examples for English

British English and US English have six plosive consonants, /p t k/ (voiceless) and /b d g/ (voiced).

In syllable-initial position (UKT: see ONSET), sounds in the voiceless group /p t k/ are strongly aspirated (see ASPIRATION), and in final position GLOTTALISATION of these sounds causes a shortening of the preceding vowel. Sounds in the voiced group /b d g/ tend to be 'devoiced' at the beginning and ends of words. At the ends of words, the pairs of sounds /p b/, /t d/ and /k g/ can sound very similar due to this, and one must listen to the length of the vowel to work out which consonant is being produced. (UKT: see DEVOICING .)

The basic plosive consonant type can be of many different forms: plosives may have any place of articulation, may be voiced or voiceless and may have an 'egressive' (breathing out) or 'ingressive' (breathing in) airflow. The airflow may be from the lungs ('pulmonic'), from the larynx ('glottalic') or generated in the mouth ('velaric'). We find great variation in the release of the plosive.

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58. Postalveolar

p422. Descriptive of sounds made between the upper teeth and the front part of the palate.

Examples for English

British and US English have two sets of sounds referred to postalveolar, the FRICATIVES /ʃ ʒ/ and the AFFRICATES /ʧ ʤ/.

UKT: /ʃ/ as in <sheep> is represented by three B-Myanmar aksharas, {yha.}, {rha.}, {thhya.} (please note that Romabama is a transliteration representing 1-1 from Myanmar to Latin, {yha.}, {rha.}, {thhya.} are how the syllables are spelled: they are all pronounced as /ʃ/ as in <sheep>. I cannot think of any equivalent of /ʒ/. However, /ʧ ʤ/ are represented by {hkya.} and {gya.}

These are also referred to as PALATO-ALVEOLAR, e.g.:

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59. Prefixes

p425. A prefix is an element placed at the beginning of a word to modify or alter its meaning. In general, prefixes do not alter the original pronunciation of the word stem on to which they are affixed, though they may attract secondary stress.

A narrow definition of prefix would apply only in the case of words where removal of the prefix would leave a free-standing word (for example, <unfit> is <un> + <fit>), but many treatments of English word stress also treat as prefixes such elements as <con> in <contain> or <in> in <insert>, where <tain> and <sert> do not exist independently as words.

Examples