Wednesday, 12 March 2008

• Language ho!

  Recently, I've developed quite a fascination with the English language and pronunciation. I think the issue really began when various people meeting me for the first time suggested I touted an unidentifiable foreign accent. Naturally, this led me to the bastion of all human knowledge, Wikipedia, to look up random data on pronunciation. Luckily for me, I found a veritable cornucopia of information.
  

  
  

  For instance, in the field of Phonemic mergers, how many of you have fallen prey to the whine-wine merger? Apparently, what was once considered the educated manner of pronunciation (hwuht/hwot, hwahy) has now been nearly entirely limited to residents of the American south. However, apparently in the most prestigious drama schools in London it is still taught as the correct way to speak.

  Another interesting sound-drop is the yod (or ‘y’ sound, generally represented by [j]). Without thinking, how many of you say new [nu], rather than new [nju]? How about avenue with or without the ‘y’ sound? (av-uh-nju, -nu) In fact, without that extra sound, a fair number of words sound exactly the same (dew/do, for example). This is also related to the yod-coalescence, in which yod sound becomes an actual ‘j’ sound (as opposed to a ‘y’ sound represented by a [j]). Educate, graduate, and creature are mostly pronounced as such.

  
  

  

  In case you're confused, a reference chart always helps
  

  
  

  For me, I find it fascinating to simply listen to people as they speak to see which sounds they pronounce, and which they don’t (though, no doubt the people around me get quite annoyed by my occasional corrections). The thing is, I understand that without a centrally governing body, there is not a ‘correct’ way to say most things, but I can’t help but feel that randomly leaving off syllables is different than pronouncing other syllables differently. For instance, while I would never correct somebody for saying rath -er, instead of rah-th -er, most people agree that dropping ‘g’s on verbs seems somewhat colloquial. As such, observing a person’s pronunciation can tell you a number of interesting things about the speaker, like where they are from, and generally how well educated they are. (It can also be somewhat confusing; I was listening to some fellow read a book-on-tape the other day who included the yod in words like illumination, which is fairly rare, but with the exception of being non-rhotic most of his consonant pronunciation sounded American)

  Also fascinating is the history behind the language, and why things are pronounced and spelled as they are. For instance, I find humorous the conflict between the Americans and the World over the use of ‘u’ in a number of words (hono[u]r, colo[u]r, etc). Apparently, the word ‘honour’ came to current English through Middle English, after Old French, which was copying the original Latin. When the word went from Latin to Old French, a ‘u’ was added, and to this day the British (and most of the world) add that ‘u’. However, Americans do not. The real humour is that the Americans do not because they believe they are copying the Latin, and thus using the older, more correct version, while the British do add the ‘u’ because they see themselves as being older and more conservative by supporting the status quo.

  I suppose as long as one can be understood, it’s enough for basic communication, but I do find it interesting to study the differences in language.

  
  
  

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