83-732: Aquashicola Creek ( Ahkwa-SHIK-ola ), also known as Aquanchicola Creek , or Aquanshicola Creek , is a 20.8-mile-long (33.5 km) tributary of the Lehigh River in the Pocono Mountains in Northeastern Pennsylvania . The name is derived from the language of the Lenape , meaning "where we fish with the bush net." The creek rises from a swamp to the southeast of Saylorsburg , and flows westward between Chestnut Ridge and Blue Mountain . It meets its major tributary, Buckwha Creek , to
166-628: A postalveolar approximant , which would normally be expressed with the sign [ɹ] in the International Phonetic Alphabet , but the sign /r/ is nonetheless traditionally used for RP in most of the literature on the topic. Voiceless plosives ( /p/ , /t/ , /k/ , /tʃ/ ) are aspirated at the beginning of a syllable, unless a completely unstressed vowel follows. (For example, the /p/ is aspirated in "impasse", with primary stress on "-passe", but not "compass", where "-pass" has no stress.) Aspiration does not occur when /s/ precedes in
249-671: A quantitative-qualitative IPA notation system when he took over editorship of the EPD (13th edition, 1967); and by the 1990s, the Gimson system had become the de facto standard for phonetic notation of British Received Pronunciation (RP). The first native (not learner's) English dictionary using IPA may have been the Collins English Dictionary (1979), and others followed suit. The Oxford English Dictionary , 2nd edition ( OED 2, 1989) used IPA, transcribed letter-for-letter from entries in
332-429: A syllabic nasal ( bitten [ˈbɪʔn̩] ). The glottal stop may be realised as creaky voice ; thus, an alternative phonetic transcription of attempt [əˈtʰemʔt] could be [əˈtʰemm̰t] . As in other varieties of English, voiced plosives ( /b/ , /d/ , /ɡ/ , /dʒ/ ) are partly or even fully devoiced at utterance boundaries or adjacent to voiceless consonants . The voicing distinction between voiced and voiceless sounds
415-527: A "non-phonemic" approach using a small set of common spelling patterns in which words would be respelled chunk by chunk, rather than phoneme by phoneme, as in this respelling of persiflage (IPA: /ˈpərsɪˌflɑʒ/ ): per-sif-large. According to both authors, the reduced vowel ( schwa ) does not need to be shown in a respelling so long as syllabification and syllable stress are shown. The following overlapping issues concerning pronunciation respelling in children's dictionaries were directly raised by Yule and Fraser:
498-445: A basis for description in textbooks and classroom materials. RP has been the traditional choice for teachers and learners of British English . However, the choice of pronunciation model is difficult, and the adoption of RP is in many ways problematic. Nasals and liquids ( /m/ , /n/ , /ŋ/ , /r/ , /l/ ) may be syllabic in unstressed syllables . The consonant /r/ in RP is generally
581-557: A blog entry on 16 March 2012 that when growing up in the north of England he used /ɑː/ in "bath" and "glass", and considers this the only acceptable phoneme in RP. Others have argued that /æ/ is too categorical in the north of England to be excluded. Clive Upton believes that /æ/ in these words must be considered within RP and has called the opposing view "south-centric". Upton's Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English gives both variants for BATH words. A. F. Gupta's survey of mostly middle-class students found that /æ/
664-488: A dictionary and must rely on the pronunciation respellings to find the correct match. Traditional respelling systems for English use only the 26 ordinary letters of the Latin alphabet with diacritics , and are meant to be easy for native readers to understand. English dictionaries have used various such respelling systems to convey phonemic representations of the spoken word since Samuel Johnson published his Dictionary of
747-468: A few non-phonemic symbols /ʳ i u ᵊl ᵊn/ to represent both RP and General American pronunciation in a single IPA transcription. Clive Upton updated the Gimson scheme, changing the symbols used for five vowels. He served as pronunciation consultant for the influential Concise Oxford English Dictionary , which adopted this scheme in its ninth edition (1995). Upton's reform is controversial: it reflects changing pronunciation, but critics say it represents
830-427: A language, the pictures in these dictionaries both define the entry words and are the "keys" to their pronunciation. Respellings for English begin to appear in dictionaries for novice readers. Generally, US-based dictionaries contain pronunciation information for all headwords, while UK-based dictionaries provide pronunciation information only for unusual (e.g., ache ) or ambiguously spelled (e.g., bow ) words. As
913-421: A method for teachers to indicate pronunciation without respelling as a supplement to the respelling scheme used in the dictionary. Pronunciation without respelling is also sometimes used in texts with many unusual words, such as Bibles, when it is desirable to show the received pronunciation. These will often be more exhaustive than dictionary respelling keys because all possible digraphs or readings need to have
SECTION 10
#1732852159162996-420: A monosyllabic triphthong. In more casual speech the middle vowel may be considerably reduced, by a process known as smoothing , and in an extreme form of this process the triphthong may even be reduced to a single long vowel. In such a case the difference between /aʊə/ , /aɪə/ , and /ɑː/ in tower , tire , and tar may be neutralised with all three units realised as [ɑː] or [äː] . This type of smoothing
1079-530: A narrower regional accent, and abandons parallelism with American and Australian English. In addition, the phonetician John C. Wells said that he could not understand why Upton had altered the presentation of price to prʌɪs . Upton outlined his reasons for the transcription in a chapter of A Handbook of Varieties of English . He said that the PRICE -vowel represented how the starting point could be anything from centralised front to centralised back. The change in
1162-417: A new system (which he calls Standard Southern British English, or SSB) as a replacement. Lindsey's system is as follows—differences between it and standard transcription are depicted with the usual transcription in brackets. Like all accents, RP has changed with time. For example, sound recordings and films from the first half of the 20th century demonstrate that it was usual for speakers of RP to pronounce
1245-455: A p and m a rry , /ɒ/ in l o t and o range , /ə/ in a go and sof a . Examples of long vowels : /iː/ in fl ee ce , /uː/ in g oo se , /ɛː/ in b ear , /ɜː/ in n ur se and f ur ry , /ɔː/ in n or th , f or ce and th ou ght , /ɑː/ in f a ther and st ar t . The long mid front vowel /ɛː/ is elsewhere transcribed with the traditional symbols ⟨ ɛə, eə ⟩. The predominant realisation in contemporary RP
1328-475: A prestige norm there and (to varying degrees) in other parts of the British Isles and beyond. Faced with the difficulty of defining a single standard of RP, some researchers have tried to distinguish between sub-varieties: Traditionally, Received Pronunciation has been associated with high social class. It was the "everyday speech in the families of Southern English persons whose men-folk [had] been educated at
1411-515: A separate transcription for each. British and American English dialects have a similar set of phonemes , but some are pronounced differently; in technical parlance, they consist of different phones . Although developed for RP, the Gimson system being phonemic, it is not far from much of General American pronunciation as well. A number of recent dictionaries, such as the Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's English Dictionary , add
1494-500: A special class of dictionary giving a wide range of possible pronunciations: British pronunciation dictionaries are all based on RP, though not necessarily using that name. Daniel Jones transcribed RP pronunciations of words and names in the English Pronouncing Dictionary . Cambridge University Press continues to publish this title, as of 1997 edited by Peter Roach . Two other pronunciation dictionaries are in common use:
1577-515: A symbol of the southeast's political power in Britain. Based on a 1997 survey, Jane Stuart-Smith wrote, "RP has little status in Glasgow, and is regarded with hostility in some quarters". A 2007 survey found that residents of Scotland and Northern Ireland tend to dislike RP. It is shunned by some with left-wing political views, who may be proud of having accents more typical of the working classes. Since
1660-447: A unique spelling. * IPA symbols interpreted by Misplaced Pages. † This reading or symbol is only obtained or used before "r". ‡ This reading is only obtained in unstressed syllables. The International Phonetic Alphabet is a standardized method of phonetic transcription developed by a group of English and French language teachers in 1888. In the beginning, only specialized pronunciation dictionaries for linguists used it, for example,
1743-414: A weak dental plosive ; the sequence /nð/ is often realised as [n̪n̪] (a long dental nasal ). /l/ has velarised allophone ( [ɫ] ) in the syllable rhyme . /h/ becomes voiced ( [ɦ] ) between voiced sounds. Examples of short vowels : /ɪ/ in k i t , m i rror and rabb i t , /ʊ/ in f oo t and c oo k , /e/ in dr e ss and m e rry , /ʌ/ in str u t and c u rry , /æ/ in tr
SECTION 20
#17328521591621826-662: Is monophthongal . Many conventional descriptions of the RP vowel system group the non-diphthongal vowels into the categories "long" and "short". This should not be taken to mean that RP has minimal pairs in which the only difference is vowel length. "Long" and "short" are convenient cover terms for a number of phonetic features. The long-short pairings shown above include also differences in vowel quality. The vowels called "long" high vowels in RP /iː/ and /uː/ are slightly diphthongized , and are often narrowly transcribed in phonetic literature as diphthongs [ɪi] and [ʊu] . Vowels may be phonologically long or short (i.e. belong to
1909-532: Is a variable quantity differing from individual to individual, although all its varieties are 'received', understood and mainly unnoticed". Although a form of Standard English had been established in the City of London by the end of the 15th century, it did not begin to resemble RP until the late 19th century. RP has most in common with the dialects of what has been termed the South East Midlands, in particular
1992-403: Is adopted in the latest revision of Gimson's Pronunciation of English . Beverley Collins and Inger Mees use the term "Non-Regional Pronunciation" for what is often otherwise called RP, and reserve the term "Received Pronunciation" for the "upper-class speech of the twentieth century". Received Pronunciation has sometimes been called "Oxford English", as it used to be the accent of most members of
2075-457: Is common throughout many English dialects, though the phonetic realisation of e.g. [i] rather than [ɪ] (a phenomenon called happy -tensing ) is not as universal. According to Jane Setter , the typical pronunciation of the short [u] is a weakly rounded near-close near-back rounded vowel [ ʊ̜ ] . The centring diphthongs are gradually being eliminated in RP. The vowel /ɔə/ (as in door , boar ) had largely merged with /ɔː/ by
2158-557: Is defined in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary as "the standard accent of English as spoken in the South of England", and alternative names such as "Standard Southern British" have been used. Despite RP's historic high social prestige in Britain, being seen as the accent of those with power, money, and influence, it may be perceived negatively by some as being associated with undeserved, or accidental, privilege and as
2241-596: Is known as General American (GA). Sophisticated phonetic systems have been developed, such as James Murray 's scheme for the original Oxford English Dictionary , and the IPA, which replaced it in later editions and has been adopted by many British and international dictionaries. The IPA system is not a respelling system, because it uses symbols not in the English alphabet, such as ð and θ . Most current British dictionaries use IPA for this purpose. The following chart matches
2324-543: Is known as the tower – tire , tower – tar and tire – tar mergers . There are differing opinions as to whether /æ/ in the BATH lexical set can be considered RP. The pronunciations with /ɑː/ are invariably accepted as RP. The English Pronouncing Dictionary does not admit /æ/ in BATH words and the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary lists them with a § marker of non-RP status. John Wells wrote in
2407-410: Is not possible to predict with certainty the sound of a written English word from its spelling or the spelling of a spoken English word from its sound. So readers looking up an unfamiliar word in a dictionary may find, on seeing the pronunciation respelling, that the word is in fact already known to them orally. By the same token, those who hear an unfamiliar spoken word may see several possible matches in
2490-404: Is pronounced by some RP speakers in a noticeably different way when it occurs before /l/ , if that consonant is syllable-final and not followed by a vowel (the context in which /l/ is pronounced as a "dark l"). The realization of /əʊ/ in this case begins with a more back, rounded and sometimes more open vowel quality; it may be transcribed as [ɔʊ] or [ɒʊ] . It is likely that the backness of
2573-401: Is reinforced by a number of other differences, with the result that the two of consonants can clearly be distinguished even in the presence of devoicing of voiced sounds: As a result, some authors prefer to use the terms fortis and lenis in place of voiceless and voiced . However, the latter are traditional and in more frequent usage. The voiced dental fricative ( /ð/ ) is more often
Aquashicola Creek - Misplaced Pages Continue
2656-616: Is that they do not illuminate the English writing system. Like the IPA, they represent phonemes differently from the ways in which the phonemes are normally spelled. So these notations do not guide readers to infer the regularities of English spelling. Also, the practicality of these systems for learning English locally may be offset by difficulties in communication with people used to different norms such as General American or Received Pronunciation. Most beginner dictionaries are picture dictionaries, or word books. For preliterate native speakers of
2739-460: Is the British English accent regarded as the standard one, carrying the highest social prestige , since as late as the very early 20th century. Language scholars have long disagreed on topics such as: the exact definition of RP, how geographically neutral it is, how many speakers there are, the nature and classification of its sub-varieties, how appropriate a choice it is as a standard, how
2822-638: Is too low to correlate meaningfully with the usual factors", having found only two speakers (both having attended boarding schools in the south) who consistently used /ɑː/ . Jack Windsor Lewis has noted that the Oxford Dictionary's position has changed several times on whether to include short /æ/ within its prescribed pronunciation. The BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names uses only /ɑː/ , but its author, Graham Pointon, has stated on his blog that he finds both variants to be acceptable in place names. Some research has concluded that many people in
2905-480: The /æ/ sound, as in land , with a vowel close to [ɛ] , so that land would sound similar to a present-day pronunciation of lend . RP is sometimes known as the Queen's English , but recordings show that even Queen Elizabeth II shifted her pronunciation over the course of her reign, ceasing to use an [ɛ] -like vowel in words like land . The change in RP may be observed in the home of " BBC English ". The BBC accent of
2988-513: The English Pronouncing Dictionary edited by Daniel Jones ( EPD , 1917). The IPA, used by English teachers as well, started to appear in popular dictionaries for learners of English as a foreign language such as the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (1948) and Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (1978). IPA is very flexible and allows for a wide variety of transcriptions between broad phonemic transcriptions which describe
3071-680: The Golden Triangle of universities, namely London, Oxford and Cambridge, and the public schools that fed them, such as Eton , Harrow and Rugby . In 1922, the BBC selected RP as its broadcasting standard, citing its being widely understood globally as a reason. According to Fowler's Modern English Usage (1965), "the correct term is 'the Received Pronunciation'. The word 'received' conveys its original meaning of 'accepted' or 'approved', as in ' received wisdom'." Some linguists have used
3154-556: The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) in linguistics references and many bilingual dictionaries published outside the United States. The pronunciation which dictionaries refer to is some chosen "normal" one, thereby excluding other regional accents or dialect pronunciation. In England this standard is normally the Received Pronunciation , based upon the educated speech of southern England. The standard for American English
3237-499: The Longman Pronunciation Dictionary , compiled by John C. Wells (using the name "Received Pronunciation"), and Clive Upton 's Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English , (now republished as The Routledge Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English ). Pronunciation forms an essential component of language learning and teaching; a model accent is necessary for learners to aim at, and to act as
3320-448: The North of England have a dislike of the /ɑː/ vowel in BATH words. A. F. Gupta wrote, "Many of the northerners were noticeably hostile to /ɡrɑːs/ , describing it as 'comical', 'snobbish', 'pompous' or even 'for morons'." On the subject, K. M. Petyt wrote that several respondents "positively said that they did not prefer the long-vowel form or that they really detested it or even that it
3403-597: The University of Georgia . For many English language learners, particularly learners without easy Internet access, dictionary pronunciation respelling are the only source of pronunciation information for most new words. Which respelling systems are best for such learners has been a matter of debate. In countries where the local languages are written in non-Latin, phonemic orthographies , various other respelling systems have been used. In India, for example, many English bilingual dictionaries provide pronunciation respellings in
Aquashicola Creek - Misplaced Pages Continue
3486-477: The University of Oxford . The Handbook of the International Phonetic Association uses the name "Standard Southern British". Page 4 reads: Standard Southern British (where 'Standard' should not be taken as implying a value judgment of 'correctness') is the modern equivalent of what has been called 'Received Pronunciation' ('RP'). It is an accent of the south east of England which operates as
3569-484: The 1950s is distinctly different from today's: a news report from the 1950s is recognisable as such, and a mock-1950s BBC voice is used for comic effect in programmes wishing to satirise 1950s social attitudes such as the Harry Enfield Show and its "Mr. Cholmondley-Warner" sketches. A few illustrative examples of changes in RP during the 20th century and early 21st are given below. A more comprehensive list (using
3652-477: The English Language in 1755, the earliest being devised by James Buchanan us be featured in his 1757 dictionary Linguæ Britannicæ Vera Pronunciatio , although most words therein were not respelled but given diacritics; since the language described by Buchanan was that of Scotland, William Kenrick responded in 1773 with A New Dictionary of the English Language , wherein the pronunciation of Southern England
3735-634: The IPA and the Webster -based systems used in American dictionaries). Both studies found that in such systems, word respellings may be cumbersome and ambiguous, as in this respelling of psychology : "suy-kol-uh-jee". The authors of the two studies proposed alternative systems, though there were no follow-up studies. Yule's "cut system" leaves out extra letters, adds specific spellings for sounds with variable spellings, and adds accents to show long vowels, as in this respelling of occasion : o-cà-zhon. Fraser advocated
3818-448: The IPA symbols used to represent the sounds of the English language with the phonetic symbols used in several dictionaries, a majority of which transcribe American English . These works adhere (for the most part) to the one-symbol-per-sound principle. Other works not included here, such as Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary of the English Language (unabridged, 2nd ed. ), do not adhere and thus have several different symbols for
3901-549: The NURSE vowel was intended as a simplification as well as a reflection that nɜːs was not the only possible realisation in RP. The other alterations were intended to reflect changes that have occurred over time. The in-progress 3rd edition of the Oxford English Dictionary uses Upton's scheme for representing British pronunciations. For American pronunciations it uses an IPA-based scheme devised by William Kretzschmar of
3984-522: The RP vowel system. He also argues against including other French vowels on the grounds that not many British speakers succeed in distinguishing the vowels in bon and banc , or in rue and roue . However, the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary draws a distinction between /ɒ̃/ (there rendered as /ɔ̃ː/ ) and the unrounded /ɑ̃ː/ of banc for a total of four nasal vowels. Not all reference sources use
4067-590: The Second World War RP has played a much smaller role in broadcast speech. RP remains the accent most often heard in the speech of announcers and newsreaders on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4, and in some TV channels, but non-RP accents are now more widely encountered. Most English dictionaries published in Britain (including the Oxford English Dictionary ) now give phonetically transcribed RP pronunciations for all words. Pronunciation dictionaries represent
4150-534: The Second World War, and increasingly since the 1960s, a wider acceptance of regional English varieties has taken hold in education and public life. Nonetheless, surveys from 1969 to 2022 consistently show that RP is perceived as the most prestigious accent of English in the United Kingdom. In 2022, 25% of British adults reported being mocked for their regional accent at work, and 46% in social situations. In
4233-483: The Second World War, and the vowel /ʊə/ (as in poor , tour ) has more recently merged with /ɔː/ as well among most speakers, although the sound /ʊə/ is still found in conservative speakers, and in less common words such as boor . See CURE – FORCE merger . More recently /ɛə/ has become a pure long vowel /ɛː/ , as explained above. /ɪə/ is increasingly pronounced as a monophthong [ɪː] , although without merging with any existing vowels. The diphthong /əʊ/
SECTION 50
#17328521591624316-619: The accent has changed over time, and even its name. The study of RP is concerned only with matters of pronunciation, while other features of Standard British English , such as vocabulary , grammar , and style , are not considered. The accent has changed, or its traditional users have changed their accents, to such a degree over the last century that many of its early 20th-century traditions of transcription and analysis have become outdated or are no longer considered evidence-based by linguists . Still, these traditions continue to be commonly taught and used, for instance in language education , and
4399-724: The correct pronunciation and other aspects of broadcast language. The Committee proved unsuccessful and was dissolved after the Second World War . While the BBC did advise its speakers on pronunciation, there was never a formalised official BBC pronunciation standard. A notable departure from the use of RP came with the Yorkshire-born newsreader Wilfred Pickles during the Second World War; his accent allowing listeners to more clearly distinguish BBC broadcasts from German propaganda, though Pickles had modified his accent to be closer to RP. Since
4482-424: The diphthong onset is the result of allophonic variation caused by the raising of the back of the tongue for the /l/ . If the speaker has "l-vocalization" the /l/ is realized as a back rounded vowel, which again is likely to cause backing and rounding in a preceding vowel as coarticulation effects. This phenomenon has been discussed in several blogs by John C. Wells . In the recording included in this article
4565-522: The early days of British broadcasting speakers of English origin almost universally used RP. The first director-general of the BBC , Lord Reith , encouraged the use of a 'BBC accent' because it was a "style or quality of English which would not be laughed at in any part of the country". He distinguished the BBC accent from the 'Oxford accent', to which he was "vehemently opposed". In 1926 the BBC established an Advisory Committee on Spoken English with distinguished experts, including Daniel Jones , to advise on
4648-475: The first edition, which had been noted in a scheme by the original editor, James Murray . While IPA has not been adopted by popular dictionaries in the United States, there is a demand for learner's dictionaries which provide both British and American English pronunciation. Some dictionaries, such as the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary and the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English provide
4731-470: The first year of elementary school, whereas English-speaking children are expected to read by the end of third grade. Pronunciation respellings begin to appear in dictionaries for children in third grade and up. There seems to be very little research on which respelling systems are most useful for children, apart from two small studies done in the 1980s and 1990s. Both studies were limited to traditional respelling systems without diacritics (setting aside both
4814-463: The great public boarding-schools" and which conveyed no information about that speaker's region of origin before attending the school. An 1891 teacher's handbook stated, "It is the business of educated people to speak so that no-one may be able to tell in what county their childhood was passed". Nevertheless, in the 19th century some British prime ministers, such as William Ewart Gladstone , still spoke with some regional features. Opinions differ over
4897-469: The level of difficulty, the type of notation, the degree of divergence from regular spelling, and pronunciation norms. Yule also raised the question of the types of impact respelling systems could have on children's literacy acquisition. These issues could be usefully addressed in studies that include American respelling systems as well as the IPA. An issue that has arisen since the Yule and Fraser studies concerns
4980-460: The local language, they are more practical to use in such contexts than the IPA or the Latin respelling systems with diacritics. Another advantage of local-script respellings for English learners is that they retain the "flavour" of local English speech , allowing learners to make connections between their spoken and written English experiences. However, these systems also have limitations. One limitation
5063-611: The local orthography. This is the case for several Indian languages, including Hindi, Urdu, Malayalam, and Tamil. To reduce the potential distortions of bilingual phonemic transcription, some dictionaries add English letters to the local-script respellings to represent sounds not specified in the local script. For example, in English-Tamil dictionaries, the sounds /b/ and /z/ need to be specified, as in this respelling of busy : "b பி z ஸி ". Because these respellings primarily use symbols already known to anyone with minimal literacy in
SECTION 60
#17328521591625146-476: The long or the short group of vowel phonemes) but their length is influenced by their context: in particular, they are shortened if a voiceless ( fortis ) consonant follows in the syllable, so that, for example, the vowel in 'bat' [bæʔt] is shorter than the vowel in 'bad' [bæd] . The process is known as pre-fortis clipping . Thus phonologically short vowels in one context can be phonetically longer than phonologically long vowels in another context. For example,
5229-592: The name "BBC Pronunciation". The term 'The Queen's English' has also been used by some writers. The phonetician Jack Windsor Lewis frequently criticised the name "Received Pronunciation" in his blog: he has called it "invidious", a "ridiculously archaic, parochial and question-begging term" and noted that American scholars find the term "quite curious". He used the term "General British" (to parallel " General American ") in his 1970s publication of A Concise Pronouncing Dictionary of American and British English and in subsequent publications. The name "General British"
5312-478: The name "General British" in place of "RP") is given in Gimson's Pronunciation of English . RP RP A number of cases can be identified where changes in the pronunciation of individual words, or small groups of words, have taken place. The Journal of the International Phonetic Association regularly publishes "Illustrations of the IPA" which present an outline of the phonetics of a particular language or accent. It
5395-476: The normal age of literacy acquisition varies among languages, so do the age-range designations of children's books. Generally, age ranges for young children's books in English lag behind those of languages with phonemic orthographies by about a year. This corresponds to the slow pace of literacy acquisition among English speakers as compared to speakers of languages with phonemic orthographies, such as Italian. Italian children are expected to learn to read within
5478-537: The phrase "fold his cloak" contains examples of the /əʊ/ diphthong in the two different contexts. The onset of the pre- /l/ diphthong in "fold" is slightly more back and rounded than that in "cloak". RP also possesses the triphthongs /aɪə/ as in tire , /aʊə/ as in tower , /əʊə/ as in lower , /eɪə/ as in layer and /ɔɪə/ as in loyal . There are different possible realisations of these items: in slow, careful speech they may be pronounced as two syllables with three distinct vowel qualities in succession, or as
5561-684: The plosives /t/ and /d/ often have no audible release utterance-finally, and voiced consonants are partly or completely devoiced (as in [b̥æd̥] ); thus the perceptual distinction between pairs of words such as 'bad' and 'bat', or 'seed' and 'seat' rests mostly on vowel length (though the presence or absence of glottal reinforcement provides an additional cue). Unstressed vowels are both shorter and more centralised than stressed ones. In unstressed syllables occurring before vowels and in final position, contrasts between long and short high vowels are neutralised and short [i] and [u] occur (e.g. happy [ˈhæpi] , throughout [θɹuˈaʊʔt] ). The neutralisation
5644-456: The proportion of Britons who speak RP. Trudgill estimated 3% in 1974, but that rough estimate has been questioned by J. Windsor Lewis . Upton notes higher estimates of 5% (Romaine, 2000) and 10% (Wells, 1982) but refers to these as "guesstimates" not based on robust research. The claim that RP is non-regional is disputed, since it is most commonly found in London and the southeast of England. It
5727-404: The same sound (partly to allow for different phonemic mergers and splits ). Some dictionaries indicate hyphenation and syllabic stress in the headword. A few have even used diacritics to show pronunciation "without respelling" in the headwords. The Concise Oxford Dictionary , 1st through 4th edition, used a mix of two systems. Some editions of Webster's Unabridged Dictionary have offered
5810-406: The same syllable, as in "spot" or "stop". When a sonorant /l/ , /r/ , /w/ , or /j/ follows, this aspiration is indicated by partial devoicing of the sonorant . /r/ is a fricative when devoiced. Syllable final /p/ , /t/ , /tʃ/ , and /k/ may be either preceded by a glottal stop ( glottal reinforcement ) or, in the case of /t/ , fully replaced by a glottal stop, especially before
5893-495: The same system of transcription. Clive Upton devised a modified system for the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1993), changing five symbols from the traditional Gimson system, and this is now used in many other Oxford University Press dictionaries; the differences are shown in the table below. Linguist Geoff Lindsey has argued that the system of transcription for RP has become outdated and has proposed
5976-552: The significant units of meaning in language and phonetic transcriptions which may indicate every nuance of sound in detail. The IPA transcription conventions used in the first twelve editions of the EPD was relatively simple, using a quantitative system indicating vowel length using a colon, and requiring the reader to infer other vowel qualities. Many phoneticians preferred a qualitative system, which used different symbols to indicate vowel timbre and colour. A. C. Gimson introduced
6059-457: The south of Little Gap and joins the Lehigh River at Palmerton . 40°47′32″N 75°36′45″W / 40.7923°N 75.6124°W / 40.7923; -75.6124 Pronunciation respelling for English A pronunciation respelling for English is a notation used to convey the pronunciation of words in the English language , which do not have a phonemic orthography (i.e.
6142-517: The spelling does not reliably indicate pronunciation). There are two basic types of pronunciation respelling: As an example, one pronunciation of Arkansas , transcribed / ˈ ɑːr k ən s ɔː / in the IPA , could be respelled är ′ kən-sô′ or AR -kən-saw in a phonemic system, and arken-saw in a non-phonemic system. Pronunciation respelling systems for English have been developed primarily for use in dictionaries. They are used there because it
6225-417: The term "RP" while expressing reservations about its suitability. The Cambridge-published English Pronouncing Dictionary (aimed at those learning English as a foreign language) uses the phrase " BBC Pronunciation", on the basis that the name "Received Pronunciation" is "archaic" and that BBC News presenters no longer suggest high social class and privilege to their listeners. Other writers have also used
6308-501: The term had been used much earlier by P. S. Du Ponceau in 1818 and the Oxford English Dictionary cites quotations back to about 1710. A similar term, received standard, was coined by Henry C. K. Wyld in 1927. The early phonetician Alexander John Ellis used both terms interchangeably, but with a much broader definition than Jones's, saying, "There is no such thing as a uniform educated pron. of English, and rp. and rs.
6391-542: The use of RP as a convenient umbrella term remains popular. The tradition of Received Pronunciation is usually credited to the British phonetician Daniel Jones . In the first edition of the English Pronouncing Dictionary (1917), he named the accent " Public School Pronunciation"; for the second edition in 1926 he wrote: "In what follows I call it Received Pronunciation, for want of a better term." However,
6474-502: The utility of different combinations of pronunciation features in the online children's dictionaries. Anglophone press agencies , such as the Voice of America , periodically release lists of respelled given names of internationally relevant people, in order to help news TV and radio announcers and spokespersons to pronounce them as closely as possible to their original languages. Received Pronunciation Received Pronunciation ( RP )
6557-487: The utility of pronunciation respellings given the availability of audio pronunciations in online dictionaries . Currently, the advantage of written respellings is that they may be read phoneme by phoneme, in parallel to the way novice readers are taught to "stretch out" words to hear all the sounds they contain, while the audio pronunciations are given only as whole words spoken in real time. When audio pronunciations are made flexible, it will become possible to study and compare
6640-457: The vowel called "long" /iː/ in 'reach' /riːtʃ/ (which ends with a voiceless consonant) may be shorter than the vowel called "short" /ɪ/ in the word 'ridge' /rɪdʒ/ (which ends with a voiced consonant). Wiik, cited in ( Cruttenden 2014 ), published durations of English vowels with a mean value of 172 ms for short vowels before voiced consonants but a mean value of 165 ms for long vowels preceding voiceless consonants. In natural speech ,
6723-520: Was covered and numbers rather than diacritics used to represent vowel sounds; Thomas Sheridan devised a simpler scheme, which he employed in his successful 1780 General Dictionary of the English Language , a much larger work consisting of two volumes; in 1791 John Walker produced A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary , which achieved a great reputation and ran into some forty editions. Today, such systems remain in use in American dictionaries for native English speakers, but they have been replaced by
6806-508: Was incorrect". Mark Newbrook has assigned this phenomenon the name "conscious rejection", and has cited the BATH vowel as "the main instance of conscious rejection of RP" in his research in West Wirral . John Wells has argued that, as educated British speakers often attempt to pronounce French names in a French way, there is a case for including /ɒ̃/ (as in bon ), and /æ̃/ and /ɜ̃ː/ (as in vingt-et-un ), as marginal members of
6889-483: Was used by almost everyone who was from clearly north of the isogloss for BATH words. She wrote, "There is no justification for the claims by Wells and Mugglestone that this is a sociolinguistic variable in the north, though it is a sociolinguistic variable on the areas on the border [the isogloss between north and south]". In a study of speech in West Yorkshire, K. M. Petyt wrote that "the amount of /ɑː/ usage
#161838