Posts Tagged ‘pronunciation’
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Posted by John Wells on November 22, 2011
The discussion of class and language continues with a guest post by John Wells, Emeritus Professor of Phonetics at University College London, and author of Accents of English, English Intonation, and the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary. He writes a daily blog on phonetics at phonetic-blog.blogspot.com. ___________ It was interesting to read Ben Trawick-Smith’s discussion of the [...]
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Posted by Ben Trawick-Smith on November 14, 2011
Class English month continues with the pronunciation theme: guest blogger Ben Trawick-Smith, from Dialect Blog, takes a look at (non-)rhoticity in American English. Ben has worked as an actor, playwright, director, critic and dialect coach. His other passions include linguistics, urban development, philosophy and film. Ben lives with his wife in Seattle, Washington, in the [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on November 08, 2011
In his recent guest post about the language of the theatre, Ben Trawick-Smith mentions the privileged position of Received Pronunciation. RP, he writes, was virtually de rigueur in English theatre “until it became apparent to (some) Britons that dialect prejudice is as bad as any other”. An RP accent, even a modified one that combines [...]
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Posted by Kati Sule on May 30, 2011
A new kid (or shall I say app) on the block, this super tool is based on the popular Sound Foundations book and chart, written by Adrian Underhill. It comes in two versions: a free app which includes the phonemic chart only, with the pronunciation of the phonemes and example words, and a premium edition [...]
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Posted by Beth Penfold on February 01, 2011
Two words that seem to get commonly mixed up are wary and weary. These two words have very different meanings and so are not interchangeable, but it doesn’t stop people from doing it. Most often, people use weary when they mean wary. Here are some annoying sentences that have insulted my ears recently: I’m quite weary [...]
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Posted by Sharon Creese on December 08, 2010
I think my favourite new entry to the Open Dictionary this week has to be sarchasm. It’s such a perfect word, combining both of the key ideas behind its meaning – sarcasm and chasm – in a very simple, tidy way. I did have difficulty when I first saw it though, trying to decide how [...]
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Posted by Sharon Creese on December 03, 2010
There was an interesting piece on pronunciation in last week’s roundup, and it reminded me of something I’d seen on the Guardian Mind your Language blog, about English language learners being too shy to speak. It’s an age-old problem: students don’t want to make themselves look silly by mispronouncing things, so they stay quiet. I [...]
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Posted by Beth Penfold on October 28, 2010
Following on from Sharon‘s piece this morning, ‘Pronunciation research’, the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 also covered the story of the British Library creating a snapshot of changing English, something I really fancy getting involved in. Today polled the public in its introduction to the item, with rather telling results. In addition, Professor John Wells was [...]
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Posted by Sharon Creese on October 28, 2010
It’s not surprising that we quite often talk about pronunciation on the Macmillan blog – see this post, for example, or this one – but it’s not something that the rest of the world is perhaps quite as interested in as we are. Today, though, it’s on the tips of the newsreaders’ tongues, as the [...]
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Posted by Sharon Creese on October 13, 2010
HRT…in the UK, this acronym commonly stands for hormone replacement therapy, a common treatment for women undergoing the menopause. Linguistically however, HRT stands for high-rising terminal. This is the questioning intonation that appears at the end of a sentence, whether it is a question or not. This pronunciation habit seems particularly prevalent amongst younger people in the [...]
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