I feel in need of some expert advice on the pronunciation of a couple of names that are in the news. The first is Beira (city in Mozambique, currently badly damaged by storm). On radio and TV, there seems to be a 50/50 divide over whether the first syllable has /ai/ or /ei/. All the pron dictionaries I have looked at have the /ai/ diphthong for British English, including CEPD, but if the name was given by Portuguese-speaking colonisers I'd have thought /ei/ was more likely. Wikipedia gives no pronunciation for the city in Mozambique,  but Beira in Portugal is given as ˈbɐjɾɐ. 

The other name is the surname of the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern. The 'r' in the second syllable seems to be causing confusion. Several broadcasters produce a stress on the second syllable, as in the word 'astern'. Others give the name initial stress but a long vowel in the second syllable (sometimes the second syllable is pronounced so emphatically that it sounds like Speaker John Bercow's way of shouting "order"). Wikipedia gives the pronunciation as  ˈɑ:rdɜ:rn. I would have expected stress on the first syllable and a final syllable with schwa, as in 'Malvern', but I don't hear that much.

I have recently done some editing of the "Notable speakers" section of the Wikipedia article on Received Pronunciation. As you may have read in an earlier post, I added some YouTube links so that readers could listen to an example of each speaker. These were removed by an editor, who has now gently explained to me why such links are not appropriate for WP articles. I have deleted the complaints I wrote in this blog about the deletion.

The YouTube links can still be found here. I hope that they may be useful.

I would be interested to get any comments on this material. To me, it does little to support the idea that there is a single identifiable accent that could be called RP, even if you divide the speakers into different sub-groups and label their accents "Conservative RP", "Mainstream RP", "Advanced RP", "Juvenile RP", "Luvvie RP" or whatever.

[NOTE: I HAVE NOW EDITED THE WIKIPEDIA PAGES ON 'VOWEL LENGTH', 'ENGLISH PHONOLOGY' AND 'RECEIVED PRONUNCIATION' TO CORRECT THE VOWEL LENGTHENING/VOWEL SHORTENING PROBLEM DESCRIBED BELOW]

​I have noticed that an old fallacy survives in a couple of Wikipedia articles. In Vowel length and in English phonology you find the statement (made without any citation to support it) that English vowels are lengthened when followed by voiced (lenis) consonants or in an open syllable. The correct statement is that vowels are shortened when they are followed by a voiceless (fortis) consonant. You can see this in the descriptions in Cruttenden’s Gimson, section 8.4.1. The basic scientific work was published in 1970 by Matthew Chen in an interesting article entitled ‘Vowel length variation as a function of the consonant environment’ (Phonetica, 22, 129-59). I have written about this issue very briefly in ‘English Phonetics and Phonology’ (page 29 in the latest edition, in “problems and further reading”, 4.4.)  A simple “do-it-yourself” test is to measure your pronunciation of ‘ride’, ‘rye’ and ‘right’. The duration of the diphthong in ‘rye’, being in a zero-coda syllable, may be taken as the baseline duration. ‘Ride’ will show a very similar duration, but ‘right’ will have a markedly shorter duration. I will edit the two articles (and any others I find with the same error) and also remove the “generative rule” included in the Vowel length article (which is not only ad hoc and unnecessary, but also wrong).

Just a follow-up to my recent post about the unsatisfactory section headed "Prosody and intonation" in Wikipedia's article on Vowels. I've removed quite a lot of this section and rewritten the rest, but kept the title Prosody and intonation. I hope that has improved it a bit. At least it now has a couple of references.

Some time ago I grumbled that the Wikipedia article on Articulatory Phonetics had plenty of information about consonants but only a couple of sketchy notes about vowels. I've made a start on improving the situation by editing in a summary of the main articulatory variables affecting vowels, but it's pretty sketchy, like its predecessor. I hope that at least the framework is more appropriate. I have made no attempt to provide a detailed treatment of each of the variables - they are already amply covered in the huge network of overlapping phonetics articles in WP.

I've had to read the material in the corresponding WP article on Vowel as I went along. Something that has puzzled me is the statement there, in the section "Front, raised and retracted", that The conception of the tongue moving in two directions, high–low and front–back, is not supported by articulatory evidence and does not clarify how articulation affects vowel quality. Vowels may instead be characterized by the three directions of movement of the tongue from its neutral position: front, raised, and retracted. There is a reference to a paper by John Esling at the end of this section, so I suppose this comes from him (I haven't been able to get hold of the article yet). I'm afraid I can't see why the traditional open/close and front/back dimensions are inapplicable, as long as one doesn't treat them as absolute determinants of vowel quality.

The Wikipedia coverage of vowels is on the whole pretty comprehensive. In the article on Vowels all the variables that characterize vowels are listed one by one, with the odd exception of vowel length or quantity. To find information on that topic, you have to look further down in the article, to a section entitled Prosody and intonation. Something that immediately looks dodgy about that section is that it carries no references to published material, something that in general Wikipedia does not approve of. A lot of the section is, as you might expect, about stress, tone and intonation, all of which are aspects of speech that I think of as syllable-related, not specifically vowel-related, and all of which are covered comprehensively in other WP articles. It seems to me that basic information on vowel length is relevant and should be retained, but the rest of the material should be removed. However, a sentence in the lead paragraph might perhaps mention that vowels are involved in prosodic variables. What’s left should be re-titled “Vowel quantity” and moved up to be appended to the list of vowel variables.
There is, in fact, a separate WP article on Vowel length, about which I will write some comments later. Meanwhile I will try to tidy up the Vowel article.

Wikipedia has a rather cursory treatment of the term Phoneme, and I noticed that there was almost no mention of the possibility of choosing alternative analyses of phonemic systems such as the English vowel system, in spite of the fact that there was a great debate during the early and middle 20th century (before Generative Phonology) around this topic. It was usually known as the “God’s Truth vs. hocus-pocus” debate. A key paper was Yuen Ren Chao’s catchily-titled ‘The non-uniqueness of phonemic solutions of phonetic systems’. When I first taught in the Linguistic Science Department at Reading University we used to get the first year Linguistics students to read the various papers on the subject in Martin Joos’s collection of papers Readings in Linguistics 1 (I never liked the sequel, Readings in Linguistics 2). To be honest, I don’t think the students really enjoyed reading them. Still, it seems odd that so many publications on the phonemes of English still seem stuck in the God’s Truth camp. It seems to be commonplace to state without reservation that English (well, RP) has twenty or more vowel phonemes. Sometimes writers note in passing that this is a bigger total of vowel phonemes than one finds in the world’s other languages. It is, indeed, massively bigger, considering that most other languages have only a handful. Yet it is perfectly possible (as I have pointed out before) to analyse the vowel phonemes of English in a different (perhaps hocus-pocus) way that reduces their number to seven or six, if one should wish to.
​
I have now added a section to the Phoneme article called “The non-uniqueness of phonemic solutions”, and I am waiting to see if anyone objects to it. So far, it has just received one attack of vandalism!

A happy New Year to all.

[NOTE: I HAVE NOW ADDED NAMES OF SOME WOMEN WHO HAVE BEEN DESCRIBED AS RP SPEAKERS. NOT EVERYONE WILL AGREE WITH THE CHOICES, AND THE SOURCES ARE NOT IMPECCABLE]


I don't want to keep coming back to the Wikipedia article on Received Pronunciation, but it's one of WP's most controversial topics and it gets a lot of attention (some of it unwelcome). What I am complaining about at the moment is the section on "Notable RP speakers", which has been there for years. The problem with this section is that all the speakers listed are male, with the exception that the reference to The British Royal Family necessarily includes some royal female speakers.

I could easily come up with a list of female speakers that I would consider to be speakers of RP as defined in this article, but I'm not going to. For a start, I don't believe in RP any more than I believe in Father Christmas. If I did believe in it, I wouldn't include the Royal Family as RP speakers. Finally, it's not possible just to add new names to the list of notables, because only people who have been cited by name in a published source will be acceptable to Wikipedia (Dame Vera Lynn used to be on the list, but I removed her name because no reference was given). What all the listed speakers have in common is that they have been classed as RP speakers by John Wells in his blog, which is acceptable as a citation. Phoneticians other than John Wells are acceptable sources.

So here's the challenge: if you would like to see a proper representation of women speakers and you care about what WP says about RP, publish your list of female speakers somewhere other than WP (a blog will do), and the names can then be added to the present list. If you prefer, you could send me your list and I'll publish it here.

[I HAVE NOW EDITED THE PL ARTICLE TO INCLUDE SOME OF THE MISSING INFORMATION]

Reading the Wikipedia article on Peter Ladefoged, I notice that the role he played in the IPA doesn’t get proper recognition. The relevant bit says “Ladefoged was also a member of the International Phonetic Association for a long time, and was involved in maintaining its International Phonetic Alphabet. He was also editor of the Journal of the International Phonetic Association.”
 
I think the article ought to record how long PL was a member of the IPA – I imagine his membership must have been very long. I think the bit about his being "involved in maintaining its International Phonetic Alphabet" ought to make a mention of the importance of his contribution to the 1989 Kiel Conference - in fact, the Wikipedia article on the Kiel Conference itself makes no mention of him beyond listing various related publications of his. The article should also record that he was President of the IPA – I believe that was from 1986 to 1991. And I must say I have no recollection of him ever having been editor of JIPA.
 
I’d be glad if anyone could give me the relevant facts. I’ll be happy to make the necessary corrections.

I normally write here to criticize things that I find wrong with Wikipedia's coverage of phonetics and phoneticians, so it's a pleasure to make a note for once of a really good article that appeared recently. This is on Lilias Armstrong, a UCL phonetician of great accomplishment who is not now well known. I learned a lot from reading it (as I did from studying her Phonetics of French​).