• HOME
  • Publications
  • BLOG
  • English Phonetics and Phonology
  • The English Pronouncing Dictionary
  • RESOURCES
  Peter Roach

​The SQUARE vowel – diphthong or pure vowel?

26/11/2021

1 Comment

 

The “centring diphthongs” of the English RP/BBC accent are in continuous change. When I first studied English phonetics in the 1960’s there were textbooks which listed /ɪə/, /eə/, /ʊə/ and /ɔə/. It was made clear to me that the last of these, /ɔə/ was going the way of the dinosaurs, and indeed Daniel Jones remarks, in my edition of Outline of English Phonetics (Ninth Edition) “many speakers of Received English (myself among them) do not use the diphthong ɔə at all, but replace it always by ɔː”. This diphthong used to be very familiar to me, as I used to hear it in the speech of my older Lancashire (Merseyside) relatives born in the 19th Century. The diphthong /ʊə/ started its move towards the exit door rather later. Already by the time CUP took over publication of the English Pronouncing Dictionary, then on its Fourteenth Edition, the recommendation for words such as ‘your’, ‘poor’, ‘insure’ had /ɔː/, though /ʊə/ was always given as second choice.
This leaves us with /ɪə/ and /eə/. As many are aware, /eə/ is the next to go. Many recent writers have observed that the vowel element in SQUARE is more often a long pure vowel /ɛː/ than the traditional diphthong /eə/. Clive Upton’s Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation dropped /eə/ completely in favour of /ɛː/, and later Alan Cruttenden’s Gimson’s Pronunciation of English (Eighth Edition) went the same way. Geoff Lindsey’s English After RP also uses /ɛː/. Until recently, however, Wikipedia’s articles on RP and on English Phonology stuck with /eə/ Recently someone changed the RP article so that the SQUARE vowel was described as a long mid front vowel, but was still symbolized as /eə/. This resulted in a very confusing description, so I have edited the article so that /ɛː/ (SQUARE) takes its place among the long pure vowels. I have also noted that /eə/ does not now belong in the list of diphthong phonemes. This is really just bringing WP’s practice into line with its statement that “The centring diphthongs are gradually being eliminated in RP”.
Now we have just /ɪə/. But Wikipedia says that “The remaining centring glide /ɪə/ is increasingly pronounced as a monophthong [ɪː]”. A reference to something written by me was cited in support of this statement, but I can find no trace of this statement in that article so I have removed the reference (I probably wrote something of the sort elsewhere, but I can’t remember where). However, Cruttenden (2014), p.154 gives a more solid support: “Increasingly, pronunciations with a monophthong [ɪː] can be heard within GB”.
I don’t believe the change from /ɪə/ to /ɪː/ has yet been completed, though I don’t doubt that the change is going on. In my own speech I believe I still have a diphthong in open syllables like ‘fear’, ‘near’, but I do have a pure vowel before /r/ as in ‘fearing’, ‘nearer’.
Watch this space! I will now have to go through other Wikipedia articles on English phonemes to bring them into line with what has been done for the RP article with respect to /eə ~ ɛ:/.
1 Comment
Geoff Lindsey link
30/11/2021 01:16:48 pm

Thanks for mentioning my use of /ɛː/ in English After RP; you could also have mentioned my use of /ɪː/. (That Wikipedia article could cite EARP p. 49, or any of the blog articles I've written on NEAR, or indeed my recent long video on vowels https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtnlGH055TA .)
As you say, NEAR is [ɪː] before /r/, and the number of common words like series, period, era, zero, experience, hearing, clearance, bacteria, hero, steering, interior, material, query etc. means that a fair case can be made for [ɪː] as NEAR's most common allophone, even for relatively conservative speakers. The pre-pausal allophone with a schwa offglide is comparable to the [ɔə]~[oə] that many speakers have as their pre-pausal allophone of THOUGHT-NORTH. (If Wells's keyword was SERies, /ɪː/ would seem more natural.)
Something you don't discuss (your post is about SQUARE, after all) is the extremely common "varisyllabic" or "triphthongal" NEAR. Listening to "fear" and "fire" in your CEPD, I don't see why they should be treated as structurally different. If "fire" has PRICE+schwa, then "fear" has FLEECE+schwa. And -ear- and -ire- are comparably smoothed in CEPD's "nearly" and "retirement". The varisyllabicity of NEAR received some discussion in weak syllables (compare Gimson's "serious" as /ˈsɪə.rɪəs/ with yours as /ˈsɪə.ri.əs/, but the same issue in stressed syllables has gone widely ignored.

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    A blog that discusses problems in Wikipedia's coverage of Phonetics

    Peter Roach

    Emeritus Professor of Phonetics,
    ​University of Reading, UK

    uArchives

    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    September 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    March 2019
    April 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    July 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    November 2016
    September 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.