Phonetics

Olha Kostash
Gr. # 214
24/12/07

Glossary of Phonetic Terms

Received Pronunciation (RP) (загальновизначена правильна вимова) is a form of pronunciation of the English
language which has been long perceived as uniquely prestigious amongst British accents. The earlier mentions of the
term can be found in H. C. Wyld's “A Short History of English” (1914) and in Daniel Jones's “An Outline of English
Phonetics”, although the latter stated that he only used the term "for want of a better". According to Fowler's “Modern
English Usage” (1965), the term is "the Received Pronunciation". The word received conveys its original meaning of
accepted or approved — as in "received wisdom".

Linking R and intrusive R (сполучне R та вставне інтрузивне R) are phonological phenomena that occur in many
non-rhotic dialects of English. In all non-rhotic dialects, the phoneme /ɹ/ does not appear in the coda of a syllable (so
spar is pronounced the same as spa); in dialects with linking and/or intrusive R, however, /ɹ/ may appear at a word
boundary before a vowel-initial word.

A homophone (омофон) is a word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in meaning. The words
may be spelled the same, such as rose (flower) and rose (past tense of "rise"), or differently, such as carat, caret, and
carrot, or your and you're. A short example of a homophone are the words "know" and "no".

Epenthesis (епентеза - поява в слові додаткового звуку) is the addition of one or more sounds to a word,
especially to the interior of a word. Epenthesis may be divided into two types: excrescence (if the sound added is a
consonant) and anaptyxis (if the sound added is a vowel).

Retroflex consonants (приголосні, що утворюються при рухові кінчика язика вверх та назад в напрямку до
твердого піднебіння) are consonant sounds used in some languages. (They are sometimes referred to as cerebral
consonants.) The tongue is placed behind the alveolar ridge, and may even be curled back to touch the palate: that
is, they are articulated in the postalveolar to palatal region of the mouth. In other words, retroflex consonants are
coronal consonants articulated behind the alveolar ridge, which do not have the secondary articulation of
palatalization.

æ-tensing is a process that occurs in some accents of North American English whereby the vowel /æ/ is raised and
lengthened or diphthongized in various environments. In some dialects it involves an allophonic split whilst in others it
affects all /æ/s. There are dialects, however, where the split is phonemic.

The bad–lad split is a phonemic split of the Early Modern English short vowel phoneme /æ/ into a short /æ/ and a
long /æ:/. This split is found in some varieties of English English and Australian English.

The trap–bath split is a vowel split whereby the Early Modern English phoneme /æ/ merged with the /ɑː/ in certain
environments. It occurs mainly in southern varieties of English English, the Boston accent and the Southern
Hemisphere accents.

Yod-coalescence (з'єднання; зрощення yod) is a process that changes the clusters [dj], [tj], [sj] and [zj] into [dʒ],
[tʃ], [ʃ] and [ʒ] respectively. This generally occurs in unstressed syllables in all varieties of English, except for the
older RP varieties.

Canadian raising is a phonetic phenomenon that occurs in varieties of the English language, especially Canadian
English, in which diphthongs are "raised" before voiceless consonants (e.g., [p], [t], [k], [s], [f]). For example, IPA /aɪ/
(the vowel of "eye") and /aʊ/ (the vowel of "loud") become [ʌɪ] and [ʌʊ], respectively, the /a/ component of the
diphthong going from a low vowel to a back vowel ([ʌ]). As [əʊ] is an allophone of /oʊ/ (as in "road") in many other
dialects, the Canadian pronunciation of "about the house" may sound like "a boat the hoas" to non-Canadians. Some
stand-up and situation comedians exaggerate this to "aboot the hoos" for comic effect.

The voiceless labiovelar approximant (глухий лабіальний фрикативний (щілинний) звук) (traditionally called a
voiceless labiovelar fricative) is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the
International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ʍ, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is W.

Newfoundland English is a name for several dialects of English found in the province of Newfoundland and
Labrador, often regarded as the most distinctive dialect of English in Canada. Some specific Newfoundland dialects
are similar to the accent heard in the southeast of Ireland (See Wexford and Waterford, while others are similar to
those of West Country England, or a combination of both, mainly due to mass immigration from a limited number of
ports in those specific regions.

Hiatus in linguistics is the separate pronunciation of two adjacent vowels, sometimes with an intervening glottal stop.

Vocalic r refers to the phenomenon of a rhotic segment such as [r] or [ɹ] occurring as the syllable nucleus. This is a
feature of a number of Slavic languages such as Croatian and Czech as well as languages like English and Mandarin
Chinese, where it occurs as an r-colored vowel, a vowel whose distinctive feature is a low third formant. In rhotic
accents of English such as General American, vocalic r occurs in words like butter and church.

The word "schwa" is from the Hebrew word ָ‫שוְׁוא‬

‫ ש‬, meaning "nought"—it originally referred to one of the niqqud vowel
points used with the Hebrew alphabet, which looks like a vertical pair of dots under a letter. This sign has two uses:
one to indicate the schwa vowel-sound and one to indicate the complete absence of a vowel. These uses do not
conflict because schwa is, in Hebrew, an epenthetic vowel, the equivalent of "no vowel at all". Sometimes the term
"schwa" is used for any epenthetic vowel; however, different languages use different epenthetic vowels.

If a phoneme moves in acoustic space, but its neighbors do not move in a chain shift, a phonemic merger
(фонетичне об’єднання, злиття) may occur. In this case, a single phoneme results where an earlier stage of the
language had two phonemes. A well known example of a phonemic merger in American English is the cot-caught
merger , by which the vowel phonemes /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ (illustrated by the words cot and caught respectively) have merged
into a single phoneme in some accents.

 The vein–vain merger is the merger of the Middle English diphthongs /ai/ and /ei/ that occurs in
all dialects of present English.

 The meet–meat merger is the merger of the Early Modern English vowel /e:/ with the vowel /i:/.
The merger is complete outside the British Isles and virtually complete within them.

 The pin–pen merger is a conditional merger of /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ before the nasal consonants [m], [n]
and [ŋ].

 The bit–bet merger is a merger of /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ occurring for some speakers of Newfoundland
English.

 The toe–tow merger is a merger of the Early Modern English vowels /o:/ and /ɔu/.

 The joy–point merger is the merger of the Middle English diphthongs /ɔi/ and /ʊi/ that occurs in
all dialects of present English.

 The coil–curl merger is a merger of /ɔɪ/ and /ɝ/ which historically occurred in some dialects of
English. It is particularly associated with the dialects of New York and New Orleans.
  The line–loin merger is a merger between the diphthongs /aɪ/ and /ɔɪ/ that occurs in some
English dialects.

 The bred–bread merger is process that occurred in Middle English that caused Middle
English /ɛː/ to be shortened in some words.

 The dew–duke merger is the merger of the Middle English front vowel /y/ and Middle English
diphthong /iu/ that occurs in nearly all dialects of present English, (but not in some parts of South Wales).
 The dew–new merger is the merger of the Middle English diphthongs /iu/ and /ɛu/ that occurs in
all dialects of present English.

 The father–bother merger is a merger of the Early Modern English vowels /ɑː/ and /ɒ/ that
occurs in almost all varieties of North American English.

 The yew-hew merger is a process that occurs in some dialects of English that causes the
cluster /hj/ to be reduced to /j/. It leads to pronunciations like /ju:dʒ/ for huge and /ju:mən/ for human; hew and
yew become homophonous. It is sometimes considered a type of glide cluster reduction, but is much less
widespread than wh-reduction, and is generally stigmatized where it is found.

 The wine-whine merger is the merger of /ʍ/ or /hw/ (spelt wh) with /w/. It occurs in the speech of
the great majority of English speakers.

Geminization (Total Assimilation) - A process by which, for ease of pronunciation, one consonant becomes exactly
the same as the consonant next to it. The resulting consonant pair is called a geminate.

Yod-dropping is the elision of the sound [j]. The term comes from the Hebrew letter yod, which represents [j], (new
[nu:], blue [blu:]).

Initial consonant blends - two or three-letter consonant combinations in which both letters are pronounced.

Grapheme - a letter or a group of letters representing one sound, e.g. sh, ch, igh, ough (as in 'though')
R-controlled vowels - An 'r' sound following a vowel sound almost always distorts the vowel, making such words
harder to spell - cat/car Common r-controlled vowels are: ar, er, ir, or, ur.

The plum-plumb merger - is the reduction of the final cluster /mb/ to /m/ that occurs in all dialects of present
English. In early Middle English, words spelt with mb like plumb, lamb etc. had the cluster /mb/.

The scream-stream merger - is the pronunciation of the consonant cluster /str/ as /skr/ making "scream" and
"stream" homophonous as /skri:m/ (stretch → /skrɛtʃ/, straight→ /skreɪt/ )

The not-knot merger - is a reduction that occurs in modern English where the historical cluster /kn/ is reduced to /n/
making knot and not homophones. This reduction is complete in present

English, although it has not happened in all varieties of Scots.There is a respectable list of words in Modern English
that begin with kn, including knife, knave, knead, knee, knell, knight, knit, knock, knot, know, knuckle, and others.

The nome-gnome merger - is the reduction of the initial cluster /gn/ to /n/ that occurs in all dialects of present
English. In Middle English, words spelt with gn like gnat, gnostic, gnome, gnu etc. had the cluster /gn/.

Historical elision - dropped historically no question of inclusion (Christmas, listen)

Final blends - blends of two or three-letter consonants which make only one sound. These include -ng, -nk, -sh, -ch,
and -tch.
Vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound.

New Zealand English - often colloquially referred to as Newzild - is close to Australian English in pronunciation, but
has several subtle differences often overlooked by people from outside these countries. Some of these differences
show New Zealand English to have more affinity with the English of southern England than Australian English does.

Canadian Shift - a feature which is progressing throughout all of Canada except the Atlantic Provinces. It is a chain
shift triggered by the cot-caught merger. The vowels in the words cot and caught merge to [kɔt].

The Great Vowel Shift was a major change in the pronunciation of the English language that took place in the south
of England between 1200 and 1600. The Great Vowel Shift was first studied by the Danish linguist and Anglicist Otto
Jespersen (1860–1943), who coined the term.

African American Vernacular English (AAVE) – also called African American English, Black English, Black
Vernacular, Black English Vernacular (BEV) and Black Vernacular English (BVE) – is a variety (dialect, ethnolect and
sociolect) of English, particularly American English; it is sometimes called Ebonics. Its pronunciation is in some
respects common to Southern American English, which is spoken by many African Americans in the United States
and by many non-African Americans.

Voice or voicing is one of the three major parameters used to describe a sound. It is usually treated as a binary
parameter with sounds being described as either voiceless (unvoiced) or voiced, although in fact there can be
degrees of voicing (see below).

Liquid consonants , or liquids, are approximant consonants that are not classified as semivowels (glides) because
they do not correspond phonetically to specific vowels (in the way that, for example, the initial [j] in English yes
corresponds to [i]).