Booklet Phonetics 1
Booklet Phonetics 1
Booklet Phonetics 1
1
TABLE OF CONTENTS
THEORY ——————————> P. 3
PRACTICE ——————————> P. 71
RESOURCES ——————————> P. 95
References
- Ashton, H. & Shepherd, S. (2012). Work on your Accent. Collins.
- Sobek, S. (2016). Exploring Phonetics and Pronunciation. CTPCBA.
- Zabala, F. & David, J. C. (2008). Phonetics I.
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THEORY
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4
WHAT ACCENT WILL I LEARN?
The variety we’re dealing with is certainly not spoken
by most people in the UK, but it’s understood there
and beyond. It used to be known as Received
Pronunciation (RP)1, but that term is falling out of use,
mainly because 1) the accent has changed and 2)
because it seems that the use of the word “received”
implies that other accents would not be acceptable,
and that’s not the kind of attitude we’d like to encourage.
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Image source: https://learntalk.org/en/blog/different-english-accents-from-around-the-world
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For these reasons, other names have arisen. General British is a term very much used nowadays, but it also comes
with certain implications. In fact, geographically speaking, you’ll find speakers of this variety in the south of
England. How can it, then, be called general if its location is quite specific? That’s why many authors prefer calling
it Standard Southern British English (SSBE). If you want to access online material for listening purposes, it’s highly
suggested that you check the BBC. For this reason, another common name for this accent is BBC English.
It’s also important that you understand what the accent in this book will tell people about you. SSBE is socially
associated with the middle class or people in professional positions. We choose this accent because it’s the usual
pronunciation in standard English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teaching in the UK and in most places around the
world.
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7
8
9
10
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HOW TO PRODUCE SOUNDS
The FLEECE vowel /iː/
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The NORTH vowel /ɔː/
SCHWA /ə/
13
The GOAT vowel /əʊ/
14
The voiceless dental fricative /θ/, the voiceless alveolar
plosive /t/ and the voiceless alveolar fricative /s/
15
The voiced alveolar nasal /n/ and the voiced velar nasal /ŋ/
16
The voiced labial-velar approximant /w/
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SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION
Key
18
19
20
Key
21
Key
22
Key
23
Key
24
Key
25
Key
26
27
28
Key
29
30
Key
31
Key
32
Silent letters
Key
33
Key
34
Key
35
Key
36
Key
37
Key
38
Key
Key
39
40
41
Key
42
Key
43
44
Key
Key
45
Key
Key
46
Key
47
48
49
Key
50
51
52
Key
53
54
55
Key
Key
56
Key
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Key
58
DEVOICING OF CONSONANTS
1. Devoicing is a kind of regressive assimilation. It affects the vibration of the vocal cords in
voiced sounds. Stress does not count here.
When it happens, a voiced consonant loses its voicing either partially or completely. The
diacritic used for this process is [ ̥ ]
There are many cases of devoicing but, in this course, we’ll only focus on the following two:
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Key
60
Key
61
Key
62
63
Key
64
Key
65
Key
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67
Key
68
Key
69
Key
70
PRACTICE
71
PRACTICE 1
Key
72
PRACTICE 2
73
Key
PRACTICE 3
Key
74
PRACTICE 4
75
Key
76
PRACTICE 5
Key
PRACTICE 6
Key
77
PRACTICE 7
Key
PRACTICE 8
78
Key
Key
79
PRACTICE 9
Key
PRACTICE 10
Key
80
PRACTICE 11
Key
PRACTICE 12
Key
81
PRACTICE 13
82
Key
PRACTICE 14
83
Key
PRACTICE 15
Key
84
PRACTICE 16
Key
PRACTICE 17
Key
85
PRACTICE 18
Key
PRACTICE 19
86
Key
PRACTICE 20
Key
87
PRACTICE 21
Key
PRACTICE 22
88
Key
PRACTICE 23
Key
PRACTICE 24
Key
89
PRACTICE 25
Key
PRACTICE 26
Key
90
PRACTICE 27
Key
91
PRACTICE 28
Key
PRACTICE 29
Key
92
PRACTICE 30
Key
93
PRACTICE 31
Key
PRACTICE 32
Key
94
RESOURCES
95
Organs of Speech
96
Phonemic Chart
97
Vowel Chart + Lexical Set
98
TRADITIONAL VOWEL CHART (RP)
99
Anticlockwise vowel chain shift
100
VOWELS (PURE VOWELS & DIPHTHONGS)
ARCHEPHONEMES
4
You’ll also find /eə/ as /ɛː/
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CONSONANTS
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fricative <ss>; city
<c>
/z/ voiced alveolar fricative <z>; <s> zebra, loves
(after voiced
sound if the
<s> is a suffix)
/ʃ/ voiceless postalveolar <sh>; cash, action, ocean
fricative <ti/ci> special
/ʒ/ voiced postalveolar <age>; massage, rouge, usually
fricative <sure>, pleasure,
<sion> precision
/h/ voiceless glottal fricative <h> hope
/m/ voiced bilabial nasal <m>; meal, comma
<mm>
/n/ voiced alveolar nasal <n>; note, tennis knit, knee,
<nn> knife, know,
knock
/ŋ/ voiced velar nasal <ng>; ring, thanks
<nk>
/l/ voiced alveolar lateral <l>; <ll> lie, call
approximant
/r/ voiced postalveolar <r>; <rr> rapid, carrot wrong, wrath,
approximant write
/j/ voiced palatal <y> yes
approximant
/w/ voiced labial-velar <w>; wave, why one, queen,
approximant <wh> quite
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THE PRONUNCIATION DICTIONARY
In this course, we encourage students to use two pronunciation dictionaries. The
first one is the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary. Its last edition was published
in 2008 and you can download the software included in it by accessing this link.
In order to use it, you have to download the whole folder onto your computer,
unzip the file and click on the file named “lpd.exe”. We highly encourage you to
explore all of this dictionary’s features. However, we’ll deal with the most
important ones in the activities below.
The second dictionary we suggest you use is Geoff Lindsey’s CUBE dictionary.
First, let’s read what he proposes:
Many sources, including the Cambridge, Collins, and Longman dictionaries, still use for their British English
transcriptions a set of vowel symbols which was chosen by A. C. Gimson more than half a century ago to describe
explicitly the upper class speech of the period before the tumultuous social changes of the 1960s: classic Received
Pronunciation (RP).
This Gimsonian transcription does not give an explicit indication of 21st century SSB. In fact, if its vowel symbols are
pronounced with the explicit values of the International Phonetic Alphabet, the result is an accent which now
sounds to native speakers old-fashioned, ‘posh’ and even amusing. Unfortunately publishers and authors typically
fail to make this discrepancy clear to their readers, who often take the symbols more literally than is now
appropriate. (Another problem with the Gimsonian vowel symbols is that they make the wrong groupings. For
example, the vowels which Gimson chose to write with the IPA length symbol /ː/ no longer constitute — if they ever
did — any kind of true phonetic or phonological grouping.)
Because this rather inaccurate and misleading old system is still so widely used, CUBE includes the option to display
it (in black) by ticking the box ‘trad’ under SYSTEMS. We hope that you find it useful to compare it with our more
accurate transcription in blue.
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Source: http://seas.elte.hu/cube/accent.html
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Here are some practical guidelines on how to use this online dictionary. First you’ll type http://cubedictionary.org/
on your browser (or just click here). Once in the website, make sure you tick the “trad” box in the “SYSTEMS”
section and the box “full word”, provided that you’re looking for a specific word:
Then, type the word you want to look up. When typing <phonetics>, this is the result:
The result in blue shows the contemporary and most accurate transcription of the chosen word. Next to it, you
have the traditional transcription of the same word. We will follow that system since it’s the most spread in the
teaching field. However, it’s very important that you get familiar with the new trends since they will soon become
the mainstream way of teaching pronunciation. If you want to know more about the CUBE dictionary, you can
check this video where Geoff Lindsey himself explains how to use it. Last but not least, notice that you can also
click on the play button so as to listen to the chosen word being pronounced by different speakers in the website
YouGlish. This is also a very interesting resource since it shows you words being pronounced in different contexts
out of real situations, and not a recording made for the exclusive purpose of creating a dictionary.
ACTIVITY 1: Download the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary. Look up the following words: total, sudden, fire,
twenty, afternoon, last, play. Pay attention to the following:
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ACTIVITY CHECKING: Check the keys to activity 16.
ACTIVITY 2: Use the CUBE dictionary to look up the following words: girl, green, dentist, microscope, scared.
Check the contemporary transcription and the traditional one so as to complete the following chart:
FLEECE /iː/
DRESS /e/
NURSE / ɜː/
PRICE /aɪ/
GOAT /əʊ/
SQUARE /eə/7
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Key to Activity 1: a. Raised symbols represent sounds that can be optionally inserted; b. Symbols in italics represent sounds
sometimes optionally omitted; c. The symbol ◂ signals the possibility of stress shift, whereas the symbol § is used to offer
alternative pronunciations to the standard which are widely used; d. Conjugations are shown below the word that triggers
any type of conjugation.
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Key to Activity 2: FLEECE /ɪj/, DRESS /ɛ/, NURSE /əː/, PRICE /ɑj/, GOAT /əw/, SQUARE /ɛː/
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Key to Activity 3: it follows a similar tradition to the one in Spanish, where we have a written accent or what we call <tilde>
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