Vowels and consonants

[greenilex]

Obviously I mean the sounds and not the letter names, in case people want to try it for themselves...

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Quite so - but Alpie's posited argument in the OP that "it's always a vowel" doesn't hold.

I was asking a question rather than stating a hard fact. I like the semi-vowel idea.

[ardcarp]

The human ear seems capable of detecting the minutest differences in vowel-sounds. Leaving aside dialect words and regional expressions, vowels can vary minutely in communities a few miles apart, as evidenced by the late Stanley Ellis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Ellis_(linguist)

Those who try mastering another language will know that there is almost no hope of capturing vowels exactly...as we know from hearing foreigners speak English. Even the brilliant ones, e.g. news presenter Matt Frei, betray a whiff of their mother tongue.

Our vowels change too. Many young people cannot (or do not) produce a rounded 'oo' sound such as we like to hear sung on, for instance, the word Jerusalem. It tends towards the pinched French 'u'. (Any choir-trainer has to work hard to get kids to do it 'right'.) My own bugbear is the 'young posh' pronunciation of 'book'. It comes out like 'berk'. And the University Challenge contestants that announce that they 'read Fuzzucks' just make me laugh.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Our vowels change too. Many young people cannot (or do not) produce a rounded 'oo' sound such as we like to hear sung on, for instance, the word Jerusalem. It tends towards the pinched French 'u'. (Any choir-trainer has to work hard to get kids to do it 'right'.) My own bugbear is the 'young posh' pronunciation of 'book'. It comes out like 'berk'. And the University Challenge contestants that announce that they 'read Fuzzucks' just make me laugh.

RP has become incredibly lazy, close to ventriloquism. It's not new though. Bamber Gascogne hardly moved his lips. George Bernard Shaw exploited in Pygmalion, when Eliza Doolittle was made to speak with her mouth full of marbles. The effect is much more evident now. Sir Laurence Olivier, Sir Alec Guinness and David Niven could pronounce "book" and "cool" without sounding soppy.

In the TV series "Liar", Joanne Froggatt had her voice trained to speak RP, this included the watering down of these vowel sounds.

[french frank]

RP has become incredibly lazy, close to ventriloquism.

"RP" is nothing save a passing phase:
And thus in Shakespeare's age did English sound. …

[Richard Barrett]

I don't know that it's described like that, but something like that seems to exist.

There is indeed such a continuum - various points on it have International Phonetic Alphabet symbols attached to them but these are never more than approximations because every language divides the vowels up in different ways. The continuum is three-dimensional in fact; it's normally represented as "front"-"back" on the horizontal axis and "closed"-"open" on the vertical, and each point on the x/y chart also has a "rounded" and "unrounded" version. See the diagram on the second row at the right on this chart:

https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/sites/default/files/IPA2005_1000px.png

Of course English has far more than five distinguishable vowels - but only five letters with which to write them with; and of course the same letters are used to write all the dialects of English while the sounds they represent might differ considerably.

While the sounds represented in English by the letters "y" and "w" serve consonantal as well as syllabic functions, many languages, especially Slavic ones, have sounds that serve syllabic functions whereas in English they are always consonantal. The name of the Czech Republic's second city Brno has two syllables, with the accent on the "r". So whether a sound has a consonantal or syllabic function, or both in different contexts, depends on which language you're speaking.

[french frank]

Of course English has far more than five distinguishable vowels - but only five letters with which to write them

Indeed: the nub of the matter (I had that very vowels chart on my desktop until a few weeks ago, and was too idle to seek it out again when I needed it )

[jean]

The human ear seems capable of detecting the minutest differences in vowel-sounds...

But all actual human ears are part of speech communities, and will only 'hear' the sounds that occur within the languages they are familiar with.

Italians, for example, typically can't hear the difference between the various 'i' sounds in English - they are not a minimal pair in Italian. That's why a well-known pronunciation textbook is entitled Ship or Sheep.

English speakers have a greater repertoire of vowel sounds in general, but we have difficulty with the varieties of e sound in for example Italian and German.

[Richard Barrett]

they are not a minimal pair in Italian

Indeed, as in the difficulty Japanese people have distinguishing between the sounds represented by "l" and "r" in English. But of course these things can eventually be learned, like (I hope) the difference between "ć" and "č" in Serbian... (I'm not there yet)

Adventurous listeners might want to lend an ear to Trevor Wishart's electronic composition Globalalia, which consists only of spoken sounds from a myriad different languages -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWkxPP6Ndng

... quite often concentrating on the same phoneme as spoken in dozens of different ways, often cut up into "microscopic" particles. Aside from this kind of tour de force, many contemporary composers (including this one) are fascinated by this whole subject and often use IPA symbols in scores.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Differences in regional accents are largely down to vowels, which is why Scouse and Brummie sound very similar, as do Cockney, South African and Australian. However, consonants account for the finer differences: rolled Rs in Scotland, the Scottish ch, which also occurs in Scouse, and let's not even start on the American T, which is usually pronounced as a D, except at the beginning of words.

[gurnemanz]

But all actual human ears are part of speech communities, and will only 'hear' the sounds that occur within the languages they are familiar with.

Italians, for example, typically can't hear the difference between the various 'i' sounds in English - they are not a minimal pair in Italian. That's why a well-known pronunciation textbook is entitled Ship or Sheep.

English speakers have a greater repertoire of vowel sounds in general, but we have difficulty with the varieties of e sound in for example Italian and German.

As well as position of articulation and openness of mouth as shown in that great chart above, short/long is also a characteristic - had/sad. In English the longer version tends to get diphthongised - not/note. These "impure" vowels are a feature of English compared to say Italian or German, where the longer versions are more open but still pure. German Gott (short) Not (long) - the following double consonant is a helpful indicator. Italian fatto (short) fata (long).

[jean]

...Italian fatto (short) fata (long).

English RP version of Italian latte, anyone?

[vinteuil]

English RP version of Italian latte, anyone?

... I wd hazard - lar as in lard, tay as in tame, 'lar-tay, strong accent on first syllabub.

[ ... tho' I wd go for a macky-arto, m'self. ]

.

[gurnemanz]

... I wd hazard - lar as in lard, tay as in tame, 'lar-tay, strong accent on first syllabub.

[ ... tho' I wd go for a macky-arto, m'self. ]

.

... then there is the famous composer, JS Bark

[Padraig]

English RP version of Italian latte, anyone?