Morgen – a suitable case for treatment
I once identified a speaker as German from the way he said good morning. The problem was that he mispronounced it as
gʊd ˈmɔːnɪŋ
sounding rather like:
whereas a native pronunciation would have been more like:
gɵd ˈmoːnɪŋ
I constructed those two audio clips fairly crudely from words in the online German dictionary by Duden. The first clip uses the initial syllables of Kutte kʊtə ‘monk’s habit’ and Morgen mɔʁgn ‘morning’; I’ve removed the aspiration from the former and the ʁ portion of the latter:
The second clip uses the initial parts of Gedicht gədɪçt ‘poem’ and Mond moːnt ‘moon’:
The German schwa of Gedicht makes a perfectly acceptable rendition of the vowel in weak English good, which can vary between the full FOOT vowel, ɵ, and schwa. (German schwa is often a little closer, fronter and even rounder than the English version, though not so much as French schwa.)
We can hear that the British English vowel of mor- (and of THOUGHT) is far closer to the oː of German Mond than to the ɔ of German Morgen. The following words could easily be BrE torn and dorm:
But in fact the clip is a German speaker saying Ton toːn and Dom doːm.
German ɔ does occur in BrE, but as the vowel of LOT. Just listen to the near-identity of German kommen and BrE common, German offen and BrE often:
And this perfectly acceptable pronunciation of often
begins with part of Daniel Jones’s own recording of primary cardinal 6, ɔ, crudely spliced onto -fən from the Oxford Advanced Learner’s dictionary.
Given that German and other languages contain appropriate vowels for BrE THOUGHT and LOT, oː and ɔ respectively, it’s a shame that BrE dictionaries and textbooks encourage learners to use inappropriate ones. The problem with the German-sounding good morning at the top of this post is precisely that it sounds like a dictionary transcription.
The orthodox transcriptions also tend to obscure similarities across accents of English. The following might be two stylistically different Southern BrE realizations of what:
But in fact they’re both by Scotsmen, First Minister Alex Salmond saying water and talk show host Craig Ferguson saying what about:
So the ɔ of these Scots’ LOT/THOUGHT is a better match for Southern LOT, as in what, than for Southern THOUGHT, as in wart. This is the reverse of what’s suggested by the orthodox transcriptions, namely that the two accents have different qualities in LOT but the same quality in THOUGHT.
In RP, the THOUGHT and LOT vowels were more open than they are in contemporary BrE; so was the main element of the CHOICE diphthong. Here is saw from the BBC’s Watch With Mother in 1957, followed by its first part, which sounds rather like the beginning of contemporary sock or sob:
Likewise the beginning of the Queen’s 1957 loyalty sounds like the start of contemporary lot:
According to the dictionaries, BrE LOT contains an exotic secondary vowel, the supposedly rounded-but-fully-open “ɒ”. Its endless repetition in publications on BrE has given this vowel a familiarity out of all proportion to its scarcity in the world’s languages. Even in RP I doubt there was ever much reason to transcribe LOT with ɒ. RP’s [ɔ̞] was adequately described with a short ɔ, the symbol which Daniel Jones himself used in broad transcription.
Also to be heard in recordings of classic RP is a version still more distinct from today’s LOT, namely ɑ, i.e. low, unrounded and short (ie differing from the PALM vowel only in length). Compare the stressed syllables of Margaret and tomorrow in this 1940 recording of the then Princess Elizabeth:
Today’s BrE certainly lacks ɒ, and neither the [ɔ̞] nor the [ɑ] realization of RP LOT required it. Frankly I suspect that ɒ is an entirely superfluous IPA symbol. Here are Jill House and John Wells demonstrating cardinals number 6, [ɔ], and 13, [ɒ]:
Is it likely that any language would make a contrast out of such barely audible differences? Do those represent two equally useful cardinal points in the vowel space? Surely not.
(The whole basis of the “secondary cardinal” vowels is shaky. The primary set, i e ɛ a ɑ ɔ o u, clearly maps out the periphery of any speaker’s auditory-acoustic vowel space, achieved in articulatory terms by complex adjustments of lip, jaw and tongue. But it makes neither acoustic nor phonological sense to posit a secondary set by simply toggling the lip positions; the result is a rag-bag of common, not-so-common and non-existent entities, hardly any of which belong near the periphery of the vowel space. For more on this, see my more recent post on the vowel space.)
Lastly, it’s interesting to note that the Scottish o of GOAT usually has a closer quality than the oː of German Mond and Standard BrE THOUGHT, making it more like the THOUGHT of London-Estuary. This, for instance, might be London-Estuary pause:
But it’s from Scotsman Craig Ferguson again, saying you propose:
Scottish English, unlike German, lacks either ʊ or u, allowing its o to levitate north without loss of contrast. Many Scots have realizations of GOAT in ʊ/u territory, like this Scotsman’s o- in for over three:
Of course, Standard Southern BrE also lacks ʊ and u, despite what the dictionaries tell you. So the possibility exists that its THOUGHT vowel may continue to levitate, following London-Estuary and leaving German oː behind. RP’s pure close vowels, iː and uː, were just about its only feature that was more natural than contemporary BrE; perhaps BrE uː will one day be reinstated by the shape of THOUGHT to come.
[Discussion of clips in an earlier version of the post – GL]
Re German vowels: Like you, I’ve also noticed that the German /ʊ/ in Putz is too tense for most types of English. But to my ear, the German /ɪ/ as in bist (or Gedicht above) on the opposite side of the vowel space also sounds too tense for English (well, for my type of English at least).
Too tense, as a rule, which results in a legitimate native variant, but sounds German if it’s used exclusively and with other interferences from German.
But I think, speakers of Standard German or of Northern accents have a degree of rounding (or lack of spreading from the neutral position) in /ɪ/ that sounds very German in an English context.
Thank you. It’s nice to learn more about German
… namely a low unrounded ɑ…
Don’t you mean either a low rounded ɑ or a low unrounded ɒ, though that would perhaps be better described as less rounded since if unrounded, it would be ɑ?
Perhaps they chose it because that vowel, toghether with the DANCE vowel, was once, in U-RP, a fully back open vowel. Doesn’t the Accents of English book say so?
Another mystery — apart from ɪ in diphthongs — is why they chose ɜ as a symbol for what was a raised schwa, perhaps better described by what the symbol ɘ represents?
Here is the Daniel Jones vowel chart from his Everyman’s English Pronouncing Dictionary:
http://s1.bild.me/bilder/160512/9191903Blank_vowel_trapezoid.png
And these are the diphthongs (suggestions welcome, I think it needs some correcting):
http://s1.bild.me/bilder/160512/4013029Blank_diphtongs_trapezoid.png
Hi, Dinora.
I was just wondering did you make those charts, and if so, which program did you use to do it?
Gassalasca, yes, I did, I used a freeware vector graphics editor.
I meant what I said: Princess Elizabeth’s middle vowel in tomorrow is low and unrounded, i.e. a short version of PALM.
I never use the term “U-RP” because it makes no sense to me. People invoke “U-RP” whenever they want to talk about some feature that’s posh and old-fashioned. But anyone who speaks with the vowel qualities still used in the dictionary transcriptions will sound posh and old-fashioned. If you say Who put that there? as [huː pʊt ðæt ðeə] you’ll sound like a character in a Noel Coward play. That is RP, pure and simple, and it’s obsolete.
Regarding ɜ, I don’t claim to be sure of the various rationales people have used for this symbol in English but, as I said in my post on STRUT, my cynical suspicion is that it’s been motivated by a desire to preserve a dogma that schwa never occurs in stressed syllables.
I agree that it doesn’t make sense to say “U-RP” where you mean “conservative RP” or simply “RP” (provided you don’t use the latter term without any qualification for today’s mainstream whatever as well). But U-RP does have features that differ from RP.
Also, what does obsolete mean in your usage? There are not so few RP speakers in their fifties and even only forties who have a diphthong SQUARE vowel and much less glottalisation than what you might recommend to EFL learners.
Obsolescence is a matter of degree and probably needs to be discussed feature by feature. [huː pʊt ðæt ðeə] is too old fashioned for a TV newsreader today, let alone for a young EFL learner.
I’d probably rather say “not typical” than “too old fashioned” for a TV newsreader, but I see what you mean.
For EFL learners, it would depend on what they want, too, but right, one shouldn’t sell them something different from what they want, even if they aren’t really aware of it.
In general, I think the general public simply isn’t far enough to accept EFL learner aiming at a fully contemporary colloquial accent of native 20-year old, unless the learner can really pull it off to perfection. A French accent in RP is funny to some, and will simply be recognised by some, but a French accent that glottalises and has progressive vowels will risk being the object of ridicule – even if this doesn’t make sense.
I don’t think I know a TV newsreader who has phonetic [uː], [ʊ], [æ] and [eə]. Obviously John Wells and other dictionary makers are using these as broad symbols, but my view as a higher-level pronunciation teacher is that it’s getting excessively laborious to explain the divergences between actual pronunciations and the phonetic values of the symbols – hence the alternative reference material provided on my site/blog. (Then there are the problems of teaching phonetics/IPA to native Brits, where RP-centric English transcription makes it harder to teach IPA values.)
You refer to “a fully contemporary colloquial accent of native 20-year old”. Are you suggesting that BrE as I describe it is some kind of casual youthspeak? I don’t think it is. A monophthongal SQUARE, for example, is not a mere colloquialism of the young. In this recording I made on the London Underground, the diphthong [eə] is used in terminates at Edgware by the London-Estuary employee, and not in the standard announcement which follows:
https://www.englishspeechservices.com/audio/blog_audio/edgware_tube.mp3
There’s a significant difference here which I feel justified in pointing out to my students.
The best foreign speakers of English are generally those who are able to imitate the reality of the language as they hear it. A very good French speaker of English is Christine Lagarde:
https://www.englishspeechservices.com/audio/blog_audio/lagarde.mp3
One of the nice features of that clip is her GOOSE diphthong in to, where she avoids the u of her native French and of the RP-centric dictionary transcriptions. Her ɵ in could is also felicitous, surely not a “progressive vowel” risking ridicule. Another nicety is the glottalized t in not. If she came to me for coaching, the main thing I’d get her to work on (as with so many other super-advanced learners) is her FLEECE-KIT contrast, at least in some words, e.g. her ceiling and Italy:
https://www.englishspeechservices.com/audio/blog_audio/lagarde2.mp3
Aside from that, I’d congratulate her and tell her to go on emulating contemporary natives rather than dictionary transcriptions.
I think you have to be as good as she is, or even better, frankly, to pull off the accent you mean (TAYM). The vowel she uses in ‘could’ is certainly closer to the TAYM accent than [ʊ], but together with the hesitation, rounding or schw after the [d], it sounds French. Now, if the problem is the /d/, [ʊ] wouldn’t make the whole word sound any less French, but I think [ɵ] sounds funnier to many people then. And if the interferences are stronger, tolerance will decrease.
I’m really not sure which is the better way. I suppose, at least for a certain age, your approach makes sense. I’m not an EFL pronunciation teacher – of course, your aim is that EFL learners will reach perfection, and if they do, TAYM will be the natural choice.
(The ‘not’ is nice, but the ‘just’ right afterwards sounds like a copy of it where none is asked for. Her diphthong in ‘sign’ is also very convincing. Somewhat nasal?)
I listened to this speech from seven years later: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hmsB1uKkV4
The vowel of the first instance of GOD is pretty close, the second instance a couple of seconds later is somewhat more open. Neither sounds to me as the PALM vowel. Is that some lexical incidence?
Sorry, I’ve never worked out the distribution of LOT variants in RP; but I don’t think it was lexical. Further examples of short ɑ are along and log from children’s BBC TV in the 1950s:
https://www.englishspeechservices.com/audio/blog_audio/rag_along_log.mp3
(Those are both post-lateral and pre-velar, but I suspect that’s coincidental.)
Low unrounded LOT is one of those old features, like back-rounded GOAT, which never seems to have lodged in people’s minds as a classic feature of RP.
By the way, I gather that some linguists use ɒ for Hungarian short a. My impression is that it’s basically just ɑ. What do you think?
The standard accounts transcribe this vowel as /ɔ/ or as /ɒ/. [ɑ] as pronounced here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_back_unrounded_vowel
doesn’t sound rounded enough to me. Ladefoged’s pronunciation of [ɑ] here sounds right: http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter9/cardinal/cardinal.html Jones also pronounces the cardinal vowels on the same page. In the recording labelled “Set 1” I hear #5 as the Hungarian a, in “Set 2” #6 is closer to it. So either my ears are crap or Jones’ pronunciation is not consistent.
Personally I prefer [ɑ] for this vowel, but this is partly because phonologically it is clearly unrounded.
(I was very happy to read your doubts about the meaningfulness of any ɑ/ɒ difference in the first place!)
Geoff,
Would you say that Brian Sewell uses the true [ɒ] here around 12:31
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rhshxZzdGA
or here when saying “bomb”:
http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-34304203
?
I’d avoid a phrase like “the true [ɒ]”, which suggests that “it” exists out there and it’s up to us to find it. I think the symbol only exists because of a problematic articulatory model which defines a set of vowels in terms of supposed tongue shapes, then declares that for every one of these there exists another, parallel vowel with a reversed lip position. In practice, I think analysts use the symbol ɒ for something that seems markedly more open or retracted than the more typical ɔ we get in lots of languages. But I rarely hear anything that doesn’t seem adequately covered by ɔ or ɑ, given that we also have diacritics. For me, ɔ is the kind of thing I hear in German Bombe, eg the audio next to Lautschrift: [ˈbɔmbə] here. Do Brian Sewell’s LOT vowels sound different from that? Maybe a bit; to my hear, his block is more distinctive than his bomb – it sounds like his tongue is pulled a bit lower and backer. I think the same often applies to David Cameron’s LOT, eg toxic at the bottom of this post.
I know what you meant, but the lack of an appropriate punctuation sign, a comma perhaps, makes it sound as if there is a rounded ɑ, which is the ‘default’ pronunciation of that sound. (But then again, a comma wouldn’t be able to save it, you’d need a complete rephrasal of the sentence.) ɑ is already unrounded, by definition. Furthermore, seeing how Daniel Jones positioned it on his vowel chart, that vowel is more back than the PALM of his era and slightly raised than the fully back sound represented by ɒ.
You are right. When you put it like that, U-RP really doesn’t make much sense. Especially since John Wells defines the speech of any current-age upper classes as Upper Received Pronunciation. That’s why it would probably be more correct, though still unsatisfactory, to called it Older RP, Traditional RP or Conservative RP.
Furthermore, you can say a word just as it is transcribed in the EPD or LPD, but you would need an additional layer and an allophone or two gotten right to sound truly like a duke or a countess from the Edwardian age. And choose the appropriate pronunciation of several given, like perhaps saying lʌkˈsjʊəɾɪəs instead of the more common (pun intended) lɐgˈʒʊəriəs.
As for the schwa, apart from that inaccurate dogma, there is a problem in that, one, the Daniel Jones NURSE is a bit more raised than the second COMMA vowel, two, that there is a contradiction in that he says that the lower and lengthened COMMA vowel, perhaps represented correctly by ɜː is vulgar and John Wells saying that a duchess would say nɐːs. Who is right? And is that ɐː actually and really more close than ɐ and really and indeed ɜː?
Thanks – I’ve tried to reword the line on ɑ to avoid confusion.
Regarding commA and NURSE, perhaps you could work through my long post on STRUT, though I’m afraid it didn’t clarify as much as I hoped it would. There is much variability in commA, NURSE and STRUT, even within an individual. The highest priority for the learner is to have good command of schwa, and to avoid both a and ɔ qualities in these sets. My simplest recommendation is to use schwa in all three, though STRUT is opener when stressed, particularly when emphatic (tending towards ɑ in more upmarket accents, towards a in downmarket ones). NURSE as nɐːs is still heard; I tend to think of it as relatively posh, young, female (so a lot of actresses have it).
Just for fun I checked out luxurious on Cambridge, Macmillan and Oxford Advanced online. Macmillan’s transcription has gzj, the other two have gʒ. In the audio, Macmillian and OA have [gʒ], while Cambridge has [kʃ]. All three of course transcribe the stressed vowel as ʊə, while in the audio it’s consistently monophthongal, sounding rather like French je, [ʒɵ].
“NURSE as nɐːs is still heard; I tend to think of it as relatively posh, young, female (so a lot of actresses have it).”
Not to get too off-topic, but I’ve also noticed that SQUARE with a more open starting point [æ] is still heard, especially from posh young females. And like NURSE as [nɐːs], Wells labeled this as a U-RP pronunciation.
The question here is, is what is labeled as /ɜː/ actually in U-RP [ɜː], a lower mid-central vowel, and thus does not, as in mainstream RP, stand for [əː] or a slightly raised schwa, or is it even more open and thus [ɐː], a lower central vowel. How open is it in upper-crust RP?
I’ve come to the conclusion that U-RP is either a thing of the distant past or something so rare that the facts cannot be pinned down. No one ever suggests an example of a contemporary speaker of U-RP. I don’t think that your question can be answered.
I have heard [ɐː] in some variants of Cockney.
Yes, that’s one source of confusion: U-RP can refer to a concrete accent or group of accents with very few native speakers born after 1960 (but enough around not to call it extinct), or it can refer to whatever a certain social class of speakers speak at a given time, eg today. This might or might not be different from the mainstream or standard. The next problem would to define that class, of course.
@Matthew Yes. I think a problem/query re my comment and yours is our use of the word “still”, which rather implies continuity. I’m not 100% sure that the mothers of today’s NURSE/SQUARE openers also do/did the same thing. Likewise GOAT-fronting – I’m not sure there’s continuity between the young variety and the old-fashioned kind.
Correct, they use the monophthongal pronunciation. I made a mistake in that what I wrote is a sort of a semi-phonetic, semi-narrow mess of a transcription.
I would still think, though, that a late 19th century duchess would say lʌkˈsjʊəɾɪəs. And that what the Macmillan and other advanced learners’ dictionaries have is a sort of a neutral pronunciation, with no class markers.
I don’t think that RP had got going by the late 19th century. William Gladstone went to Eton College, and his pronunciation was clearly not RP.
I think that RP as described by Daniel Jones was an accent that had quite a short life-span – but that is not uncommon in the British Isles.
Thank you for clarifying about the COMMA vowel, I will now espouse the theory that is is quite variably, which it is, even in one person’s speech, but I do not know what to think about NURSE. How open, how closed, what was considered vulgar, what was not…
Re ‘Krautish’ English. Geoff, I don’t know if you’re aware of an excellent book geared to the needs of NSS of German trying to speak English:
Eckert, H., Barry, W. (2005), The Phonetics and Phonology of English Pronunciation, (Trier). It deals with the problems Germans have with General British pronunciation in a very competent way. Bill Barry, a native speaker of English and a trained phonetician, was head of the phonetics institute of Saarbrücken University.
Thanks Petr. I was a colleague of Bill’s at UCL in the 1980s and I should look out for his book with Eckert.
I didn’t know that! Bill first appeared on my radar screen while was he was a GA (or some similar position) at Kiel University with Klaus Kohler, from where he received his Ph.D. (if I remember correctly).
This is one hell of a post. I’ve read it a few times, and I’m still struggling to digest it.
It seems to me that the RP system has been canonised so that all other accents of English have been defined in relation to it. I’d like to relate this to the speech of my area to get things clear. Petyt (1985) and Wells have both used o: for West Yorkshire GOAT and ɔ: for West Yorkshire THOUGHT. These men have far superior minds to my own but, when I transcribe my speech, I use ɔ: for GOAT and ɒ: for THOUGHT. This was used in some of the British Library transcriptions: for example, that for my home town.
I’d like to ask Mr. Lindsey if he thinks that the symbols ɔ: and ɒ: are used appropriately in describing the sound clip above.
Thanks for the link to that clip. For the lady speaking there, your opener symbols for GOAT and THOUGHT are more accurate than the closer symbols of Petyt and Wells. This might be a standard southern BrE pronunciation of lock, i.e. lɔk:
https://www.englishspeechservices.com/audio/blog_audio/yorks_lock.mp3
I made it out of the speaker’s closing up, klɔːzɪnʊp:
https://www.englishspeechservices.com/audio/blog_audio/yorks_closing_up.mp3
So her GOAT is clearly ɔː, not oː. But I’m still not convinced that we need ɒ for her THOUGHT. These might be standard southern BrE dark and far:
https://www.englishspeechservices.com/audio/blog_audio/dark_far.mp3
I made them out of the speaker’s daughters and fall back:
https://www.englishspeechservices.com/audio/blog_audio/daughters_fall_back.mp3
In other words, I think her THOUGHT vowel is adequately covered by ɑː.
The primary cardinal vowels divide the perimeter of the vowel space into eight sections, i e ɛ a ɑ ɔ o u. We might think of ɒ as an intermediate quality between ɑ and ɔ. In this sense, I suspect it’s superfluous: I don’t think a language will make use of ɒ in addition to ɑ and ɔ. The AmE PALM vowel tends to be a bit brighter/fronter than the standard BrE ɑ, while the Tyneside/Geordie PALM tends to be a bit darker than standard BrE ɑ. We don’t use a separate vowel symbol for the AmE variety, and I don’t see any more reason to use one for the Tyneside variety, though the Wikipedia entry on Geordie tells us that PALM there is ɒː. My view would be that if a Geordie has a PALM vowel so dark that the symbol ɑ is inappropriate, then it’s probably time to transcribe it with ɔ.
The situation is somewhat analogous to æ, which is intermediate between ɛ and a. I don’t think a language will make use of æ in addition to ɛ and a. But I’m a bit more inclined to make use of æ than ɒ, because humans are more sensitive to differences in the front vowels (which is why contrastive rounding is not uncommon in front vowels, but practically unheard of in back vowels). English speakers seem more sensitive to social/regional distinctions in the ɛ-a area for TRAP than they are to distinctions in the ɑ-ɔ area for LOT. (AmE LOT stands out so much to British ears because of its length, since AmE vowel length generally correlates with openness. The short ɑ of many RP speakers in LOT seems to have gone practically unnoticed.)
That’s a very clever way of analysing her speech. It’s funny to make southern BrE words out of different words in her Yorkshire speech.
After remembering that ɑ is an unrounded vowel, you’re clearly right in saying that ɑ is a more appropriate symbol for this lady’s THOUGHT vowel. Applying to my own speech, THOUGHT is unrounded whereas GOAT is rounded, so your analysis makes sense.
I get the impression that there are some areas of the Midlands that have [ɒ:] for START and [ɑ:] for PRICE. I’ve had a look on the collection and this Nottinghamshire clip is the best that I can find. He has [a:] for MOUTH and [ɔ:] for THOUGHT as well. Do you think that this is a rare case when all four symbols can be used?
Thanks for the Notts link. For THOUGHT, that speaker seems to have a classic ‘international’ o quality, between cardinal 6 [ɔ] and 7 [o]. And yes, he has aː for MOUTH. But I hear no reason to describe his START other than as ɑː. As for his PRICE, it’s diphthongal, moving forwards and sometimes closing somewhat; typically the start point is in the ɑ-a region, the end point in the a-ɛ region. This might be essence:
https://www.englishspeechservices.com/audio/blog_audio/notts_essence.mp3
And this might be southern last:
https://www.englishspeechservices.com/audio/blog_audio/notts_last.mp3
But they’re just parts of his licensed:
https://www.englishspeechservices.com/audio/blog_audio/notts_licensed.mp3
A broad transcription like ae or ɑɛ might be suitable?
Thanks for the new analysis by sound clips. I think that you are right once again.
“German and other languages contain just the right vowels” for some English vowels–It’s good news to foreign learners of English like me though my language may have less in common with English than European languages may.
The Japanese o certainly overlaps with BrE THOUGHT. For example, this sounds exactly like an Englishman saying saw this:
https://www.englishspeechservices.com/audio/blog_audio/soo_desu.mp3
But it’s actually a Japanese speaker saying そうです soo des(u) ‘that’s so’. (The clip is also a nice reminder that the English ð shouldn’t be over-articulated as a fricative, and that KIT is non-close and would be adequately transcribed by cardinal 2, e.)
However Japanese o sometimes seems to be a bit closer than in that clip, i.e. more like London-Estuary THOUGHT or Scottish GOAT, so don’t assume it’s as good a match as German.
Thank you very much!
It’s amazing that “saw this” exactly sounds like そうです！
Lipman, the /d/ is a problem?
‘Not’ is a copy of ‘just’?
This is an interesting website with many erudite posts. I was surprised by your chart comparing the accents of south-east England to newspapers. Why did you associate the Guardian with Standard Southern British? This suggests that Guardian-readers are the social elite. They’re supposed to be the ones that oppose class divisions. Most of them would say that all accents are equal and that RP was a tool by which the upper classes kept the masses down. Also the Guardian began in Manchester and still covers the north of the country more than the other newspapers do.
Thanks for your kinds words. According to Newsworks, unless I misunderstand, the percentages of readers in the AB bracket (roughly the “top” quarter of the population) are as follows: Guardian 67%, Times 63%, Telegraph 57%, Independent 49%, Mail 30%, Sun 13%. The percentages of London readers are: Guardian 41%, Independent 35%, Times 31%, Telegraph 24%, Mail 22%, Sun 22%. The percentages of readers in the urban “north” of England (i.e. those in the Central, Granada, Yorkshire and Tyne Tees TV regions) are: Sun 38%, Mail 38%, Times 36%, Independent 35%, Telegraph 33%, Guardian 29%. That would seem to suggest that the Guardian readership is the most elite, most London-centric and least “northern” in the country.
Hi, Geoff. Thanks for replying to my little message. I didn’t realise that the Guardian had become the preserve of the London-based elite. This is surprising. I maintain that it has better coverage of stories from the north though – certainly better than the Indepedent.
Have you ever thought about covering other accents on your blog? That’d be brilliant. I’d like somebody to do a description of Mancunian. We don’t seem to get much attention from professionals.
I personally would love it if you did a full post on Scottish accent(s). There’s quite a few references to SE in this post/comments, would be great to have it all broken down into bits… 🙂
Personally I think it’s the German symbol for the Morgen vowel that’s wrong: it should be ɒ or ɑ. So while I agree that the ɒ and ɑ sounds are too similar to warrant separate symbols, there *is* a difference between CV 5 ɔ and ɒ/ɑ which deserves to be recognized by different symbols, and not just ɔ and ɔ̞.
Simon