| Pages in topic: < [1 2] | Here and hear/ Q. for native speakers Thread poster: Lingua 5B
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Oliver Walter 
United Kingdom
Local time: 19:17
German to English
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| Identical sounds | Oct 25, 2010 |
My spoken English (native, "received" pronunciation but with a little influence from northern England where I spent my first 18 years) has absolutely no difference in pronunciation between the following pairs, and if I heard of a claimed difference, I would not know which sound belonged with which word:
here - hear
hair - hare
there - their
your - yore
mail - male
pail - pale
and no doubt, many more pairs. And, of course none of the above sounds the same... See more My spoken English (native, "received" pronunciation but with a little influence from northern England where I spent my first 18 years) has absolutely no difference in pronunciation between the following pairs, and if I heard of a claimed difference, I would not know which sound belonged with which word:
here - hear
hair - hare
there - their
your - yore
mail - male
pail - pale
and no doubt, many more pairs. And, of course none of the above sounds the same as:
they're, you're
Oliver ▲ Collapse
| | | | Neil Coffey
United Kingdom
Local time: 19:17
French to English
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| English spelling | Oct 25, 2010 |
Christine Andersen wrote:
The erratic English spelling reflects to some extent the way the language is descended from many different languages, and probably even dialects of those.
It's true that English spelling has been influenced by things such as multiplicity of varieties existing side by side, loan words, use by non-native speakers, artificial manipulations (things like inserting a "b" into "debt"). But these things also occurred in other languages whose spelling system more systematically reflects pronunciation also.
A major reason for English spelling being so erratic is probably what it *hasn't* had: periodic reforms to the system. The fact that, say, Spanish or Russian orthography corresponds to pronunciation much more systematically than in English isn't an accident: it has come about through deliberate reforms of those systems to bring them into line with pronunciation as people sensed that pronunciation and spelling were "getting out of sync".
Where spelling and pronunciation are closely related, the written language has a stabilising effect on pronunciation.
Do you have a particular study in mind that demonstrates this?
There never has been a single standard pronunciation of English, and for the foreseeable future, there never will be!
However, there are certain dialects that are considered more correct than others - in Britain called Received Pronunciation, BBC English, the Queen's English (maybe slightly old fashioned, but still understandable!) and Southern English, Oxford English or Estuary English... with different connotations.
I wonder why you use the word "correct" rather than just "neutral", "standard", "non-regional"...?
The dictionaries try to give the pronunciation from these ´correct´ dialects to cut the confusion to a minimum, but as others have explained, they cannot give all the subtleties.
I doubt that any mainstream dictionary is trying to make a statement that a particular pronunciation is "correct". They probably have more practical criteria (more students learn Received Pronunciation than Lowland Scotts, so if you use RP you'll sell more dictionaries than if you use Lowland Scotts as the basis for your transcriptions; RP is more "universally heard" etc)
| | | | | Considered correct by teachers among others | Oct 26, 2010 |
@ Neil
With regard to some accents being considered more correct than others...
In my day my parents, aided to the best of their ability by schoolteachers, gently but firmly made sure that my brother and I did NOT pick up too much Indian accent from our schoolmates. In fact, that is precisely what we did at school... and we spoke ´properly´ at home! On the rare occasions when our parents came to the school they noticed we were utterly silent.  ... See more @ Neil
With regard to some accents being considered more correct than others...
In my day my parents, aided to the best of their ability by schoolteachers, gently but firmly made sure that my brother and I did NOT pick up too much Indian accent from our schoolmates. In fact, that is precisely what we did at school... and we spoke ´properly´ at home! On the rare occasions when our parents came to the school they noticed we were utterly silent. 
Precisely the same happened with my younger sisters in Northumberland... and to thousands of dialect-speaking children all over the country.
My father, BTW, has a Bristol r and l that have come back in his old age, to my secret glee!
It is not a purely English phenomenon either.
_________________
I admit, I am not sure where I have read that phonetic spelling has a stabilising effect on pronunciation - and it IS a very sweeping statement. Probably hard to prove as well! But with older sound recordings it is becoming possible.
I think with languages that have not had a written form until the 20th century, it may be true, but I do not know any of them well enough to comment. ▲ Collapse
| | | | | Answer clear? | Oct 26, 2010 |
Hello Lingua 5B,
Did you get a clear answer to your question? As a native speaker of American English, I agree with M-W.
The assumption that differently spelled words cannot be pronounced identically is incorrect. It is as simple as that.
Sincerely,
Michael
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Lingua 5B
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Local time: 20:17
Member (2009)
English to Croatian
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TOPIC STARTER
Yes, I've got plenty of useful answers and explanations from native colleagues, thank you very much.
In my language, it's impossible to have two words differently spelled and pronounced the same way ( or identically if you wish), due to a specific structure of the language.
If we have two words identically pronounced, then they are spelled identically ( except for minor changes in capitalization or accentuation sometimes, but those are other elements of orthography, not... See more Yes, I've got plenty of useful answers and explanations from native colleagues, thank you very much.
In my language, it's impossible to have two words differently spelled and pronounced the same way ( or identically if you wish), due to a specific structure of the language.
If we have two words identically pronounced, then they are spelled identically ( except for minor changes in capitalization or accentuation sometimes, but those are other elements of orthography, not a spelling).
I've met some theater actors in UK, and they've made differences between such words. For example "here" is shorter, and "hare" has a wider/ more widely open vowel. And there are phonetic symbols for both things.
Thanks again everyone. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Kaspars Melkis
United Kingdom
Local time: 19:17
English to Latvian
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| pitch accent differences is not identical pronunciation | Oct 26, 2010 |
Lingua 5B wrote:
In my language, it's impossible to have two words differently spelled and pronounced the same way ( or identically if you wish), due to a specific structure of the language.
Pitch accent in those languages that have it (Japanese, Swedish, Latvian, Serbian etc.) is a very distinctive pronunciation feature therefore I don't think that we can say that words with different pitch accents are pronounced identically. Each language realizes these features differently but in some ways it is similar to stress. Native speakers usually can understand words pronounced by non-native speakers even if they make mistakes in stress or pitch accent but nevertheless they would consider such pronunciation incorrect or non-standard. And there are cases when incorrect stress can be a source of hilarious misunderstandings, e.g., Russian п`исать (to pee) or пис`ать (to write) or Spanish papá - father, papa - potato. And Yasutomo Kanazawa already gave similar examples for pitch accent in Japanese.
I would like to know if there are any phonetic features that would allow us to distinguish the pronunciation of "here" and "hear" in the standard English (or any variant that claims to pronounce them identically). But I am not holding my breath.
| | | | Neil Coffey
United Kingdom
Local time: 19:17
French to English
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| The accent police | Oct 26, 2010 |
Christine Andersen wrote: In my day my parents, aided to the best of their ability by schoolteachers, gently but firmly made sure that my brother and I did NOT pick up too much Indian accent from our schoolmates. In fact, that is precisely what we did at school... and we spoke ´properly´ at home! On the rare occasions when our parents came to the school they noticed we were utterly silent.
Oh dear! Hope you're now enjoying life free from the accent police!
It's true that there are people who invest enormous amounts of energy in striving towards some particular accent that they perceive as somehow "better", even to the point of paying for elocution lessons. For what it's worth, Trudgill who you mentioned has studied people's perceptions to different accents, and there's not always a correlation between people's perceived aspirations for "correcting" their accent and the actual perceptions of other listeners (e.g. regional accents can be perceived as conveying values such as honesty which are actually positive things that the elocutee may wish to have conveyed).
But.... despite all that, I don't think that dictionaries are taking the same stance as your father in saying a particular accent is "correct".
[quote]Christine Andersen wrote:
I admit, I am not sure where I have read that phonetic spelling has a stabilising effect on pronunciation - and it IS a very sweeping statement. Probably hard to prove as well! But with older sound recordings it is becoming possible.
[quote]
Maaaybe, although just having sound recordings doesn't automatically solve the problem, of course.
A priori, there are some severe problems with assuming that spelling can have much of an effect on pronunciation. Much key language development and "hard-wiring" appears to happen much before the child learns to read and write. (E.g. even in their first 6 months of being, babies are apparently already "mapping out the perceptual space" of the language(s) they hear around them.)
For what mechanisms there are, these could actually drive *change* rather than hampering it. In Spanish, for example (which I would consider to have a "semi-phonetic" writing system), an interesting case arises with certain cases where some speakers pronounce consonant clusters in "learned" words (which, arguably, they pronounce because they see them written down) which break the ordinary phonotactics of the language (i.e. they pronounce consonant clusters where in "normal" Spanish words they couldn't occur). There's an argument that as our society evolves a greater preoccupation for discussing more "learned" topics, this could lead to an increase in the frequency of such clusters, and hence influence the phonotactics of the basic language.
[Edited at 2010-10-26 15:08 GMT]
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