Search results for 'tag:American English tag:Consonants' matching tags 'American English' and 'Consonants'

Re: i want to learn bristish accent...

Anonymous — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 15:12:47 GMT

I am very talented with accents, but I have had to accept the fact that I am getting older and the ability to imitate an accent is diminishing. I am a native speaker of standard mid-western American English (considered to be accent free in the US). I speak Spanish with several regional accents, due to spending summers as a child in Mexico with relatives, then I lived 12 years in Miami and developed quite a heavy Caribbean accent, and could pass as a Cuban.

I learned quite fluent German at age 20-23 when I was stationed in Germany with the US Army, but I have a slight accent because of what I mention in the next paragraph--rhythm and music.

I live in Israel now, and although I do not use American vowels and consonants in Hebrew, it is the rhythm or music as they say, which gives me away.

At the end of the day, you must admit that it is WHAT you say and that it should be kind and with a good heart. Someone could be the most talented foreign language learner in the world and could learn to speak those languages perfectly without foreign accent, but this person is a horrible and says nasty things! I think we would love and respect the foreign accent spoken by the kind, well-meaning person. It is not the accent, but the thought that counts. Remember that!

Re: a(n) university ??

yizhivika — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 22:38:19 GMT

Yes, Yankee's comments above pretty much speak for British English usage, as well as for American English. The initial u in the 'consonant' examples given by Yankee is invariably pronounced as yoo.

As for British usage of 'An historic(al)', you will still occasionally find it, and I think one is supposed to drop the h when pronouncing it, i.e. "An 'istoric(al)", but I suspect it'll die out eventually, and we'll all use "A historic(al)" instead.

Re: Mimicking an actor's accent

Kooyeen — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 20:27:59 GMT

Hi,
yes, I remember you asked about him. I'm not an expert at all, but I can tell you my opinion, as a learner.
I agree it's a good accent for those who are interested in British English. I don't find any annoying features in his accent (=features I don't like). It doesn't sound posh to me, his intonation seems to be normal and not exaggerated like in annoying posh accents.

3:54 - That is strange, yes. <-- Tapped T in "that is". I don't know how many accents have this feature and to what extent because I don't really know enough about British English.
3:57 - Yeah, that's a little weird <-- Glottal stops in "little". But they are not everywhere... either he's changing hir accent while he speaks, or those glottal stops are only found in certain special cases in his accent.
He doesn't release final T's. - Notice the difference between his final consonants and the hosts' ones, especially the woman's (the hosts sound like they overpronounce final consonants to me, since I'm mainly used to American English).

Just my non-native opinion, though. I don't know how difficult it is for a learner to pick up such an accent, because I don't know how widespread those kinds of accents are in the UK and in the media in general. Good luck.

Re: Sides vs Advantages

sumryan — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 17:12:49 GMT

In American English the 's' in sides sounds like /z/ too.
Here are the rules for pronouncing the final 's' in American English.

1. âesâ is pronounced as /ez/ after these sibilant sounds

/s/          businesses, buses
/z/          freezes, causes
/sh/        bushes, marshes
/ch/        churches, lunches
/j/           pages, judges and ADVANTAGES ( :

2. âsâ is pronounced as /z/ after these voiced consonant sounds and all vowel sounds
/b/   tabs
/d/   cards
/v/   loves
/g/   hugs
/th/ bathes
/l/     girls
/r/         cars
/m/       moms
/n/        menâs
/ng/       sings
/y/        boys
/w/        howâs

3. âsâ is pronounced as /s/ after these voiceless sounds

/p/       stops, mops
/t/         cats, puts
/f/        coughs, laughs
/k/       makes, trucks
/th/      baths, months

Hope this helps!
Susan
<<Web site removed by mod - please put it in your profile instead>>

Re: Syllabic Consonant ???

Anonymous — Wed, 28 May 2008 19:37:57 GMT

James-

I think the differences all could be accounted for by dialect. In American English, I have been taught that the only syllabic consonants are l and n, but not m. all of the words above such as london and gordon could be pronounced with a syllabic consonant. The determinant for any sc is dialectal variations and how the region has chosen to address these types of words. Try traveling into another area and see how the people say the word. I bet you find that even though you are in the same country, speaking the same language, dialect (known to laymen as accent) will vary wildly.

Re: fair-haired

Pter — Mon, 19 May 2008 10:02:06 GMT

Yes, there are regional variations in American English. Do you know which accent is chosen by MW as the reference in the pronunciation keys. Is it General American?

My problem is that, as I have mentioned before, they are indeed denoted differently in British English. The first one is a simple vowel while the second one is a diphthong / e /. The question is whether the diphthong / e / ONLY occurs before an R. If it occurs before some other consonants, such as D, L, T, N ( / -et /, / -el /, / -ed /, / -en / ), using / er / to indicate a different sound from / e / is not a good idea because you'll have problems showing the differences between / -et /, / -el /, / -ed /, / -en / and / -et /, / -el /, / -ed /, / -en / respectively.

Certain combination of sounds just do not exist in English and that's why they don't need to use diacritic to indicate that the P in SP is non-aspirated whereas an initial P is aspirated. The bottom line is that the pronunciation keys have to be non-ambiguous. This is the same reason why they don't need to use diacritic to indicate tapped intervocalic T or final dark L. (Clear L at syllabic final position does not exist.)

I did a search in my pronunciation dictionary and found that the combinations / -et / and / -el / do not exist. / -ed / and / -en / only exist when the spelling has an R between / e / and the following consonant. Since British English is non-rhotic, the corresponding American pronunciation would have an R before that consonant, resulting in / rd / and / rn /. So, / e / ONLY occurs before an R! As a result, using / er / in American English to represent the counterpart of the British English / e / is non-ambiguous after all!

After going through all these discussions, I finally found out the reasons.

Kooyeen, many thanks indeed for discussing this issue with me. Without your insights, I would not have been able to find out the underlying issues that has been troubling me.

EDIT:

It appears that / e / was the result of the influence of the following R sound on the / e / sound. It is therefore actually the equivalent of / er / in American English. However, because British English is non-rhotic, the R influence results in the / e / becoming a diphthong, i.e. a schwa is added after the / e / to become / e /.

EDIT 2:

While adding the above EDITed text, I just found that what I guessed was probably right.

http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/sounds/text-only/received-pronunciation/london/

The vowels of youth
Listen first to the vowel sound she uses in the words air, there, their, where, somewhere and parents. In traditional forms of RP, they would be pronounced with a diphthong â that is two vowel sounds. Older RP speakers would start with an <e> sound â as in bed â before drifting into a weak vowel rather like the initial sound in about. This type of pronunciation, also applied to words such as dare, hair and bear, was until relatively recently common in many English accents. The diphthong emerged once speakers began to omit the <r> sound at the end. Speakers throughout the UK once pronounced this <r> sound, but it is increasingly restricted to speakers in the West Country and far South West of England, a small area of Lancashire and most of Scotland and Ireland. It is also present in most US English accents. The <r> sound was initially replaced by the weak vowel at the end of the diphthong, but nowadays most younger RP speakers omit this final part of the diphthong and simply use a long <e> sound â thus shared is pronounced with exactly the same vowel as in shed, only the vowel is noticeably longer. This demonstrates perfectly how successive sound changes can radically alter the pronunciation of a set of words. Most RP speakers, like Michelle, now only distinguish between pairs such as fairs and fez or flared and fled simply by vowel length. Older speakers tend to use a diphthong for the first word in each pair.

It means that the Received Pronunciation that I have been learning (and indicated on all the dictionaries) is only that of the older generation! What a surprising finding from this simple question of fair-haired!

Re: fair-haired

Pter — Sat, 17 May 2008 17:27:16 GMT

Thanks again for your patience in explaining that to me. I think I know what you are talking about. This also happens for the length of vowels before voiceless consonants vs voiced consonants, e.g. bat vs bad. Yes, you are right, the vowel quality is often affected by the following consonant.

My problem is that, the pairs of words we discussed before are denoted with different IPA symbols in British English, which is mostly what I learnt, while they are denoted with the same symbol in American English. My only conclusion is that, they are indeed different in British English and warrant the use of different symbols, but they are much closer in American English and are considered only as variants.

Now I know I knew nothing about American English.

Re: Consonant cluster reduction

Kooyeen — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 21:13:30 GMT

No.
But in African American English sometimes, or often, there are similar reduction, for example TEST ---> TESS ... HAND ---> HAN

What you are hearing is probably the fact that consonants are not fully pronounced in some cases. For example the C in FACT is not pronounced like the C in COP. I retain it, so there's practically no sound coming from that C, and you get FA(C)T. It is not the same as FAT though, because my mouth is not skipping that C... it's just that no sound comes from the C, but I think the sound comes more from the movement from the unreleased C to the T, or even just from the T.

Maybe someone else will be able to help you more... I am a non-native speaker, but that's what I do and that's the way natives sound to me.

Consonant cluster reduction

Learner100 — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 19:57:59 GMT

I've noticed that in some TV programs some final consonant clusters are reduced. Here are a few examples that I've noticed:

facts -> fax

gifts -> gifs

tests -> tess

tasks -> tass

asked -> ass-t

kicked -> kit

Is it acceptable to make these kind of reductions in American English?

Re: British vs American English in their accent

Kooyeen — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 18:54:41 GMT

It's a symbol for phonetic transcriptions and it represent a sound, not a letter. It's not a matter of pronouncing it differently, but a matter of using it or not. Americans use that sound in "bath" for example, but some people in the UK don't. So Americans say /bÃ¦Î¸/, and some people in the UK use another sound instead, so that transcription doesn't work to describe the way those British people talk.
That said, the transcriptions you find in dictionaries are not perfect, not 100% accurate. For example, even if every dictionary says "can" is pronounced /kÃ¦n/, most Americans say either /kÉÉn/, or /keÉn/, or /kÉªÉn/. It often happens before nasal consonants like N and M, for example.