English ee

Hi, I am seeking an accurate transcription of southern English vowel sounds. I think that "you" is /jʉ:w/ in slow and deliberate enunciation and /jʉ/ or /jə/ elsewhere. I don't think /ju:/ comes across as anything other than foreign pronunciation, or maybe pronunciation from other dialects. Is this right.

And then, I am trying to get a transcription of "he" - not /hi:/, but one that shows the difference of the long e from other languages' equivalents. If you think of the difference between french fille and English "fee", you will see what I mean. I am forever telling French people to relax their mouths when speaking English. It is not a vowel as close and as front as possible, but a less close and front type. Could it be /hɨ:/? That might not be quite right. Maybe /hɨi/ would capture the real delivery better? Or /hɨi(j)/?

Can IPA experts advise me, with an eye to really natural southern English delivery. I am southern English, so I know it is NOT ju: and hi:.

If I exaggerate the way I say "you" "he" "she" - they are actually diphthongal! It's definitely not a purely vowel. Would it be wrong to transcribe /j/ and /w/ at the end of these when said with stress?

I'm trying to explain to a foreign speaker of English how southern British English is really pronounced. I think in southern Britain there is a continuum between more careful and more relaxed pronunciation, and most people would vary between the two at different times. So "it" could be ɪt, but could also be ɪʔ. Do these look right?

I aɪ~ɑ
you jʉ:w~jʉ~jə
he (h)ɨi~(h)ɨ
she ʃɨi~ʃɨ
it ɪt~ɪʔ
we wɨi~wɨ
they ðeɪ
what? wɔt~wɔʔ
cat kʰæt~kʰæʔ
dog dɔg
who? (h)ʉ:w~(h)ʉ
a eɪ~ə
girl gɜːl~gɜʊ
boy bɔɪ
man mæ:n
woman wʊmən
where? weə(ɹ)~weə(ʋ)
here (h)iə(ɹ)~(h)iə(ʋ)
there ðeə(ɹ)~ðeə(ʋ)
no nəʊ~næ

As S British English is non-rhotic the (ɹ)~(ʋ) above is meant to convey the fact that the r would be pronounced before a following word beginning with a vowel.

Matthew : « I think that "you" is /jʉ:w/ in slow and deliberate enunciation and /jʉ/ or /jə/ elsewhere. I don't think /ju:/ comes across as anything other than foreign pronunciation, or maybe pronunciation from other dialects. Is this right. »

Pour sortir de la syllabe <you> (quelle que soit sa prononciation), j'aimerais plutôt aborder le statut du phonème /uː/ en anglais et me concentrer sur "sa" réalisation effective. Mettons la réalisation inaccentuée de côté (/uː/ → [ʉ] =[}], [ə] = [@], etc) : ne retenons que la voyelle accentuée /uː/ — comme dans An <croupier>, <ewe>, <lose>, <roof> etc — que Matthew notait [ʉːw] = [}:w]. J'imagine que la prononciation doit varier avec les locuteurs, mais je perçoit souvent la réalisation de /uː/ comme une sorte de diphtongue inversée → /ʊ̯uː/ = /U_^u:/.

Je rejoins donc Matthew quand il ôte toute cardinalité au phonème anglais traditionnellement noté /uː/ (par exemple, opposer An <two> à Fr <tout>, où <#out> = /u/), mais je ne le suis plus quand il fait succéder la semiconsonne [w] à une voyelle longue ([ʉ] ou [ʊ] → ça n'a pas grande importance) : je perçois deux voyelles → une brève suivie d'une longue.




Matthew : « And then, I am trying to get a transcription of "he" - not /hi:/, but one that shows the difference of the long e from other languages' equivalents. If you think of the difference between french fille and English "fee", you will see what I mean. I am forever telling French people to relax their mouths when speaking English. It is not a vowel as close and as front as possible, but a less close and front type. Could it be /hɨ:/? That might not be quite right. Maybe /hɨi/ would capture the real delivery better? Or /hɨi(j)/? ».

Dans la même veine que /uː/→ /ʊ̯uː/ = /U_^u:/, je dirais que /iː/→ /ɪ̯iː/ = /I_^i:/. Mais ce n'est qu'une perception personnelle, et donc subjective car avant tout francocentrée.

J'opposerais ainsi Fr <fit> = Al {machte} = Es {hizo}, qui se prononce /fi/, à An <fee> = Al {Gebühr} = Es {tarifa}, que j'interprèterais volontiers comme /fɪ̯iː/ = /fI_^i:/.

Josh Lalonde : « There are some RP speakers who do have something pretty close to [i:] and [u:] but most have something more like [Ii Uu]. »

C'est ce que je pense aussi.

I think you might both be right on the long i: pronunciation, but not on the long u:. In fact, Greg, to pronounce "you" as you have outlined could only be a foreign pronunciation. I would prefer replies from native speakers of British English rather than replies from foreigners who don't necessarily have good listening skills to appreciate what I am saying. The vowel in you does not end in /u:/ (bearing in mind the number of people who speak RP in England is minimal - TV programmers have difficulty finding actors who can use this accent naturally). I don't think there is a w- or j-glide in all circumstances, but if you say "you are", is there not a w in the middle?

Matthew : <<I am forever telling French people to relax their mouths when speaking English. It is not a vowel as close and as front as possible, but a less close and front type.>>

I think natives should unrelax their mouths when speaking so the vowels becomes as different from each other as possible to make it is easier to understand for foreigners.

<<but if you say "you are", is there not a w in the middle? >>

This is true, but it's a consequence of normal linking as well. Think of "now he thinks" vs "now I think". In the second example, there's a linking [w] connecting /naU/ with /aI/.
/u:/ and /aU/ regularly link via a slight [w] to a vowel sound in the next word, /i:/ and /aI/ link via [j] and /U@/ /e@/ /I@/, as well as /3:/, /A:/ and /O:/ link via /r/.

I once had a wee bit of a friendship at uni with a French lassie from a town in Southern France called Fleurance. Her name was Giselle, and she told me that she had great difficulty understanding British MEN speaking (in English of course) mainly because they never seemed to open their mouths "properly", in sharp contrast to their French counterparts who really made use of their lips in the course of speech (in French of course).

We have to discount accent and dialect misundertandings here.

Giselle complained that English men in particular (as opposed to Scots, I suppose, because even though I have a pronounced, but not unduly strong, Edinburgh Scottish accent (far less harsh than Glaswegian that's for sure) she never had any problems understanding me, maybe because as a Scot I probably make more use of mouth movements without going OTT of course....that would be weird anyway, but I'm not really aware of my mouth movements when talking, and I have not stood in front of a mirror while reciting a wee bit of Burns in order to find out.

She said that many English men speak without much in the way of mouth movement. That was her observation anyway - I've not made a study on this one so I can't make any valid comment myself.

Anyway, she said that she found British women easier to understand than she did British men, so they must open their mouths wider than do the blokes......(they do....they do.....!) I think she found British women easier to follow because they tend to talk a whole lot more than do British men anyway (they do...they do!) so she became more familiar with their speech patterns.

It's a bit like those foreigners asking you to slow down a lot when speaking English to them because they say you are talking much too fast! When you hear so many other Languages being spoken at about a zillion words per second, especially the Romance Languages, you tend to think, as an English speaker, that your own speech is quite slow and languid in comparison. Apparently it's not so......if it's not your accent then it's your machine gun delivery......

The /i/ and /u/ phonemes in English have wide variety of subtle variations throughout the world. Here in the States, I find that /u/ is typically something like [Mu] (that is, with a slight, unrounded onglide) and that /i/ is usually a little retracted.

British English almost always has some sort of onglide, ranging from [Ii] and [Uu] at the mildest to [@i] and [@u] in Midlands English. JC Wells suggests that /u:/ is realized as [1}] in Estuary English (i.e. similar to the American version but quite fronted).

The actual [i:] and [u:] realizations are only realized in a few dialects--notably very conservative RP and some ethnolects like Germanic upper midwestern English and Chicano English, where the more pure vowel is held over from another language.

The dialect here in Milwaukee falls under the category of such dialects with monophthongal /i/ and /u/ (I do not mark phonemic length for them, as under conventional analyses both can be short and long), as [i(ː)] and [u(ː)] respectively. However, /u/ has another pronunciation, which shows up after coronals, which is as [ʉ̯̆ŭ]/[ʉ̯u] or, more extremely, [y̯̆ŭ]/[y̯u]; similar diphthongs show up for other mid and high back vowels after coronals except that they never form full front-to-back diphthongs, unlike /u/. (One little detail here is that long vowels tend to be a bit laxer than their short counterparts in the dialect here, and may at times form very narrow falling, opening diphthongs in practice.)

Your friend Giselle would have an even harder time understanding Americans, because we apparently move our lips far less than Brits and have quite a bit less variation in pitch, which makes us sound like we are speaking in a monotone to you.

Conversely, "machine gun" is EXACTLY how I would describe the average Brit's delivery. I just watched a documentary on the Glastonbury music festival (which I gather is sort of like Lollapalooza with a lot more mud), and much of the difficulty I had in understanding some of the people on it had to do more with their very staccato, chopped-off speech patterns and the strange, uncomfortable rhythm of their sentences rather than the differences in their actual pronunciation. Oddly enough, the more the stoned they got, the easier they were to understand....