Britons: How do you pronounce 'inch' and 'lunch'?

Tom   Sat Jan 23, 2010 12:00 am GMT
Hi,

This time I have a question for Britons, preferably (but not exclusively) those who speak something similar to RP.

I've recently heard that in British English it is considered OK to pronounce "inch" and "lunch" as "insh" and "lunsh", respectively. Do you ever pronounce it that way and do you find this pronunciation acceptable?
Guext   Sat Jan 23, 2010 12:59 am GMT
The thing is, what's the difference between "inch" and "insh"? You are going to have an epenthetic /t/ anyway: intsh. So the difference would be one of place: "intsh" is just a fronted "inch".
Tom   Sat Jan 23, 2010 1:05 am GMT
Are you saying it is impossible to pronounce "insh" without making it sound like "inch"? I don't think it is impossible.
Johnny   Sat Jan 23, 2010 1:20 pm GMT
I'm saying that I think "inch" is /ɪnt̠ʃ/ (the /t/ is retracted and becomes postalveolar), and I take "insh" to be /ɪntʃ ̟/ (the /ʃ/ is advanced and becomes alveolar). I'm not saying the sound the same, they don't.
What I'm saying is that there's no pure /ʃ/ sound in "insh", as long as you pronounce some kind of /n/ consonant. If you wanted to hear a pure /ʃ/ in "insh", you would have to get rid of the /n/ consonant and nasalize the vowel instead: /ɪ̃ʃ/. That actually has a pure /ʃ/, and "inch" pronounced that way would probably sound odd in every native variety of English.

This is just my guess, where I've assumed that there's always an epenthetic /t/ between an /n/ and an /s/ or /ʃ/. I'm neither a native speaker nor a linguist.
Damian in Edinburgh   Sat Jan 23, 2010 2:14 pm GMT
Will a (sort of) Edinburgh Scottish version of RP do here, Tom? It will? Excellent! Then I'll begin...

I've never thought about this before really, but I for one use the "ch" sound rather than the "sh" sound in words such as "inch" and "lunch", but when speaking rapidly, as I am inclined to do most of the time, it's not always clear which of the sounds I emit...it can be somewhere in between, but when I say "inch" or "lunch" slowly then it's definitely a "ch", no doubt about it.

It's like everything else in everyday speech - the "improper" is often the "lazy" option than the "proper" - it rolls off the tongue easier.

It's it's considered "OK" here in Britain to go with the "sh" thing then I'm not sure who exactly declares this to be the case.....obviously not the British English Language Pronunciation Police, but not too many people abide by their rulings anyway, not even the BBC some of the time.
Damian in Edinburgh   Sat Jan 23, 2010 2:18 pm GMT
This should read:

***the "improper" is often the "lazier" option rather than the "proper"***
Tom   Sat Jan 23, 2010 10:08 pm GMT
Johnny:

I don't get the part where you say "insh" means /ɪntʃ/ with an advanced /ʃ/. Maybe it's my lack of familiarity with terms like "post-alveolar"...

More to the point, I don't believe there always has to be an thepanatic t. Check out these recordings from the LDOCE:
http://www.antimoon.com/temp/nsh-without-t.mp3

If it is possible here, it should be possible in "insh". (Also consider words like "insane" where there is no pentathenic /t/ before /s/.)

Therefore, I don't get it why pronunciation dictionaries transcribe "inch" as /ɪntʃ/ (with t in italics, which means it is optional). When I only had the Cambridge EPD, I thought it was just an oversight; but now I'm looking at the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary and it does the same thing.
Steak 'n' Chips   Sat Jan 23, 2010 10:45 pm GMT
I said "lunsh" out loud a few times in different sentences.

Perhaps my ears are deceiving me, or the artificial situation made it a poor experiment, but I found that there was a "tsh" sound when the word was more stressed, and more like "sh" when less stressed. When I tried to say "lunsh" in a more stressed position "you can have a snack after your lunch" I sounded like I was slurring. But in "lunch is late" or "lunchtime soon" "lunsh" sounded OK.

Maybe it's optional depending on word position?
Armada   Sun Jan 24, 2010 1:58 am GMT
I said "lunsh" out loud a few times in different sentences.


"lunsh" sounds more elegant.
Johnny   Mon Jan 25, 2010 12:40 pm GMT
Tom, I think you are right. I tried to think of an explanation for the epenthetic /t/, and I think it's caused by the fact the tongue is often still in the /n/ position when we start to blow air to say /ʃ or /s/, and that forms a plosive /t/.
So you are right, I think it is possible to say /nʃ/ and avoid the epenthetic /t/, partly or completely, but that might become harder to do in fast speech.
Anyway, personally, I would find /ɪnʃ/ to be a pretty odd pronunciation of "inch", although some people might not even notice it and think they heard /ɪntʃ/ with a fronted /ʃ/ anyway.
Levee44   Mon Jan 25, 2010 3:51 pm GMT
Peter Roach gives /ɪnʃ/ etc. as the only transcription for words like "inch" etc. in his book "English Phonetics and Phonology" (at least in an earlier edition that I have seen).
Tom   Wed Jan 27, 2010 12:00 am GMT
Does he explain at all why he does that?
Trolls   Wed Jan 27, 2010 7:01 pm GMT
lol @ u losers
Levee44   Wed Jan 27, 2010 7:28 pm GMT
I don't have the book on me right now but I will look it up if I don't forget. I remember that it has something to the effect of 'inch /ɪnʃ/ (which some people pronounce as /ɪntʃ/'.
Levee44   Wed Jan 27, 2010 9:09 pm GMT
OK, I've got it. The book is:

Peter Roach. English Phonetics and Phonology: A practical course. Second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

These are the relevant passages that I could find:

However, some of our phoneme symbols consist of two characters; for example, we usually treat /tʃ/ (as in 'chip' tʃɪp) as one phoneme, so tʃ is a phoneme symbol consisting of two characters (t and ʃ). (p. 39)

tʃ, dʒ are the only two affricate phonemes in English. As with the plosives and most of the fricatives, we have a fortis/lenis pair, and the voicing characteristics are the same as for these other consonants. tʃ is slightly aspirated in the positions where p, t, k are aspirated, but not strongly enough for it to be necessary for foreign learners to give much attention to it. The place of articulation is the same as for ʃ, ʒ, that is, palato-alveolar. This means that the t component of tʃ has a place of articulation rather further back in the mouth than the t plosive usually has. (p. 52)

The affricates tʃ and dʒ are, phonetically, composed of a plosive followed by a fricative, as explained in Chapter 6. It is possible to treat each of the pair tʃ, dʒ as a single consonant phoneme (we will call this the one-phoneme analysis of tʃ, dʒ), and it is also possible to say that they are composed of two phonemes each – either t plus ʃ or d plus ʒ – all of which are already established as independent phonemes of English; this will be called the two-phoneme analysis of tʃ and dʒ. […] But how can we decide which analysis is preferable? […] There are several arguments; no single one of them is conclusive, but added together they are felt to make the one-phoneme analysis seem preferable. (pp. 110-111)

[S]ome RP speakers have ntʃ in 'lunch', 'French', etc., and never pronounce the sequence nʃ within a syllable, while other speakers always have nʃ in these contexts and never ntʃ. It seems, then, that no contrast between syllable-final lʃ and ltʃ exists in RP, and the same appears to be true in relation to nʃ and ntʃ and to nʒ and ndʒ. (p. 112)