CONTRASTING /ɛ/ AND /a/ (the vowels of DRESS and TRAP)
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- čas přidán 22. 05. 2020
- A Singapore man was denied a $10,000 prize because of his pronunciation, despite the fact that he CORRECTLY identified singer Tony Hadley. Millions around the world pronounce words like "Hadley" and "Hedlye" the same - but for Brits, Americans, etc. it's an important distinction. (After all the attention, the radio station finally gave Muhammad the prize.)
Tony Hadley messages Muhammad:
• Tony Hadley telling Mr...
Spandau Ballet "Gold":
• Spandau Ballet - Gold ...
Spandau Ballet "True":
• Spandau Ballet - True ...
The story on the BBC:
• Tony Hadley backs Sing...
the radio quiz is not an English exam, neither did the contestant interviewed for the job of 'student of english'. when in doubt, give the benefit, or seek clarification by asking the contestant to spell the answer, its not so hard. i sense bad faith and snobbery in this saga.
Yes, as I say in the video, he deserved his prize and it was judgemental to deny it. On the other hand, the many who are students of Br/Am English deserve to be told that /æ/ and /e/ are not the same vowel, as is common e.g. in Germany.
On Wheel of Fortune, they didn't give the prize to contestants who didn't pronounce "Harry" differently from "hairy".
@@Taric25, in American English they’re pronounced the same. In British English they’re pronounced differently.
@@palikariatl, Wheel of Fortune is an American show.
@@Taric25, no duh 🙄. I know that. No idea why they would even distinguish between those two words. In AE they are pronounced exactly alike Harry/hairy.
I would listen to a whole video of yours distinguishing minimal pairs with /ɛ/ and /a/. That final was so funny 😂
You are not alone
Same 😅.
True. But, please, don't put the word "and" between two words in pair. This extra word makes more difficult to concentrate on minimal pair vowels.
You could make an ASMR version of it by speaking softly and putting strategic space between the words. "head, .. had. ... phonetic .. fanatic ".
⁹9@@Spieledota1995
The purpose of language is to communicate effectively. The caller made it clear who he was talking about, but it's still useful to distinguish between /ε/ and /a/. Great video.
No one, and I mean NO ONE, controls language.
@@Novumvir Except in dictatorships (like in Orwell’s novel: ”1984”, with its ”Newspeak”; or in North Korea, where speaking or even learning American English is a grave sin, for the natives). IIRC, Putin considered banning swearing, in Russia, some years back. Even in France (which is not a dictatorship, by any means), certain English words, like: ”E-mail”, ”Hashtag”, etc. are banned. Of course, no-one is gonna have your home bugged; so, they won’t even know, how you speak in your own home. 🤔
@@Novumvir The Académie Française would like to have a word with you.
I thoroughly agree. And /ɜː/ too - in my native language we only have "e" like in "bed", so it took me some time to realize that
"a bird, bad in bed" ... is not "a bad bird in bed"
@@Novumvir The beauty of English is in the pronunciation.
I'm an Italian who lived for several years in England. You're absolutely right: most Italians pronounce "dad" and "dead" exactly the same, to the point some are even convinced it's a "rule" and pronounicing "happy" with /a/ insted of /ɛ/ is a mark of thick Italian accent (!). But the question is: why is that? After all, in standard Italian, "a" is pronounced /a/ and "e" either /e/ or /ɛ/. Personally, I think there are several reasons:
- RP, some decades ago, used a upper version of /a/, namely /æ/, and this phoneneme is still used by American English and in other varieties. To an Italian ear, used to just 7 vowel sounds, this realisation sounds closer to /ɛ/ than /a/, so close it's hard to tell apart minimal pairs in isolation for a native Italian speaker.
- the sound /a/ in Italian is not quite the same as /a/ in SSB, because the Italian vowel is centralised, while the British one is clearly a front vowel. So, even if the phoneme has lowered quite close to the Italian /a/, it hasn't fully lost its "/ɛ/ flavour".
- there is another vowel that Italian adapt to their /a/ when they pronounce English: that of "hut", which feels more "like an a" to Italian ears. Of the three words "but", bat" and "bet", the latter two are the ones that "sound sort of similar". It may be that, for Italian phonology, the centrality of the /a/ (which is the only central vowel in Italian) in more fundamental than its openness.
- I also think it's a form of overcorrection. Pronouncing "happy" as /ap:i/ (the /h/ doesn't exist in Italian and it's hard to resist a gemination when we see it in writing) sounds just "too Italian", even someone who doesn't know any English at all would read like that following conventions of Italian spelling. Whereas the pronunciation /ɛp:i/ shows you're making an effort to aknowledge it's written English and has different rules.
Teaching English in Italy I found this to be so true. Especially present 'run' and past 'ran'.
I don't make a distinction between trap and dress vowels, but dad and dead are somehow distinguished. Dead is pronounced with the vowel in ate or eight
Leg and lag is also distinguished. Leg is the one pronounced with the vowel in ate or eight
@@fredrickcampbell8198 Leg and dead are not pronounced like ate or eight^^. Leg and dead have a simple "e" sound while in ate and eight you have a diphong: "e + i" sound
@@veroniquejeangille8248 Well, locally, those are all diphthongs.
We have something like that here in the US. It’s the “Mary, Marry, Merry” factor. It seems only in the Northeastern portion of the US are each of these three words pronounced completely differently from the others. Everywhere else, all 3 sound exactly the same.
Yep, where I'm from, the three are indistinguishable.
French is also undergoing mergers of several vowels. As it stands, Paris is "ahead" with fewest vowels compared to the rest of metropolitan French (i.e. that of France in Western Europe) whereas Quebecois still retains vowel distinctions long lost in France. The situation is somewhat unique in that the Parisian form enjoys the highest prestige.
@@DrWhom Not unique at all. Similar thing all over the world where there exists dialects that are more conservative in some way yet lower prestige if not 'incorrect'. You know how some dialects seemingly say 'me' in place of 'my'? Well they're actually saying 'my' with the original vowel.
Actually proper Received Pronunciation was sort of like this too compared to today where we are influenced by and generally defer to spelling. It is very much more reduced and slurred yet even today, or even to foreigners, undoubtedly higher prestige.
I remember being shocked that American colleagues pronounced "Carrie" and "Kerry" the same. I imagine they found it equally surprising that I pronounce "Luke" and "look" the same.
There was an Australian contestant who lost a New Zealand TV quiz show because he said "Crosby Steeels and Nash". Caused a big fuss
I'm native Icelandic and lived in Sweden as a child. Icelandic has /ɛ/, whereas Swedish distinguishes /e/ and /æ/, neither of which occurs in Icelandic and both of which sound(ed) like /ɛ/ to my ears.
I was playing hangman with a group of kids. The word on the board was H_J. Thinking the word to be "Hej" (hello), I called out "/ɛ/!"
The kid who picked the word promptly drew the hanged man's head and wrote Ä on the board.
Pronunciation metters!
(It turned out the word was "haj" (shark), for those of you who were curious)
The "short forms" of e and ä are pronounced the same in most dialects of Swedish. Verk and värk, best and bäst, fest and fäst, are all pronounced the same.
@@MrAwawe Wow is that true? My mother was Swedish and when I would ask her if there was a pronunciation difference between the short vowels in best and bäst, fest and fäst (because I couldn't hear it myself), she insisted there was, though it was slight. She would demonstrate it to me, but be a little disappointed in my feeble attempt to replicate it! Do you think older speakers may have had a distinction and it's now being lost with younger generations? I'm already in my sixties myself so my mother was way back there generationally. She admitted herself that when she started traveling back to Sweden in the 90's that even speakers of her own generation sounded different to her than when she had lived there up to her early twenties. Though that was in vocabulary and sentence intonation (like saying 'va?' on the end of all the sentences!) I don't think she herself noticed a difference in vowel pronunciation.
@@loopbraider that could very well be the case. They're identical in my dialect and in the dialects of everyone I know.
@@MrAwawe Thanks! That makes me feel better about my Swedish pronunciation! I'll tell my sister, too!
This is an absoutely gem of a channel. Criminally underrated too.
I'm from Brazil and we don't have the trap vowel in portuguese. It is so hard for us to differentiate those sounds, especially when speaking. A more trained ear is perfectly able to notice the difference when listening to those sounds, but pronouncing them is the real problem. Words like man/men and/end bat/bet will most often sound the same if you're listening to a brazilian person speaking English and they will always lean to the *e* sound. Well, that's the delight of learning different languages. You guys also can't speak our *ão* vowel hahaha
😄
Reading this, I'm grateful that my English teachers explained that this vowel is important and how to pronounce it. I'm Czech and our language also has open central /a/ and mid-open front /ε/ and nothing in between. The tip is: "prepare your mouth like you're going to say /a/ but say /ε/".
FWIW with a correct tip (and mention of the minimal pair pão/pau 😅), even your -ão isn't hard. For me, the truly hard part of speaking Portuguese is conscious distinction of open and close o (vô/vó minimal pair)
Video suggestion: you should do a video about the Northern Cities Vowel Shift; there’s not a lot of videos about it. In speech affected by the shift, “cat” sounds a lot more like “ket” or “Kate”. That’s just one of the shifts to the vowel chart of speakers of Inland Northern English.
I think it's interesting that words have flitted between the DRESS and TRAP lexical sets before. We have pairs like errant/arrant, ferrier/farrier; any, many, and catch can have DRESS or TRAP depending on the accent. Nares (1792) listed yellow, terrier, celery, jasmine, gather, January, thank, and radish in addition to errant and catch as words which could have either vowel. The vowels are clearly close enough that their ranges brush up against each other. It's not surprising that speakers of languages without a phonemic distinction between the two would have trouble hearing it.
And there are pairs of related words such as jasmine/jessamine, gather/together, ambassador/embassy.
Lol, it's funny as well that some of those words ARE part of a minimal pair: celery/salary, reddish/radish.
Interestingly, in California, the dress and trap vowels often merge to sound like the proper "trap" vowel rather than the more dress-like vowel of Muhammad's accent. You might recognize the "yass" Valley girl clichè, but even rural Californians sometimes slide their sends into sands.
when i lived in singapore my sgpr friends not only merged /ɛ/ and /a/ vowels but also devoiced word-final plosives and diphthongized the "/ɛ/ vowel to 'ɛi" so "head" sounded more like "hate" ["i banged my hate"]. it was more than just a nuisance as i was a financial trader and there is a big difference between trading "rates" ( interest rates) and "reds" ( red pack futures) so the ambiguity was dangerous but they still pronounced 'red' and 'rate' the same. it's no surprise to me that a singaporean pronounced hadley as 'hedley' (or hetley)and the sgpr presenter must know that but he was being a pronunciation nazi to teach the caller a lesson. i lived in the "ascot" building but they all pronounced it 'escort'
my german friends think the schoolboy wizard is "Herry Potter" and the lead singer of the rolling stones is "Mick Checker". when i moved to germany and asked which internet service i should get they recommended "ellis" but i couldnt find it. turns out they were trying to say "alice". good grief
The Mysterious Ticking Noise also speaks of “Herry Potter” because of the exaggerated RP accent the singer uses to imitate/parody Daniel Radcliffe.
Yes, I have several German colleagues and for them "back" and "beck" are both pronounced with a very wide open "e" sound
Thank you especially for that neverending list of minimal pairs at the end. I will listen to them until I'm able to clearly distinguish those two vowels 🤓
Once achieved that, I will practice pronouncing them.
I recommend practicing the differences from the get-go, it will help you learn to hear the difference. In fact maybe even exaggerate them to start with! That really helped me with learning a good accent in Mandarin. There was a language lab in both my high school and college and I would listen in the headphones and comically mimic the voices I was hearing especially one particular native language reader who enunciated very slowly and childishly as if all of us learners were 5-year olds! I could imitate her to a T, it was very fun, and later was able to make the sounds without the exaggerated childishness (luckily! it would be awful to end up talking that way permanently!)
My girlfriend and her sister both, who are both first language Brazilian Portuguese speakers, struggle with this one in "men" and "man". I got asked by them what the difference is and it was hard for them to notice when I showed them. Interesting stuff.
Really weird, as Brazilian Portuguese does have this distinction. /a/ as in "BrAsil", /ɛ/ as in "é" (he/she/it is), and so many other words. I think a lot of learners get confused because the name of the letter A is pronounced /eɪ/ and then come to think that it's always pronounced somewhat like the E of their language and then it's hard to unhear it.
EDIT: are you American? Then you probably pronounce man /mæn/ (as opposed to /man/ in RP/British English), which is indeed so much in between /a/ and /ɛ/ that it's hard to distinguish. As a non-Native speaker I stick to British English for that reason, much easier to distinguish many minimal pairs
@@ArturoSubutex no I speak Southern British English. But yeah it's an interesting little quirk. I think they learned American English though, and they speak using something more like American than British English.
@@ArturoSubutex Not really,
the /a/ phoneme in brPt is pronounced [ä], it's closer to the vowel in "far" or "ArkansAs". The vowel in "bad" sounds to me alot closer to the portuguese "é" sound in "bela" than the "a" sound in "bala", and most brazilians who aren't very good in english think "bad" and "bed" are pronounced the same, I know I used to when I was learning
@@davigurgel2040 It's weird. If you go to the wiktionary and research the British pronunciation of /bad/, it sounds exactly the same as the A in BrAsil in the Brazilian Portuguese pronunciation (there are audio files you can just click on). They all sound just like an /a/ sound in Spanish, French or Italian (as opposed to US "bad" which does sound more like an "è" to my ear -- and indeed, many Americans confuse then and than when writing, for instance).
What am I missing?
@@ArturoSubutex What you’re probably missing is that these are more contemporary values. Several decades ago, in Britain, a vowel closer to [ɛ]-as in Portuguese’s “é”-was more common as a realization of the vowel of TRAP. That’s still holds true, though, in America and several others accents and regions around the world, e.g Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, etc.
Brazilians learners are probably more inclined to hear “a” rather than “é” nowadays. (I already made the test with my friends, with no background in English.) 😅
The ending list is just superb. I would prefer to listen these pairs ... longer. It really trains the listening. Thanks.
If you want a written list of these pairs, there is a website called "minimal pair finder"
interestingly, while i distinguish these two vowels like most general american speakers, i pronounce "catch up" as "ketchup", im not sure how normal it is for americans to say "catch" that way
Not only Singaporeans but Hong Kongers also commonly pronounce 'bad'as 'bed'. I only became aware of the distinction after I went to school in Britain. At first I said 'guess' when I meant 'gas'. I don't know about others but I open my mouth more when using the TRAP vowel.
Singaporeans actually don't pronounce "bad" and "bed" identically. For the former, we say [bɛt̚], and for the latter, we say [bet̚].
Fun fact: In my native Swiss German dialect, we do make the distinction between a very open æ (as in English "at" as pronounced by Brits as opposed to Americans) and ε (as in "dress") which both become e: in modern Standard German (because the Swiss dialects did not participate in the vowel shift that occurred around 1500 and differentiates modern German from Middle High German). So the verbs "läbe" (to live), "rede" (to speak), "lehre" (to teach) have three different vowels in Swiss German (and Middle High German) - æ, ε, ε: - which all became one single vowel (e:) in modern Standard German.
Anyway, I grew up and went to school in Vienna, Austria, (got my native dialect from my Swiss parents) and, at first, could not understand as a child why at English class my classmates had difficulties differentiating the sounds in "band" and "bend" or "bat" and "bet" since the difference was so obvious to me. Took me a while to realize that this was because this distinction did not exist in their native German dialect while in mine it not only did exist, but it also was semantically significant (which I think usually makes a phonetic difference seem even more obvious).
I just wanted to take a moment aside to ask you what about British and American pronunciations of the word "at" do your hear differently? I'm a native English speaker and the word "at" is something I've never noticed being pronounced differently between American and British speakers. I don't think I've ever even noticed one or the other kind of speaker giving it a different vowel length, like price vs. ice (same vowel, different vowel length). Your anecdote is interesting anyway, I was just curious about that.
@@rawkhawk414 That's interesting! The difference that I hear (although - or maybe: because - I am not a native speaker) is that the vowel is a little bit more "open" (both figuratively and literally: i.e. they open their mouth more) in the average British as opposed to American pronunciation. Maybe it's more obvious in words like "lap" or "hat" as opposed to a mostly unstressed word such as "at".There's (again: as my foreign ears hear it subjectively) also some variance within both British and American accents. The extremes, to my ear, are, say, a Yorkshire accent on one hand and a Louisiana accent on the other hand. But even between my cousin from London and my Minnesotian brother-in-law, I hear a clear difference in how much they open their mouths when pronouncing that vowel.
@@chriflu @Rawk Hawk Fascinating conversation! I completely agree that it's more about dialects within the dialects rather than a pure Br/Am distinction. My first instinct, however, was that our (Am) "at" tends to be deeper back in the throat than Br, especially in dialects like northern midwest (Minnesota/Wisconsin) or "valley girl" (originally southern CA but spread like a virus).
I love your vids, professor. I stumbled upon them by chance. They are the best find ever! Many thanks!
Sorry for being late for this video. The strange thing is that in German we actually (in theory) have this distinction between the TRAP and DRESS vowels (sort of). Those are "ä" and "e" in writing. Unfortunately, not many distinguish between them in spoken language. Even more so, if they have a strong regional accent. I do distinguish. And I heard the difference in all the examples Goeff mentioned at the end of the video.
The issue is further complicated by the fact that the British and American pronunciations of /æ/ and /ɛ/ overlap, where the American pronunciation of /æ/ often shifts towards /ɛ/, (and /ɛ/ in turn shifts towards /e/ or even /ɪ/, leading to the pin-pen merger.)
For example, many American pronunciations of "pan" to the British ear sound similar to "pen," and the American pronunciation of "pen" and "pin" can be very close or identical.
The TRAP vowel - at least in RP and General American English - is [æ] which does not exist in Standard German. German "e" is [ɛ] (the DRESS vowel) or [e:] (which RP does not have) while "ä" is [ɛ]/[ɛ:] except for people who pronounce it identically to "e" (which I, like you, don't).
I reckon that many German speakers assimilate the English /æ/ sound with the German "ä" (a umlaut).
I am not a German speaker, but when I hear the word "Match" in German, I hear "Mätsch".
And in French, it is pronounced with the French "a" of "patte", which is almost the British pronunciation of "much".
I used to work for a German company and I noticed Germans have difficulty with the guttural “Uh” sound like in the word dunce, and when Germans say it, it sounds more like dance. It’s in other words, too; that’s the only example I can think of, but basically that guttural U sound which can be a U or an O. I think Germans try to soften if because it is a very harsh sound, and not found in the German language.
@@StormyDay Yes, the sound [ʌ] (I believe English linguists like to call it the STRUT vowel) is typically considered by Germans to be a short /a/ and will come out as something like [ä]. The German vowel inventory is quite different from the English one, so this kind of "remapping" happens a lot, especially since English classes in school don't usually focus on teaching precise phonology.
@JF Burlot Yes, exactly. Add final consonant devoicing and you have "beg", "bag", and "back" all sounding the same :D
oh my, thank god i have come across your channel, Dr. Geoff Lindsey! 🙂 the Coda was infinitely beautiful!
Thank you, Dr Lindsey! My native language doesn't have the /æ/ vowel, and I'd been thinking that "bad" and "bed", "pan" and "pen", "man" and "men", and many other words like these, are pronounced the same, until I learnt about the difference two years ago.
By the way, I prefer the symbol /æ/, not /a/, because it looks stylish in my opinion, and it reflects the nature of the sound, which is the sound between "a" and "e". Okay, in English with its complex and inconsistent orthography, "a" and "e" can correspond to different sounds, depending on the word. But in Ukrainian, which is my native language, we have a simple letter-to-letter orthography, and /æ/ sounds to me like the sound between "a" and "e" in Ukrainian. And æ was a letter in Old English and it's still used in Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic and Faroese.
funny story about this, once a german friend translated the idiom "klappe zu affe tot" for me, and i heard "door closed monkey dad" which seemed insane to me. actually he meant "door closed monkey dead" which is a little clearer ig? not rllu
There are two twin characters in the show Critical Role called Vex and Vax. When watching the show for the first time, I couldn't for the life of me guess which one people were talking about; but it did make me consider the difference of these two sounds in English. I just wish I had found this video sooner!
I only "discovered" your channel today, but l'm glad l did. Your content is great and very useful for us non-native English speakers. I speak Portuguese and we don't have many of those vowels which makes it very hard to tell the difference between those tricky words in a regular conversation. It seems easy when you stress them and put them together. I now will binge watch your videos. You deserve much more followers by the way. Cheers, mate.
Jeopardy would most likely have called that the wrong answer. I was watching a game recently where they ruled the answer incorrect for two thirds of the contestants as they each tried to pronounce the last name of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The third one, when asked if he wanted to buzz in said, "I don't know why those didn't count," and didn't buzz in.
Excellent! Thank you!
Great video. I hope the future holds 100s of them by you.
Thank you Alan.
Great video, thanks!
So cool! 💥
The example of ketchup vs catchup that you used at the end is interesting because in my General American speech these sound identical, and it feels normal to me say both words both ways, thought I more often pronounce them as you pronounced ketchup
Interesting. Catchup can go either way for me, but ketchup is ketchup.
I've never actually thought of them as two different words, just alternate spellings, and catchup is extremely uncommon.
Enjoyed the last bit... the marathon of word pairs ♥️
Its interesting. One of the differences between an Australian and NZ accent, which are often otherwise quite alike, is that the distinction between the TRAP and DRESS vowel is much less clear in Kiwi. It one of the ways we in Oz can tell if someone has come from the other side of the ditch.
I thought that Kiwis say "driss" /dɹɪs/ and "trep" /tɹɛp/? So they are still separated but with a different realisation. As far as I know, /æ/→/ɛ/ and /ɛ/→/ɪ/.
This is brilliant 👌
Thank you for the video
I like this non-trivial fade-to-black at the end.
This is sooo cool!
❤
Hello Dr Geoff Lindsey! I'm a conference interpreter from Brazil and have only found out about your marvellous CZcams channel two days ago. I've been bingeinng on your videos . Congratualtions, they are amazing! I noticed you pronounced the T in differenTIated (at 3:28) as an /s/ and not as a /ʃ/. I've heard that same type of pronunciation in 'negotiate' very often (and I used it myself, actually). I'd love to hear your comments on the different ways to pronunce this T in latin words. Thanks a million!
I really wasn´t aware of so many examples, where the e/a -distinction causes semantic differences. Thank you! As a German speaker, I do in fact pronounce both the same.
That's incredible♡ thank you
So much fun
I had never come across your videos until today but, in the span of 15 minutes, this has become one of my top 5 favourite CZcams channels.
Geoff, you're an artist!
I lived in Singapore for five years and heard all kinds of accents. When I heard the contestant's answer it was immediately obvious to me that he was saying Hadley, and not because there is no distinction between the trap and dress vowel, but because I suspect the contestant's vowels are a bit higher than "standard".
Also LOOOOOVED the Spandau Ballet! I have to pause at one point to sing it out
This is something that's been plaguing me for SOOOOOO long. I've been speaking english since I was 6 years old, and to this day I still strugle with the difference between /ɛ/ and /a/, mostly because (I think) my teachers were all brazilians who had never been to the USA/any english speaking countries, so most of the pronounciation I've learned was actually quite a bit off (i.e. "th is pronounced like f but also like s" when it's neither).
It's to the point where I'm hesitant to talk to people named Brad because I always end up calling them Bred/Bread lol There's always a noticiable pause when I need to say any word that has the sounds because I need to get myself ready for it :^)
(my other nemesis is Deep Dish Pizza. PTBR has no sound like the i in dish, and that gets me every single time lol)
when English words are borrowed (and transliterated) into Russian, "a" becomes "e"
for example "manager" in Russian is "meneger"
(the actual tranaliteration is in cyrillic which i can't type. also i am not a native Russian speaker but only know a few words).
And also for Malay, so that 'ma'am' is 'mem' in Malay. The person in the quiz has a Malay accent, so it's not surprising that he says Hedley!
That would be because they're adapting the sound rather than the spelling. The "е" in Russian sounds like /(j)ɛ/, as close as they can get to transcribing the /æ/ in "manager", whereas "манаджер" would have the "а" pronounced approximately like the "o" in "on".
I have noticed some young people on Canada merging the short ĕ and ă sounds.
"The musicians were having sæx behind the curtain."
This video is hilarious and awesome.
In my native language, [ɛ] and [æ] are allophones. When /ɛ/ is between two consonants and the consonant that follows it isn't an obstruent, it is realised as [æ]. So it's sometimes hard for me to not use /æ/ in the place of interconsonantal /ɛ/. Thanks for the video!
Great ending. Thanks.
This video? Gold!
the end of this video is pure GOLD!
great.
I suppose one would have to listen to more of the man's accent. If he narrows all his front vowels like in some varieties of English (New Zealand comes to mind) and pronounces Hedley as something approximating "Hidley", the distinction between Hadley/Hedley will still be clear.
But noone understands New Zealanders. They speak alien
I really enjoyed this video, as I do all of your output. It's a real minefield for foreign students of the English language, but it is important. I was taught to put the thumb and index finger of one hand on my cheeks about an inch to each side of my mouth, then say e.g. gas and guess, and feel the difference between them.
If this had been a CD, I would be snapping the thing in two, playing frisby with it and flinging it in the trash. Jump jump jump jump jump jump jump, I couldn't make head or tail of what was going on with some of the lapses in famous persons English towards the end. Jim Dale is a far better reader of Harry Potter books compared to Stephen Fry. Jim gave all of the characters different regional accents, Birmingham, Manchester, South London/Essex, French, Bulgarian... The list goes on, he didn't just higher or lower the pitch of his voice. Jim Dale's Professor McGonagall's spot on Scottish accent was one of the best.
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The third member of the trio, /ʌ/, is problematic, too, because if we accept [a] as the vowel in-say-‘cat’, the expected [ɐ] in ‘cut’ [ˈkʰɐt̺] becomes dangerously close to [a], and consequently, [ɐ] instinctively moves to slightly ‘louder’ a-group articulations, such as [ä, ä̠, ɑ̟].
Or, as I frequently hear from some younger speakers, some sort of vocoid in the area of [ɜ̹, ʌ̟] is employed, sometimes with a slight lip rounding. Yet another source of confusion.
Thenk you!
Reminds of a quiz show, where the correct answer was Clu Gulager, but the contestant said Clu Gallagher
I think we are aware of that they're different sounds. My problem is that those vowels sound different in different accents, in a way that they may be confusing to me, especially if I haven't heard much of the way of speaking of that person. I mean, as in some accents "man" is not /man/ but /mæn/, which is for me similar to /mɛn/, when I hear something around /æ/ and /ɛ/, I'm not sure if they've said "man" in an accent or "men" in another accent.
Moreover, when I try to sound more native, I'm nor sure anymore how I should pronounce the short vowel "a" for not to be misunderstood.
This debate could run and run. I'll be beck!
I'm a non-native english speaker(from germany) and this is definitely a thing I need to work on, which I never realized. I pronounce most of the /ɛ/ (dress) and /a/ (trap) as /ɛ/, but maybe I can get used to that pronunciation and change it. I mean at the beginning of learning english I could neither pronounce th (pronounced it as s) nor the english r(pronounced it as w), but now I can pronounce these, so maybe I'll learn /a/ as well.
Gold, GOLD!
My only comment is that /a/ exists in my variety of General American only in words with AL where the L is silent (palm, balm, etc.). For me, the A in Hadley is the diphthong /æ/ which is stretched so that it almost sounds doubled. (It's the same vowel as in bath and hand, of course). On the other hand, I use identical pronunciations for Harry and Hairy. So if a quiz show had pictures of Harry Potter and Hagrid and asked me which one was hairy, I might be disqualified by choosing "Harry" based on the pronunciation that was natural for me.
Interesting about Harry/hairy. I didn't even notice until I thought about it, but I pronounce "American" Harry like hairy, but distinguish it from "British" Harry. I treat them as two different names with the same spelling. Harry Potter and Harry Truman sound different. Totally subconscious until your comment made me think about it. I'm Canadian for what it's worth.
Where is the L silent in palm and balm? I've heard some children drop those Ls, but I don't know of a region where it's the norm.
@@liambohl It's silent for me in palm; I'm from the US. (I don't often refer to balm, though, so I'm not sure which pronunciation is most natural for me.)
@@liambohl it’s all over really. People all over the country vocalize L’s whether it’s completey or only in certain words
[æ] isn‘t a diphthong
I am a native South African English speaker living in an area where the population is predominantly Zulu -speaking. Most are fluent in English but they really struggle to differentiate the vowels of "bed", "bad" and even "bird" (the letter a in Zulu is always pronounced like the u in "cup" , while the vowels in "bird" does not occur at all. All three vowels default to the closest Zulu vowel, which is similar to "bed". I have had to decipher the stunning announcement that "The cat caught a bed", and the confusion is often carried across into written English ("Excuse my bed English"). In fact the "ur defaults to e" tendency is probably what characterises English as spoken by a Zulu more than anything else... my city, Durban, is pronounced "Debben", with both vowels a very short e, and both syllables stressed.
I found at least one American without the distinction Merry to marry Mary all sounding like Merry to Merry Merry
Most of us in the U.S. don't have that distinction of 3 separate vowels. A few dialects have the three, some have two distinctions, most have just one vowel for all three words. East coast is predominantly where the distinctions exist.
In German, if you were to pronounce "Handy" (mobile phone), Laptop, Banjo etc. with trap instead of dress that would sound rather affected. Thus it becomes even harder for Germans to get that right when speaking English - there being so many "false phonetic friends" from loanwords in German.
hello doctor 👋 I am your friend. You are a wonderful doctor. I have a question, where are you from?
And here I am who pronounces “then” and “than” specifically identically in phrases like “more, then” and “more than”
WEAK FORMS
they have the same weak form like "thun" or "thn". so they're the same!
It does seem like a case of weak forms than a true difference
Interestingly, the Hedley on the sign used is only about 50 miles from my hometown!
Considering other English accents, a speaker from New Zealand for example would probably show a very raised TRAP vowel, so, if he hypothetically were the contestant in the Singapore show, he would probably say Hadley with a sort of " e " sound and would therefore be denied the price? Of course in NZ English the DRESS vowel is raised too, sounding almost like an " i ", so that the TRAP/DRESS difference is preserved, but if we only consider the answer "Tony Hadley", he could have been an hypothetical contestant of the Singapore show being disqualified, despite being a native English speaker
Funnily enough, German does actually make a distinction between those vowels. Depending on how they are realised in English, the corresponding sound might not exist in German, but it does have /ɛ/ and /a/, with /æ/ only existing in some northern dialects.
Since many English dialects use /ɛ/ and /a/, it would be easy for a German speaker to correctly distinguish between dress and trap, but we are taught in school that they make the same sound. I don't understand why this is being perpetuated like this. I had the luxury of having an actual native speaker as my English teacher, who also had a yorkshire accent, so it was easy for me to realise the difference early on, but I almost felt lied to after that. (Since I had other English teachers before her)
Maybe this is because of American influence, where they tend to use /æ/ instead of /a/, which Standard German does not use?
This exactly! I feel betrayed too 😉 it could have been so easy but now I still have difficulties with the correct pronunciation...
Great point. British/US English (including RP like myself) are not the definitive/correct/only or best versions of English. I live and work in Hong Kong and would never ‘force’ my pronunciation on a student unless that pronunciation made an actual, meaningful difference.
The main difficulty is knowing whether it is 'a' as in "pat", or 'a' as in "pate"
No prize for anyone in the older sections of The Royal Family, then (Anne pronounced 'Enn'; snap pronounced 'snep', hacking jacket pronounced 'hecking jeckit', etc.). As H[a/e]dley might sing, 'this is the sined of my sale'!
I just saw a video about the Trans-Atlantic accent that failed to mention the practice of shifting the trap vowel to either epsilon or backwards c, so "Frank" becomes " Frenk" but "last" becomes "lawst" because "lost" is "loast."
I’m a British English language teacher to German speakers and it always confused me why they would swap their perfectly good A vowel sound in the German “Apfel” for an eh sound when translating to “Apple” instead of literally using the same correct sound, and then I realised that while yes in my accent, it uses the same vowel sound as Apfel, it doesn’t in other accents for example in American English it’s shifted a bit so I can see how foreign ears would interpret it at a different vowel
I'm German and we were taught from the beginning that in the English language A is not pronounced like it is in German, but more like the German Ä.
I think that's a mistake and one of the reasons Germans are bad at pronouncing the trap vowel correctly. It would be better to teach children to pronounce it like German A. It's not correct of course, but it's less confusing to children and still closer to the correct pronunciation than German Ä. Which most Germans pronounce just like German E.
For example we're taught to pronounce the A in "apple" like the Ä in "Äpfel" which sounds the same as the E in "Bett" or in "bed".
@@jojoshu8557 yeah which I suppose in American English sounds more correct, but to British ears it’s completely the wrong sound, which is funny because most schools claim to teach British English!
I was similarly perplexed. Why do they pronounce 'Handy' as 'Hendy' but the German word for 'hand' uses the right A sound?
Looks like you've updated the title and thumbnail, adding the old-fashioned RP symbols you've been advocating against :)
Thank you for noticing! I change the titles and thumbnails now and then to see whether anything attracts more viewers. In this case I was trying to help people who might be interested in DRESS v TRAP, and I suppose /e/ & /æ/ is what they're most likely to be searching for. Anyway, the post isn't about SSB, and /æ/ is quite accurate for Tony Hadley's London accent!
It is called International Phonetic
Since these vowels are not in my language I find them very tricky but I am slowly getting them. The trickiest for me are the ones that start with A.
Interesting. May I ask what your first language is?
@@Topomato1 Czech
@@eiramram2035 hmmm, I am a speaker of Persian (Farsi) myself, and these do exist in my language. For that reason, it never occurred to me that some languages might not have them. Thanks for the reply.
Perhaps you can make a video on the pronunciation of "ti" and "ci" as if in "differentiated" or "associated", or do you have one already? :)
Dr Geoff, can you please make a video on the correct way of pronouncing the name "Harry," so it doesn't sound like "hairy" and things like that? Thank you!
It's interesting to note that Germans and Italians indeed tend to *not* make a distinction between /a/ and /ɛ/ when speaking _English_ ... but the exact same distinction DOES exist in both German (eg Bar / Bär) and Italian (eg pazzo / pezzo). I think the reason for that is that teachers in those countries just tell students that English "A"s are pronounced like their open E sound (or, in German terms, that all English "A"s have Umlauts).
This, in turn, might be due to the fact that in both conservative RP and General American (but not in most other accents, including more recent RP), /a/ is normally /æ/, and indeed it is written as such in a lot of international English textbooks. And for both Germans and Italians, reading the IPA /æ/, you would instinctively pronounce it as /ɛ/. In German, "ae" is another way to write "ä" (/ɛ/). And the Italian pronunciation of Latin words that include "ae" realizes them as /ɛ/ (which makes sense, as Latin Æ _became_ Italian E, as in cÆlum --> ciElo, meaning sky and rosÆ --> rosE, meaning roses).
What's more, the vowel /æ/ is right in the middle between /a/ and /ɛ/, which makes it a lot harder for a lot of people to pronounce distinctively. But that makes them lose a lot of important minimal pairs. And no matter how much I have tried to tell Germans and Italians that they should just pronounce it as German and Italian /a/, be it at the cost of sounding a bit more British, in order to better distinguish minimal pairs, they never tend to believe me.
As a bonus, Germans tend to devoice final consonants, which, combined with their lack of distinction between /a/ and /ɛ/, can make them pronounce _hat_ and _head_ the same, /hɛt/.
Italian/German /a/ is not a front vowel. The front /a/ is used in French, and it’s similar to the trap vowel used by Geoff. Now even if Italians and Germans decided to use their /a/ for the trap vowel, this would sound ambiguously inbetween /ʌ/ and /æ/. They would be able to differentiate between bat and bet, but not between bat and but.
These are also very hard to distinguish for Dutch speakers, at least for me. Although it does depend on the example also. For me personally bad and bed are easier to distinguish because the vowel stretches a bit longer in bad. But some other examples are really hard.
For me, a Russian, it took a while to learn to pronounce ae vowel. Because it’s not a pure A, as in father, most Russians error on the side of turning it into drEss vowel.
There used to be a type of upper-class English accent where the 'a' sound in Hadley would indeed have sounded more like the 'e' in 'head'. But also, in many American accents what we would render as a short 'a' in British English would be a diphthong that sounds closer to an 'e'. If it's about identifying a singer, there isn't one called Tony Headley, so it's unfair to penalise a foreigner for something stemming from his accent and if there's confusion, just ask him to spell it out.
Speakers in the U.S. who have the "Northern Cities Vowel Shift" make this distinction within their own dialect, but their pronunciation of the short e sounds to other Americans as if they were saying the "a" in sack, mat, rag. When they say (as actually happened on a TV show), "My mom is dead," it sounds to the majority of Americans like "My mom is dad," which may be a much more perplexing problem than not having any mom at all.
It is the other way around.
Ha! I pronounce ketchup and catchup the same! Must be my (northern cities?) American accent!
This video needs an extended (of the end) version, like 30 to 60 minutes.....maybe more.
Question: Is the lowering of TRAP from [ɛ / æ] to [a] due to distancing from old fashioned RP or cockney (people not wanting to sound posh or low-class) or to the influence of Northern English?
TRAP-lowering certainly wasn't to avoid Cockney, as Cockney retained a more RP-like quality. I also doubt that Northern influence played a role; other Northern features like central PALM weren't adopted. Here's what I wrote in a blog article several years ago: "The lowering of DRESS and TRAP... was not driven by Popular London, which maintained traditional RP-like values; nor do we need to see it as a part-imitation of the Beatles or other northerners; young privileged speakers simply let their front vowels fill the vowel space more naturally, establishing a different sound from the characteristic close-front congestion of posh RP." www.englishspeechservices.com/blog/the-year-1962/
Pff.. the end makes me want to cry. I'll never get it.
I'd contend, and point out, that the A in cat, apple, ash, æsc, is IPA [æ], while [a] is the slightly more raised front ah most common for the Continental long/close A, and single-story [a] is short/open lower or more central. The epsilon ]e] (short/open), a bit lower, versus regular [e] (long/close), a bit higher, are similarly distinct. (And pair with backwards-C short/open [o] versus regular-O long/close [o]. -- Yes, many foreign speakers who lack [æ] substitute the open/short epsilon [e], and generally, that is understood by most people, although learning how to pronounce the [æ] goes a long way towards a good accent for any English. I pointed out the [a] versus [æ] because for most European and other speakers, the difference would be too distinct, like an ah more than an æ for most English listeners. (And for English speakers who are confused about short/open single-story-A versus long/close double-story-A, say papa, mama, pot/cot (not caught/pawed) with its ah, and then for the long/close double-story-A, smile and raise it just a little, still very like ah, but there's a qualitative difference, and it is not yet to [æ] as in apple, cat, ash, æsc. That last word is just the Old English.(Anglo-Saxon) spelling of modern ash.)
The short eh versus æ is so common for non-native English speakers that I'm surprised a Singapore channel would refuse to accept a contestant using that for Hadley's name. Yea, that sounds like Headley to a native English speaker, but most native speakers, at least anyone familiar with foreign accents, has heard that kind of pronunciation, and would only need to ask if it's unclear which one is meant. It seems awfully picky and unnecessarily so, for a channel to refuse the contestant on those grounds, at least to me. I'm from a major city, American, native speaker, but being from a major city means I am very used to hearing multiple accents, both regional English native, and non-native speakers. this is just part of modern life, and frankly, as someone who loves language and culture, I love this. Most immigrants and most visitors are enthusiastic about living or visiting. Most in other countries who learn English want to do their best, but not everyone has the ear or tongue for it without extra care practice, training, to learn the accent. Hah, and my mother always had an accent when she tried to learn foreign languages in college or later in life, whereas I have a somewhat easier time of it, but no, I am not perfect, there are factors I find difficult to hear or speak, while most things, I can learn to mimic or it comes naturally. But I/ve had language classes in school from middle school onward, and I grew up hearing those other speakers, wile my moms generation tended not to. My dad also had an accent when he learned a little German as a G.I. Both of them did well enough, but did not learn how to overcome their American accents.
That's because he uses RP's phoneme /a/, someone with an American English accent would say /æ/, which sounds much closer to /ɛ/. In fact, those minimal pairs are much more difficult to learn in AE than RP
Where I live, I am surrounded by thousands of Dutch people who speak English brilliantly, but nearly all of them would say 'hɛppy birthday'. Very few of them get the /a/ sound quite right.
it's because we use a different vowel sound for long and short a and many assume it to be absent in english
Always believe in your sole!
Pretty sure Celia Johnson says she is a "heppily" married woman in Brief Encounter. Was standard RP
Hi, 'eppy Italian here; beautiful video as always. I kept thinking, well there's no real phonological difference, until you started listing opposing couples like send and sand. I for one could improve my pronunciation in this regard.
Just one question, the "trap" vowel, isn't it a so-called "raised-a" represented by {æ} in IPA?
The fact that said isn't pronounced like sad was actual news to me.
Very enlightening. Thank you for mentioning so many word pairs. It helped me realise that I didn't pay enough attention to the pronunciation of words containing these vowels. It also reminded me of a scene from a film Dark Blue World (Tmavomodrý svět), in which Czech pilots have an English lesson and one of them is asked to pronounce "land" - czcams.com/video/vjX4yW4i-rI/video.html
Thank you for the comment and the link. Fascinating. Despite many hours listening to Czech opera, I'm afraid I know very little about Czech. In the clip from Tmavomodrý svět, I find the young man's pronunciation of 'land' quite acceptable, so that the teacher's correction feels a bit odd. And when I listen to the Czech voice in Google Translate saying 'len' ('flax' in English), again it sounds like it might possibly be the TRAP vowel.
translate.google.com/?sl=en&tl=cs&text=flax&op=translate
So, although Cz speakers may merge DRESS and TRAP, the Cz vowel sounds quite intermediate to me!
@@DrGeoffLindsey Czech students of English usually struggle with the TRAP vowel. Czech only has 5 vowels (even though the long and short i vowels are slightly different while in the other cases, the long vowels are qualitatively the same as the short ones). If you count long and short vowels separately, the total is 10 but there are only 5 (6) articulations. Three official diphthongues (native ou, borrowed au and eu in words from other languages). So Czech students find complex vowel systems baffling. I'd say our DRESS vowel is lower like the one in SSB, not like the one in RP. Minimal pair with /a/ like the one used in Spanish, not the English TRAP one, which is more front. Speakers from Prague might make the /i:/ sound more like /e/, the more closed one like in RP, and the accent might be mimicked and mocked by speakers from the rest of the country. The Czech o sound is midway between LOT and THOUGHT and there is no PALM vowel. So Czech people often think "calm" is pronounced with a long o sound, as their brain can't process an unrounded back vowel. We Czechs are also very proud of our Ř consonant(s). We love to make foreigners pronounce the Ř sound, and we laugh at them when they fail miserably. Ř is the letter used for the alveolar fricative trill and has a voiced and an unvoiced version in Czech. The trill is so difficult that Czech children sometimes go to a speech therapist to train the correct pronunciation. There are no dental fricatives in Czech. A Czech person would pronounce "this" as "dis" and "think" as "fink" or, less frequently, "sink". Czechs also unvoice all final consonants and add /k/ at the end of every English -ing, so they are "alwace speakink like dis" 😄