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Suggestion: rising non-lambdicity in American English, complete with intrusive-l in some accents. Two examples: always is now pronounced "oh-ways" or "awe-ways" and drawing is pronounced by some as "drawling". Third example: even words like "roll" often get their "l" elided. This non-lambdicity is very present in the Great Lakes region, which also has the fleece and goose vowels as monophthongs, usually.
@@joegrey9807 that's L-vocalisation, where L is replaced with a vowel such as [o], sometimes characterised as a 'w'. @chefSalad is the AE /l/ being omitted completely or is it being vocalised?
As an Australian, a lifetime ESL teacher and a somewhat patchy student of linguistics who shies away from phonetics precisely because I've run into this exact problem and incredibly complex but contradictory symbology which seemed to be completely lacking any satisfactory explanation ... this is just a ... bloody big relief. Thank you Geoff. I just would not have had the patience, probably should say attention span, in this lifetime to sort out something that has been gnawing at me like an ulcer for many years. Thanks again!
the way people talk is our biggest problem is it? really? REALLY? Our country is run by gangsters who are ripping us apart limb from limb... and youre whining about ESL. THAT is why we are screwed.
Australias a f'in joke with a majority of mouth breathing knobgoblins who give absolutely no craps outside of things that make life a little bit uncomfortable for them. as a result, the majority of you killed your kids with experimental drugs. Well done.
No wonder why when I used to transcribe Australian English words for international Chinese students who are familiar with IPA, they could not believe that my ad-hoc transcriptions could be so utterly different from what they received in 'official' dictionaries
i enrolled in the 'security t-ism and counter t-ism' course a few years back. i had one lecturer who literally ended every single word with -ah. her english, sucked. she was barely understandable. and people were expected to learn.
I am reminded of the old joke: The British General is addressing newly arrived Australian troops. "Did you come here to die ? " "Nah, we kime here yester-die".
I've heard that joke since I was a kid but while I agree that the long broad diphthong is well represented I don't think it's really that often a long broad "I' diphthong but rather a long broad "A" one. To my Melbournian ears the 'I' diphthong in that context makes it sound less Aussie.
the most convincing proof of FLEECE and GOOSE being diphthongs, imo, is just playing recordings backwards, as you did in one of your earlier videos. You can clearly hear the 'y' and 'w'. ("yipee" and "woohoo" sound the same backwards and forwards, kind of mind-blowing the first time)
As an American, my most hated example of such a dodecaphthong is Russell Brand's (well he's actually a Brit, but same idea) long "o", which is sort of a "eh-ih-ooh-uh"
I've worked in a call centre for 25 years. I'm Australian living in Australia. I would have spoken to 200,000 different Aussies, from Wurrimiyanga to Joodalup to Parramatta to Penguin and so on. I should've been taking notes of regional and socio-economic uniqueness. Imagine where the data is N=200,000! True story: Only one caller has ever picked me as having a Victorian accent. He was an Englishman. I asked how. His reply? "I spent time in a Victorian prison" HAHAHAHA
i got called out for being scottish in a queue for jobcentre in the uk. "Because i had a scottish teacher in school and he was a redhead" - imagine his shock when i spoke to him in an aussie accent 'im a pom you racist prck'
@privateinformation2960 HAHAHA sick reply mate haha Ive been to Scotland and was mostly understood but back in 96 I wanted a deep fried mars bar. Chick at the greasies could NOT understand me. "Sandwich?" she kept saying. I had to walk out. That was Edinburgh too not Skye or some rogue Glasgow suburb.
As someone from Joondalup, I can always tell when someone is from the east coast of Aus, but it would probably be a bit trickier trying to pinpoint. I think I’d struggle determining between someone from Vic and Queensland. Sydney is easy, everyone from there sounds annoying. How did you find Perth people sounded in comparison to the eastern cities? My Hometown (Moora) definitely had a different accent for the youth, which I think is attributed to the fact the majority white population and the minority aboriginal population had a good relationship, and this Co-mingling affected myself as a white person with the way I said some stuff. I’m not sure how many people in Perth go “Monarch dard” when they see a police car, but I can usually tell when someone is from a country town where all the people all get along.
@X9Z17 ha truly! I miss WA. I lived in Bunno for ten years. The only, only way I can pick a West Aussie is actually maybe from the same phenomena you observed with European and Noongar (is it Noongar up Moora?) and that is when you (some West Aussies anyway) say "Two beers" bc the oh of two is more 'rounded' and the beer is two syllables whereas here in Vic its a growly long one. Edit: cheers for interesting reply hey, I enjoyed your observations indeed.. Lol I definyely retain the hey. I find it to be very schmick lol
I have long felt that there are "covert diphthongs" in Cultivated Australian, RP and related registers. And have similarly pondered the oddities of pronunciation cited in dictionaries from the OED to the Macquarie. This explains it perfectly. With all my heart: thank you, Geoff!
@@roy1701d Jeez! I know they tend to drawl a bit out in the Queensland bush, but thirty years to get to the end of a diphthong is taking it a bit far, I'd reckon.
Re: 9:00 Daniel Jones: As an American speaker, it boggles my mind that anyone could think that "ship" and "sheep" have the same vowel. As I sustain each vowel indefinitely, it's obvious that the "sheep" vowel is far tighter with a far higher tongue.
I know a lot of Italians who were taught that sheep is a long ship. And therefore they think that sheet is a long shit, peace is a long piss, and beach is a long bitch.
Jones wasn't describing American English, of course, but I don't think his transcriptions were very precise for RP either. He chose to present the distinction between 'ship' and 'sheep' as one of length, even though he knew that was at best a simplification. Gimson, when he revised the phonemic vowel transcription symbols in the sixties, kept the length mark for /i:/, but altered the short monophthong vowel to use /ɪ/.
That's how I've learned it too, as an Italian speaker learning English in school. More than twenty years later, I'm still getting corrected all the time about ship/sheep by my (Polish) wife 😛
@@bhamiBut diphthongs can’t be sustained. It’s quite reasonable to notice that in most varieties of English, the diphthongs in sheep and ship both begin with lax /ɪ/, halfway between close /i/ and center schwa /ə/. The difference comes later when rising and closing with sheep /ɪj/ , or centering and opening with ship /ɪə/. Sheeyut /ʃiːjət/, many Americans reverse them to begin sheep loosely centered, and ship (shit) tightly raised, like Spanish i or Japanese イ.
@@DougalBayer Why do you say that? To me, they they can be sustained, but you have to choose which bit to hold and extend. You could extend the FLEECE vowel as "iiiiiiiiiiiy", or you could extend it as "iyyyyyyyyyyyyyy". Which is kind of one way of proving that it's a diphthong!
I won't say I fully understand what's being said, but I do quite appreciate the accuracy about Australian English, not just in the analysis but also in the perfect accent. I mean, no surprise from a linguist of his level, but still, this guy has one of the few perfect Australian accents done by a foreigner.
Have you ever watched the Australian comedy show “Kath and Kim”. The affected ‘posh’ accents of ‘Prue’ and ‘Trude’ are hilarious. I think you’d enjoy them.
When Germans are taught /i:/ as a monopthong (instead of /ij/) they end up sounding like Henry Higgins. "Ok, this one's easy, just like our /i:/". I'm afraid not! Similar problem for French and Italians.
Yup. French here, 'been taught all my life about /i:/ being a monophthong. Had to wait to discover Geoff Lindsey's channel to finally pronounce my /ij/ and /ɪ/ correctly (more or less, anyway).
For Hungarians, too. My students just don't believe me when I tell them that FLEECE and GOOSE (in current Standard British!) aren't [i:] and [u:], respectively. Mind you, it's not their fault. They were taught this by their schoolteachers who, in turn, had been taught it by their own profs. I did that too, for at least two decades, and I'm sorry guys.
11:28 [re: Pygmalion and a scene involving teaching Eliza a vowel]: “Can you guess which one?” ME: “Ooh! It’s ‘FACE’, isn’t it? ‘The rain in Spain stays mainly in the-’” 11:30: “That’s right - ‘FLEECE’!” ME: “Oh.”
Something not touched on is the influence of aboriginal and torres strait languages on Australian english. Apart from places and names of things, some intonations are quite unique to the Australian continent (also very similar to new zealand in many instances aside from their influences from maori languages)
Also the different states and regions have mostly subtle to non Aussies but present distinctions. Infamously SA is more "posh" allegedly due to a lack of convicts but more likely because it's a later settlement and the UK accents that created it underwent vowel shifts
As a learner of English before the audiovisual internet (we had to copy audio from cassettes back then), I was lucky that my English teacher started our learning journey with pronunciation. Ever since then, I take extreme care of ‘correct’ pronunciation, this channel is a gem.
I have to admit that, when thinking of Britain’s imperial legacy, checkered as it is, its monophthongizing of the _fleece_ and _goose_ vowels, with all the subsequent unfortunate consequences 28:32, did not immediately spring to mind. (It didn’t spring to mind _at all,_ in fact.) The channel, as always, proves to be invaluable in unexpected but much appreciated ways.
Haha couldn't help notice you were listening to Sculthorpe - it's his 10th anniversary year since his passing. I was surprised his works didn't get a refreshed airing by our orchestras... ❤🎵
Thank you so much for your teaching. I am a teacher of English a second language for adults here in Spain and since I saw your video about the phonetic symbols and read your book, I have tried to change my teaching as well. It is a hard task - but still, I truly believe it's the right way to work with the students, who have great troubles with the listening skill and, in my view, it's because of a bad teaching in phonetics. You are an inspiration!
I love Geoff Lindsey’s analyses and entertaining style. As a research scientists in a completely unrelated field, though, I can’t help thinking how much I’d dislike him if he applied this sort of biting bluntness to the research of my own field.
it's fascinating seeing how classism was exported abroad, essentially, and then passed down through education for several generations - for so long that a lot of people forgot but it's still causing issues
Or, specifically, a comparison between different posh girls schools in Greater Adelaide! (In fact, come to think of it, a Lindseyan comparison of the accents from the "top" [Insert irony emoji, here] English public schools would also be fascinating. They were, after all, the original breeding grounds of RP. And Stephen Fry - posh, but not an Etonian - clearly enjoys delivering his Etonian impressions, so there must be differences recognisable to the illuminati.)
As an Australian, I think my FLEECE vowel sounds a lot more like a monophthong than the RP FLEECE vowel. I suspect because it goes to the [j] earlier, despite having a laxer onset.
28:00 I think the Aussie "near" vowel varies a lot actually. The "beard" example shown is pretty short and mono-y, but you will definitely also hear it pronounced more like "iya". Especially in broader accents and especially at the end of a word. Ask an Aussie to say "near" or "here" and I bet you'll get "niya" and "hiya".
I'm so glad you're doing these great analyses. For years I've been bothered by the mismatch between English IPA standards and pronunciation, and people's resulting misinterpretation of phonology (insisting, for instance, that only the ones written as diphthongs are diphthongic, despite having the ability to hear their own vowels gliding).
I'm a native speaker of AusE, and my issues with the transcription of our vowels being based on RP is on the opposite corner of the mouth. Dictionaries when I was growing up were using /ɒ/ for LOT and /ɔ(r)/ for NORTH. This confused me when I started learning German -- I still don't really know where _their_ sound is.
Very interesting comment, and just felt like helping out as a German speaker. ⟨o⟩ is most commonly /o/ or /ɔ/ depending on the following consonants (Boden /ˈboːdn̩/, Sommer /ˈzɔmɐ/) or /ɔɐ̯/when followed by an R and another consonant: Sorge /ˈzɔɐ̯ɡə/ (some dialects do the same in some cases where a schwa comes after the R, so geboren would be /ɡ(ə)ˈbɔɐ̯n/ rather than /ɡəˈboːʁən/ or /ɡəˈbɔɐ̯ʁən/). I would suggest the "long O" and "short O"s of Boden and Sommer are marginally more rounded than almost-equivalent AusEng cloth and thought vowels, but only very very marginally.
in the north of england, "class" rhymes with "mass", while in the south of england it has the longer vowel, so "class" rhymes with "parse". this is called BATH-broadening. geoff has an interesting accent: he's from northern england but his accent now is very similar to southern english accents, the main exception being that he has no BATH-broadening.
It's basically the historic pronunciation. Clahss was the result of BATH broadening around London in the 18th century. Most Australians have it in words like class but not in words like chance and demand.
Born and brought up in semi rural Herts of mixed RP and cockney parents, partially educated in Scotland and having emigrated to Australia 40+ yrs ago, this is of huge interest to me. I’ve always been able to switch between (mimic?) many accents and voices at the drop of a hat without having the first idea of how.
You make a good point in other videos that, whether or not "fleece" and "goose" are realised as diphthongs for an individual speaker, English phonotactics is described most simply by considering them to be so. The idea of taking phonotactics into account when making decisions about transcription conventions is philosophically interesting, and not something I ever encountered when I learned phonetics. However, I have to say that as a >40yo Australian English speaker who recalls contemplating the composition of diphthongs in the shower as a child, "fleece" and "goose" definitely feel and sound like monophthongs to me, and grouping them with diphthongs feels deeply unintuitive. I would, if I met you, dare you to demonstrate your analysis from my own speech. (In contrast, "near" and "square" are unambiguously diphthongs for me.) Interesting that the speaker at 23:03 glides her "do" towards a more fronted position [dəʉy] while most others glide it towards the back.
@@BryanLu0in those particular examples. Not all Australian accents make that change. “Fleece” and “goose” are definitely feel like monophthongs for me too.
Dr. Lindsey! I love your content, and I have gone back through your videos to find that I've watched them all as they've come out! But I have to say, I find the pace to be wonderful. A month seems like a good period of time between videos because they are of nice length and wonderful quality. I know youtube likes to sorta be wishy washy on the length of content and length between postings, but I hope you don't feel pressured by the algorithm to make more videos faster.
This guy's almost managed to convince me that I'm some kind of freak of nature for pronouncing FLEECE as a monophthong while from the south of England (something like [ɪ̝ː~ɪ̝]. possibly because of the lack of high front monophthongs with the lowering of KIT to [e̠])
Since you mentioned the -ɥ ending of the Australian diphthongs, I'd like to see some discussion of the British "load" diphthong, which also appears to be pronounced more like [əɥ] than the [əw] one can find in the CUBE dictionary. It doesn't seem to be present in your accent, but you can hear it for instance in that of Lucy from "English with Lucy" channel, and many other accents from England (plus Google Translate's text-to-speech engine).
He's mentioned that in a different video (the one about the Australian GOAT vowel) wherein he says this phenomenon called "GOAT-fronting" is found in England too and can sound pretty Australian
@@naufalzaid7500 both GOAT and GOOSE vowel fronting are happening in many englishes, but their phonetic realizations actually vary wildly. so some places do use the familiar [əw/əʊ] but you have some places using something like [aɨ], but any variety of low/mid vowel with some upglide could exist
Ah! Goose! I was using an American programme with dyslexic kids, with adaptations for Aussie English. What sounds does the grapheme oo make? “Short” (foot); “long” (boot); and “Aussie oo” (pool). Pool has the glide. It is so nice to hear the musicality in our flat accent.
As a general Australian speaker, I've been saying fleece to myself for the past half hour and I don't feel it. On flee/coup/go, I absolutely do, but not on fleece and bead.
Unfortunately, when I was taught Latin, we used the reconstructed pronunciation and were taught "ae" and "oe" were diphthongs on the basis that "they're just two vowels stuck together" and weren't told what a diphthong really is - our pronunciation guidance was just "ae sounds like eye and oe sounds like oil without the l" . The funny thing is, reconstructed pronunciation is inherently imprecise - we don't have tapes of Caesar and Cicero (I think they were lost in a fire)
Ironically Latin is one of the best-reconstructed languages, and AE and OE were pretty much certainly those qualities. We don't have the accuracy of a formant measurement, but the pronounciations are as described.
He goes with the hypothesis that long and short vowels have identical qualities - which is far from universally accepted. I'm not saying it's wrong, but he does seem overconfident in implying there isn't room for debate. His beliefs are based on discussions with a linguistic graduate friend of his who is more knowledgeable. Whichever you believe, it doesn't make a huge difference to pronunciation.
I feel like, while it’s clear in Australian English and pretty clear in British English, how diphthongal really is fleece in AmE? It sounds basically like a monophthong to me from almost all speakers.
Neutral Midwest speaker here; definitely a monophthong in my accent. I can hear a diphthong in Southern, though -- ask for a cup of "tea" or a "piece" of pie and it's right there, plain as day. (Drives my wife nuts when people claim she uses the Southern vowel in those words -- she doesn't; her idiolect does include some Southern features but not that one. It's primarily General American.)
9:24 To be fair, I have seen some people analyse the FLEECE and GOOSE vowels as sequences /ij/ and /uw/ in even in dialects where they are (usually) realised as monophthongs, In which case it's not that different from Jones' "Chroneme", Except rather than positing a unique phoneme, It's being posited that the existing /w/ and /j/ phonemes, While not actively realised unless followed by another vowel, Do affect the underlying KIT and FOOT vowels, Raising them to the positions of FLEECE and GOOSE.
Visiting different Australian cities, there are noticeable differences in the local accent. I remember going to Sydney and thinking they sounded really Australian. (I am Australian too. I grew up in Perth, on the other side of Australia.) I'm guessing they sounded "more Australian" to me, because they sounded like the kinds of voices that are usually on Australian TV shows. Whereas my own local accent just sounds normal to me.
For phonemic purposes, I prefer the GA ɪ/i and ʊ/u notation for both GA and RP (if we were to have a single system for both). I don't think the non-compulsory vowel/pitch shift in the 'long' vowels is worth notating at the phoneme level. OTOH, I prefer having an explicit 'r' (as in GA) to mark the effect of the (possibly historic) post-vocal /r/ in coloring the preceding nucleus. Note: I am not a native English speaker and I am not familiar with Australian English and its spectrum of dialects.
A study of Kiwi English would be interesting. I had a few friends in Korea who were from New Zealand, and I was fascinated by "bed" as /beed/ and other such things.
I'm a Kiwi and I'm perplexed as to how anyone could think we pronounce "bed" as "beed". Also "feesh and cheeps" is Australian, not Kiwi. Most non-Kiwis trying to represent our pronunciation of "fish and chips" write it as "fush and chups" (although of course it doesn't sound that way to us.)
@@gcewing I’m Australian and I’ve never heard a fellow Australian say “feesh and cheeps” in my entire life. We don’t elongate the “e” vowel - especially in words that we pronounce with an “I”, such as “fish” or “chips”. We say those words the same way the poms do. So either the poms also say it wrong, or you do. Which one do you think is more likely?
I have a VERY weak Somerset accent, most people can't tell. However, somehow, when i went to Sydney, most people couldn't tell i was English! Quite strange to be honest.
That is odd, given that the most distinctive trait of West Country accents, relative to other southern British, is a degree of retained rhoticity that is not only lacking in other southern British accents but in Australian accents as well.
@@fromchomleystreetThough as noted at 27:31, rhotic vowels are rearising in Australia, but not in the places where they appear in proper rhotic dialects.
I think people might have been taking the Mick mate. I just just googled a summer set accent. Was born and raised in Sydney and that accent sounds like the hobbits from lord of the rings.
@louiscypher4186 no I have a weak version of that accent. Even British people struggle to tell. No one can guess where I'm from in the UK either, so what you googled is going to be hyper exaggerated. This also happened too many times by too many different people in completely different scenarios over the course of the year I was there.
5:42 so what I'm getting from this video is that the poshest accent is Scottish English ;) The chroneme thing with ship and sheep having a shared vowel is wild to me, but I couldn't help thinking it sounds a bit like the vowel-length rule in Scottish English, where there's a pronunciation difference between crude and crewed, tide and tied. I'd be interested in a video which explains why the idea of a chroneme wouldn't apply to that!
You got those annoyingly high fronted vowels, with no bends, or "Why am I cinstantly rising, but no questions*. What do you think you are? Norwegian. 😅
They've always sounded like diphthongs to me but it's most likely because my native language is very strict with the vowel qualities. The Tagalog phoneme /i/ can be [ɪ], [e] or [i] but will never become something like the Australian English [ɪi̯] even if in a stressed syllable as in the word ['flɪi̯s]. My ear has always been able to notice that glide in the FLEECE vowel because of this phonotactic rule in Tagalog. NOTE - Some Tagalog dialects like eastern Batangas do allow diphthongisation of single vowels /i ~ e/ and /u ~ o/, but only at the final syllable of multisyllabic words. Lexical stress doesn't seem to affect this.
I'm an Aussie and when I say sheep it sounds more like shape than ship. 😅 Edit: I just realised something interesting; If you say 'shape' in an American accent it sounds like 'sheep' in an Aussie accent.
Another great video that makes me sit and say fleece to myself 50 times. As a non native Australian English speaker who can’t be trusted with a consistent accent I think the way I say it is almost indistinguishable with flays.
The "chroneme" thing does exist (albeit, usually described with different terminology) in some languages. Japanese is an excellent example. I've seen theories that PIE might have been in that category, but I don't know how mainstream that idea is. The word "coup" is not a good example, because everyone over the age of forty remembers when it was still frequently fully expanded as "coup d'etat", and so there is a marked tendency to treat it as foreign and therefore different from other words and therefore to enunciate it with extra care.
what are you on? What do you mean by "croneme" in Japanese, 拍? It's just mora. Also the author was trying to apply cronemes to English, not Japanese, and thus was wrong. ...and noone screws up foreign words more than English speakers. Even JP folks pronounce DE or IT words more carefully than English speakers pronounce anything that's not English
@@JohnValentine-f1swe simply absorb words better. English has dozens of words that are recent additions from other languages, which are now just treated as a standard English word, even if they're spelled weird (Coyote, Schadenfreude, basically any Italian dish) and we just pronounce them with English phonotactics
The length marker chroneme would help to explain Thai vowels very well to foreign speakers. Vowel length is a major stumbling block when it comes to farangs sounding like a Thai native speaker
@@JohnValentine-f1s they're probably referring to a certain phonemic analysis common among japanese linguists, in which the second element of a long vowel is written with the cover symbol /R/ (so that 今日 _kyō_ is /kyoR/); see _The Phonology of Japanese_ (Laurence Labrune), particularly section 2.7.3, for discussion of this point.
Loved this video. The nods at the end to the debates over becoming a republic and/or altering the flag to something that no longer references Britain do seem to be heating up. The one specific Australian vowel I notice newcomers pick up quicker than others is our "Oh" vowel, which you have referenced in earlier videos and, of course, is used as a meme about Australian accents. I've met Americans, Canadians, Chinese, Germans etc. that have lived in Australia for a few years, and apart from their overall accent giving their origins away, as soon as they say a word with the 'Oh' vowel, the influence of Australian English becomes obvious. I'd be curious to know why that is.
That’s curious. I’ve found the opposite for me personally. My family moved to regional NSW when I was 12 and my sister was 8 and we had the o discussion over dinner at some point, when she had already picked it up and I haven’t yet. I must’ve woken up one day with it finally working properly when I was 14/15, it felt like the last thing I got. ‘Ou’ in ‘sound’ must’ve been the first thing I got since it’s the strongest one I have, the n is almost nonexistent - “seau(n)d”.
Wonderful. Now I know why I talk funny! All the examples seem to be the strong form of the words, it would be interesting to compare the weak forms. I have a sense that the Australian schwa sound (the middle resting sound used in weak form) is in a different (lower) place that other countries, or what the IPA thinks it is. So, as an Australia learning German, when I say eine and einer they sound exactly the same (in normal speech, where the second sound is unstressed), even though in my head i'm trying to say them differently.
@@Paul_Ernst I genuinely reckon German is the greater part of why the Adelaide accent is a bit unique. The vowels sound "posh" to most other Aus English speakers, but so do German vowels inserted into English. ;) For whatever it might be worth, when I was learning German ages ago, I found singing (both listening and doing) helpful to get past that whole thing of trying to make German words with English sounds.
So, how did the Great Vowel Shift work? Did everyone stop speaking at midnight, and an hour later, cautiously start speaking again with the new vowels?
Shift rather than a switch. From my understanding, it was a 200 year period of time in which English vowels on the whole shifted very dramatically for reasons that are still a bit mysterious. The new system then replaced the prestige of the old system. It was not a uniform change. For example Northern English accents were less affected.
This makes so much sense now. I noticed the discrepency between English transcription and what I've heard when I first started learning English. Especially short i is nothing like a shortened version of long i. Also, at 14:18 that's why you were searching for κοινή in the Opera browser..
As a Kiwi, this was super interesting. I reckon a better way of representing dipthongs without changing standard notation might be a dedicated ligature between each set of two symbols, to join them into single symbols. Unfortunately that won't work with ae though.
I'm yet again reminded how little I actually understand about phonetics. Your video on the vowel space from about a year ago was quite enlightening. Could you recommend anything similar? Or maybe some introductory teaching materials? After searching a little, I've now also found your video about vocal organs (the one with an MRI recording) so that's what I'm gonna check out next. I can see these niche theoretical topics don't perform that well, so you probably shouldn't shift the focus of your channel onto them. But what do you think about just gathering what's already there into a playlist? That would definitely help nerds like me discover them quickly.
The accent isn't anywhere near as uniform among white speakers as is often reported. However to hear the differences you need to spend a long time here. I can hear which city in south east Queensland someone is from by accent.
I find the "chroneme" idea very interesting. Though English doesn't have it, there are languages that do. Japanese for example. The difference between "house" and "no" is ie (いえ) and iie( いいえ) respectively, and the latter certainly does collapse into the former when said with speed or laziness.
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Suggestion: rising non-lambdicity in American English, complete with intrusive-l in some accents. Two examples: always is now pronounced "oh-ways" or "awe-ways" and drawing is pronounced by some as "drawling". Third example: even words like "roll" often get their "l" elided. This non-lambdicity is very present in the Great Lakes region, which also has the fleece and goose vowels as monophthongs, usually.
Imagine willingly installing a browser worse than edge xD
@@ZoDoneRightNow gawd yes. Shilling for Opera is a bad idea.
@@ChefSalad "awe-ways" along with "lit-awe" (or "li'awe) is pretty standard in some UK accents too. But drawing becomes draw-ring or draw-rink.
@@joegrey9807 that's L-vocalisation, where L is replaced with a vowel such as [o], sometimes characterised as a 'w'. @chefSalad is the AE /l/ being omitted completely or is it being vocalised?
Surely an Australian Diphthong would be called a Dip-flip-flop in the UK?
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So then what would English diphthongs be called in Australia? Diptogs?
Ya mean ‘diphies’, mate?
As an Australian, a lifetime ESL teacher and a somewhat patchy student of linguistics who shies away from phonetics precisely because I've run into this exact problem and incredibly complex but contradictory symbology which seemed to be completely lacking any satisfactory explanation ... this is just a ... bloody big relief. Thank you Geoff. I just would not have had the patience, probably should say attention span, in this lifetime to sort out something that has been gnawing at me like an ulcer for many years. Thanks again!
the way people talk is our biggest problem is it?
really?
REALLY? Our country is run by gangsters who are ripping us apart limb from limb...
and youre whining about ESL.
THAT is why we are screwed.
Australias a f'in joke with a majority of mouth breathing knobgoblins who give absolutely no craps outside of things that make life a little bit uncomfortable for them. as a result, the majority of you killed your kids with experimental drugs. Well done.
Don't worry one day you'll get good enough to teach real english classes. Keep trying.
lifetime ESL teacher and a somewhat patchy student of linguistics...
@@QuentinMosses-vr3cv ??? Why??
Na all good mate dont stress.
Exactly mate, no worries.
No wozzas
No wuckers
No wukkahs
she'll be right
No wonder why when I used to transcribe Australian English words for international Chinese students who are familiar with IPA, they could not believe that my ad-hoc transcriptions could be so utterly different from what they received in 'official' dictionaries
i enrolled in the 'security t-ism and counter t-ism' course a few years back. i had one lecturer who literally ended every single word with -ah. her english, sucked. she was barely understandable. and people were expected to learn.
I am reminded of the old joke: The British General is addressing newly arrived Australian troops. "Did you come here to die ? " "Nah, we kime here yester-die".
Or the American who asks an Australian “what’s a bison”. Aussie replies “It’s a thing you wash your fyce in”
I've heard that joke since I was a kid but while I agree that the long broad diphthong is well represented I don't think it's really that often a long broad "I' diphthong but rather a long broad "A" one. To my Melbournian ears the 'I' diphthong in that context makes it sound less Aussie.
that's... not remotely what those vowels sound like in Australian English. Source, I'm Australian.
@@Alodsinsounds like the worst Simpsons version of the Aussie accent.
@@Alodsin How can you be so sure? They didn't provide the transcription.
the most convincing proof of FLEECE and GOOSE being diphthongs, imo, is just playing recordings backwards, as you did in one of your earlier videos. You can clearly hear the 'y' and 'w'.
("yipee" and "woohoo" sound the same backwards and forwards, kind of mind-blowing the first time)
I was going to do that but when you drill down it's a bit more complex and the video was already getting very long
I didn't even know they had monophthongs in Australia, they all sound like dodecaphthongs to me
😂
Ikr?
As an American, my most hated example of such a dodecaphthong is Russell Brand's (well he's actually a Brit, but same idea) long "o", which is sort of a "eh-ih-ooh-uh"
Actually, they are icosaphthongs
French is all dipjandals interrupted by pttttthth
I've worked in a call centre for 25 years. I'm Australian living in Australia. I would have spoken to 200,000 different Aussies, from Wurrimiyanga to Joodalup to Parramatta to Penguin and so on. I should've been taking notes of regional and socio-economic uniqueness. Imagine where the data is N=200,000!
True story: Only one caller has ever picked me as having a Victorian accent. He was an Englishman. I asked how. His reply? "I spent time in a Victorian prison" HAHAHAHA
i got called out for being scottish in a queue for jobcentre in the uk. "Because i had a scottish teacher in school and he was a redhead" - imagine his shock when i spoke to him in an aussie accent 'im a pom you racist prck'
@privateinformation2960 HAHAHA sick reply mate haha
Ive been to Scotland and was mostly understood but back in 96 I wanted a deep fried mars bar. Chick at the greasies could NOT understand me. "Sandwich?" she kept saying. I had to walk out. That was Edinburgh too not Skye or some rogue Glasgow suburb.
As someone from Joondalup, I can always tell when someone is from the east coast of Aus, but it would probably be a bit trickier trying to pinpoint. I think I’d struggle determining between someone from Vic and Queensland. Sydney is easy, everyone from there sounds annoying. How did you find Perth people sounded in comparison to the eastern cities? My Hometown (Moora) definitely had a different accent for the youth, which I think is attributed to the fact the majority white population and the minority aboriginal population had a good relationship, and this Co-mingling affected myself as a white person with the way I said some stuff. I’m not sure how many people in Perth go “Monarch dard” when they see a police car, but I can usually tell when someone is from a country town where all the people all get along.
@X9Z17 ha truly! I miss WA. I lived in Bunno for ten years.
The only, only way I can pick a West Aussie is actually maybe from the same phenomena you observed with European and Noongar (is it Noongar up Moora?) and that is when you (some West Aussies anyway) say "Two beers" bc the oh of two is more 'rounded' and the beer is two syllables whereas here in Vic its a growly long one.
Edit: cheers for interesting reply hey, I enjoyed your observations indeed.. Lol I definyely retain the hey. I find it to be very schmick lol
One of the stand-outs of a Victorian accent, is the substitution of an "A" for an "E" like instead of "Malvern" it is "Melvern". (SA)
The cut to the wasteland of explanations cracked me up.
That and 30:55
Yes that one got me too
I have long felt that there are "covert diphthongs" in Cultivated Australian, RP and related registers. And have similarly pondered the oddities of pronunciation cited in dictionaries from the OED to the Macquarie. This explains it perfectly. With all my heart: thank you, Geoff!
Watching the Australian English vowel drift in real-time is truly fascinating. 😀
I wanna watch it on 2x speed!!!
how long have you been watching?
@@trinity_null I dunno. Thirty years or so?
@@roy1701d Jeez! I know they tend to drawl a bit out in the Queensland bush, but thirty years to get to the end of a diphthong is taking it a bit far, I'd reckon.
And maddening!!
Australia accepts your apology. Much carnage has been averted.
"...by clicking the link in the description down under."
*slow clap*
that was good.
[dɐlɔ]
I don't get it.
@@jimmychan.’down under’ is a way to describe Australia cause it’s in the southern hemisphere
@@jimmychan.Australia is often referred to as the Land Down Under because it's in the Southern Hemisphere
😂 Glad i stayed all the way to the end (after the patron names on screen)
Re: 9:00 Daniel Jones: As an American speaker, it boggles my mind that anyone could think that "ship" and "sheep" have the same vowel. As I sustain each vowel indefinitely, it's obvious that the "sheep" vowel is far tighter with a far higher tongue.
I know a lot of Italians who were taught that sheep is a long ship.
And therefore they think that sheet is a long shit, peace is a long piss, and beach is a long bitch.
Jones wasn't describing American English, of course, but I don't think his transcriptions were very precise for RP either. He chose to present the distinction between 'ship' and 'sheep' as one of length, even though he knew that was at best a simplification. Gimson, when he revised the phonemic vowel transcription symbols in the sixties, kept the length mark for /i:/, but altered the short monophthong vowel to use /ɪ/.
That's how I've learned it too, as an Italian speaker learning English in school. More than twenty years later, I'm still getting corrected all the time about ship/sheep by my (Polish) wife 😛
@@bhamiBut diphthongs can’t be sustained. It’s quite reasonable to notice that in most varieties of English, the diphthongs in sheep and ship both begin with lax /ɪ/, halfway between close /i/ and center schwa /ə/. The difference comes later when rising and closing with sheep /ɪj/ , or centering and opening with ship /ɪə/.
Sheeyut /ʃiːjət/, many Americans reverse them to begin sheep loosely centered, and ship (shit) tightly raised, like Spanish i or Japanese イ.
@@DougalBayer Why do you say that? To me, they they can be sustained, but you have to choose which bit to hold and extend. You could extend the FLEECE vowel as "iiiiiiiiiiiy", or you could extend it as "iyyyyyyyyyyyyyy". Which is kind of one way of proving that it's a diphthong!
I won't say I fully understand what's being said, but I do quite appreciate the accuracy about Australian English, not just in the analysis but also in the perfect accent. I mean, no surprise from a linguist of his level, but still, this guy has one of the few perfect Australian accents done by a foreigner.
Thank you soooo much 🙏🙏
@@DrGeoffLindsey thanks for making great videos!
Have you ever watched the Australian comedy show “Kath and Kim”. The affected ‘posh’ accents of ‘Prue’ and ‘Trude’ are hilarious. I think you’d enjoy them.
Their pronunciation of “a throw for your couch” has to be heard to be believed.
@@MsWonderBunny "Mum, do you want a threw for your carch?"
I came here to say this
@@ek-nz great minds 🙂
Or Jimmy Rees doing his youtube series "Ladies of Brighton"
When Germans are taught /i:/ as a monopthong (instead of /ij/) they end up sounding like Henry Higgins. "Ok, this one's easy, just like our /i:/". I'm afraid not! Similar problem for French and Italians.
Yup. French here, 'been taught all my life about /i:/ being a monophthong. Had to wait to discover Geoff Lindsey's channel to finally pronounce my /ij/ and /ɪ/ correctly (more or less, anyway).
For Hungarians, too. My students just don't believe me when I tell them that FLEECE and GOOSE (in current Standard British!) aren't [i:] and [u:], respectively. Mind you, it's not their fault. They were taught this by their schoolteachers who, in turn, had been taught it by their own profs. I did that too, for at least two decades, and I'm sorry guys.
11:28 [re: Pygmalion and a scene involving teaching Eliza a vowel]: “Can you guess which one?”
ME: “Ooh! It’s ‘FACE’, isn’t it? ‘The rain in Spain stays mainly in the-’”
11:30: “That’s right - ‘FLEECE’!”
ME: “Oh.”
LOL! I had the same reaction🙂
Sorry guys
Something not touched on is the influence of aboriginal and torres strait languages on Australian english. Apart from places and names of things, some intonations are quite unique to the Australian continent (also very similar to new zealand in many instances aside from their influences from maori languages)
Also the different states and regions have mostly subtle to non Aussies but present distinctions. Infamously SA is more "posh" allegedly due to a lack of convicts but more likely because it's a later settlement and the UK accents that created it underwent vowel shifts
That is highly unlikely to have been picked up from aboriginal languages.
As a learner of English before the audiovisual internet (we had to copy audio from cassettes back then), I was lucky that my English teacher started our learning journey with pronunciation.
Ever since then, I take extreme care of ‘correct’ pronunciation, this channel is a gem.
As an Australian linguistics lover I can’t tell you how excited I was to click on this video!
I have to admit that, when thinking of Britain’s imperial legacy, checkered as it is, its monophthongizing of the _fleece_ and _goose_ vowels, with all the subsequent unfortunate consequences 28:32, did not immediately spring to mind. (It didn’t spring to mind _at all,_ in fact.) The channel, as always, proves to be invaluable in unexpected but much appreciated ways.
Haha couldn't help notice you were listening to Sculthorpe - it's his 10th anniversary year since his passing. I was surprised his works didn't get a refreshed airing by our orchestras... ❤🎵
Thank you so much for your teaching. I am a teacher of English a second language for adults here in Spain and since I saw your video about the phonetic symbols and read your book, I have tried to change my teaching as well. It is a hard task - but still, I truly believe it's the right way to work with the students, who have great troubles with the listening skill and, in my view, it's because of a bad teaching in phonetics. You are an inspiration!
Gliding diphthongs is a great summer post-Christmas dinner activity.
I actually really appreciate this. It's helping me, as an Australian actually understand how I talk.
I love Geoff Lindsey’s analyses and entertaining style. As a research scientists in a completely unrelated field, though, I can’t help thinking how much I’d dislike him if he applied this sort of biting bluntness to the research of my own field.
Why would you dislike him for that?
Think about it from the perspective of the scholars whose work he is so bluntly criticising.
A TH-cam channel isn't meant for academic confrontations.
@@esachanbut there are people who do establish TH-cam channels for exactly that purpose
@@esachan youtube was literally made to upload and share videos. this is a video to be shared. academic confrontation doesnt matter
it's fascinating seeing how classism was exported abroad, essentially, and then passed down through education for several generations - for so long that a lot of people forgot but it's still causing issues
It would be interesting to see a comparison between South Australian speakers, to the other Australian states.
They sound like poms
We are a bit more archaic with more strong verb forms. We say miwk instead of milk. We say da:ns, not dæns. We pronounce neither r nor l in „girl“.
@@australiananarchist480 Due to a great influx of ten pound poms, many of whom were employed in the car factories.
Or, specifically, a comparison between different posh girls schools in Greater Adelaide!
(In fact, come to think of it, a Lindseyan comparison of the accents from the "top" [Insert irony emoji, here] English public schools would also be fascinating. They were, after all, the original breeding grounds of RP. And Stephen Fry - posh, but not an Etonian - clearly enjoys delivering his Etonian impressions, so there must be differences recognisable to the illuminati.)
It's sad to see the 'Adelaide accent' slowly die out. Not many people under 50 have as distinct accents as people like Alexander Downer or Chris Pine.
As an Australian, I think my FLEECE vowel sounds a lot more like a monophthong than the RP FLEECE vowel. I suspect because it goes to the [j] earlier, despite having a laxer onset.
28:00 I think the Aussie "near" vowel varies a lot actually. The "beard" example shown is pretty short and mono-y, but you will definitely also hear it pronounced more like "iya". Especially in broader accents and especially at the end of a word. Ask an Aussie to say "near" or "here" and I bet you'll get "niya" and "hiya".
i recall from one of geoff's videos that this also happens with the CURE vowel
@@notwithouttext I think we pretty much always say kyoo-ah. Monophthong cure would sound very posh to my ears.
I'm so glad you're doing these great analyses. For years I've been bothered by the mismatch between English IPA standards and pronunciation, and people's resulting misinterpretation of phonology (insisting, for instance, that only the ones written as diphthongs are diphthongic, despite having the ability to hear their own vowels gliding).
I'm a native speaker of AusE, and my issues with the transcription of our vowels being based on RP is on the opposite corner of the mouth. Dictionaries when I was growing up were using /ɒ/ for LOT and /ɔ(r)/ for NORTH. This confused me when I started learning German -- I still don't really know where _their_ sound is.
Very interesting comment, and just felt like helping out as a German speaker. ⟨o⟩ is most commonly /o/ or /ɔ/ depending on the following consonants (Boden /ˈboːdn̩/, Sommer /ˈzɔmɐ/) or /ɔɐ̯/when followed by an R and another consonant: Sorge /ˈzɔɐ̯ɡə/ (some dialects do the same in some cases where a schwa comes after the R, so geboren would be /ɡ(ə)ˈbɔɐ̯n/ rather than /ɡəˈboːʁən/ or /ɡəˈbɔɐ̯ʁən/). I would suggest the "long O" and "short O"s of Boden and Sommer are marginally more rounded than almost-equivalent AusEng cloth and thought vowels, but only very very marginally.
German short O is the same as in Australia, /ɔ/, and long O is like Australian aw/or, /oː/.
17:51 - 18:03
I CACKLED! That's so sassy 😂
Puzzled by your pronunciation of ‘class’ which has the ‘ah’ sound down here in Australia 🇦🇺 and I always assumed was the same in England.
in the north of england, "class" rhymes with "mass", while in the south of england it has the longer vowel, so "class" rhymes with "parse". this is called BATH-broadening. geoff has an interesting accent: he's from northern england but his accent now is very similar to southern english accents, the main exception being that he has no BATH-broadening.
@notwithouttext My accent hasn't changed that much. It was never very broad, perhaps due to TV
It's basically the historic pronunciation. Clahss was the result of BATH broadening around London in the 18th century. Most Australians have it in words like class but not in words like chance and demand.
@@DrGeoffLindsey ah i see
Aha! As an Aussie living in the US, I can now present this video to my local deli server explaining that my request for ‘tuna’ salad is valid.
Tyee-oowna right?
@ Rawight!
Born and brought up in semi rural Herts of mixed RP and cockney parents, partially educated in Scotland and having emigrated to Australia 40+ yrs ago, this is of huge interest to me. I’ve always been able to switch between (mimic?) many accents and voices at the drop of a hat without having the first idea of how.
Best conference talk I’ve heard in a long time. Pity about the catering.
Vegemite sammiches not to your taste?😂
@ I’d take a vegemite, cheese and lettuce sammie over almost any conference catering tbh :)
You make a good point in other videos that, whether or not "fleece" and "goose" are realised as diphthongs for an individual speaker, English phonotactics is described most simply by considering them to be so. The idea of taking phonotactics into account when making decisions about transcription conventions is philosophically interesting, and not something I ever encountered when I learned phonetics. However, I have to say that as a >40yo Australian English speaker who recalls contemplating the composition of diphthongs in the shower as a child, "fleece" and "goose" definitely feel and sound like monophthongs to me, and grouping them with diphthongs feels deeply unintuitive. I would, if I met you, dare you to demonstrate your analysis from my own speech. (In contrast, "near" and "square" are unambiguously diphthongs for me.) Interesting that the speaker at 23:03 glides her "do" towards a more fronted position [dəʉy] while most others glide it towards the back.
it is very minor, but as the examples in the videos show, there is a change from the beginning to the end of FLEECE and GOOSE.
@@BryanLu0in those particular examples. Not all Australian accents make that change. “Fleece” and “goose” are definitely feel like monophthongs for me too.
RP from beyond the grave
It's so ossified at this point, it belongs in a Museum.
aussified?
RIP RP
Dr. Lindsey! I love your content, and I have gone back through your videos to find that I've watched them all as they've come out! But I have to say, I find the pace to be wonderful. A month seems like a good period of time between videos because they are of nice length and wonderful quality. I know youtube likes to sorta be wishy washy on the length of content and length between postings, but I hope you don't feel pressured by the algorithm to make more videos faster.
Finally, tackling the Australia problem... 😂
Aww, that apology at the end was so cute!
This guy's almost managed to convince me that I'm some kind of freak of nature for pronouncing FLEECE as a monophthong while from the south of England
(something like [ɪ̝ː~ɪ̝]. possibly because of the lack of high front monophthongs with the lowering of KIT to [e̠])
Since you mentioned the -ɥ ending of the Australian diphthongs, I'd like to see some discussion of the British "load" diphthong, which also appears to be pronounced more like [əɥ] than the [əw] one can find in the CUBE dictionary. It doesn't seem to be present in your accent, but you can hear it for instance in that of Lucy from "English with Lucy" channel, and many other accents from England (plus Google Translate's text-to-speech engine).
He's mentioned that in a different video (the one about the Australian GOAT vowel) wherein he says this phenomenon called "GOAT-fronting" is found in England too and can sound pretty Australian
@@naufalzaid7500 both GOAT and GOOSE vowel fronting are happening in many englishes, but their phonetic realizations actually vary wildly. so some places do use the familiar [əw/əʊ] but you have some places using something like [aɨ], but any variety of low/mid vowel with some upglide could exist
@@Matty002 Yup, and the one found in England, as Dr Lindsey has said, can sound pretty Australian
Did I catch a stifled laugh after the “down under” joke at the end of the sponsor 😂😂
Ah! Goose! I was using an American programme with dyslexic kids, with adaptations for Aussie English. What sounds does the grapheme oo make? “Short” (foot); “long” (boot); and “Aussie oo” (pool). Pool has the glide.
It is so nice to hear the musicality in our flat accent.
We don't glide our pools and schools in Adelaide. I always thought that was only an east coast accent.
🤔 (Considering Adelaidian DH) Yes, more obvious in areas that had more Irish in “the olden days.”
As a general Australian speaker, I've been saying fleece to myself for the past half hour and I don't feel it. On flee/coup/go, I absolutely do, but not on fleece and bead.
worth waiting for the post credit
Unfortunately, when I was taught Latin, we used the reconstructed pronunciation and were taught "ae" and "oe" were diphthongs on the basis that "they're just two vowels stuck together" and weren't told what a diphthong really is - our pronunciation guidance was just "ae sounds like eye and oe sounds like oil without the l" . The funny thing is, reconstructed pronunciation is inherently imprecise - we don't have tapes of Caesar and Cicero (I think they were lost in a fire)
Ironically Latin is one of the best-reconstructed languages, and AE and OE were pretty much certainly those qualities. We don't have the accuracy of a formant measurement, but the pronounciations are as described.
Tragic boating accident
@@australiananarchist480Stolen by pirates who subsequently met an unfortunate fate (early Caesar reference).
Luke Raneiri has some good videos about Latin pronunciation (and how we know it's accurate) on his channel Polymathy.
He goes with the hypothesis that long and short vowels have identical qualities - which is far from universally accepted. I'm not saying it's wrong, but he does seem overconfident in implying there isn't room for debate. His beliefs are based on discussions with a linguistic graduate friend of his who is more knowledgeable. Whichever you believe, it doesn't make a huge difference to pronunciation.
Very well presented video. I was engaged and listened to the whole thing, despite not being very interested in the topic prior.
I feel like, while it’s clear in Australian English and pretty clear in British English, how diphthongal really is fleece in AmE? It sounds basically like a monophthong to me from almost all speakers.
Thank you. I’m not the only one. I, a North American (NE US), was sitting here trying to hear a diphthong in my fleece. I don’t hear one.
I agree
Neutral Midwest speaker here; definitely a monophthong in my accent. I can hear a diphthong in Southern, though -- ask for a cup of "tea" or a "piece" of pie and it's right there, plain as day. (Drives my wife nuts when people claim she uses the Southern vowel in those words -- she doesn't; her idiolect does include some Southern features but not that one. It's primarily General American.)
@@codahighland i’ve noticed the diphthongized variations in southern speech as well
Most of American accent have monophthong for i but diphthong for u.
9:24 To be fair, I have seen some people analyse the FLEECE and GOOSE vowels as sequences /ij/ and /uw/ in even in dialects where they are (usually) realised as monophthongs, In which case it's not that different from Jones' "Chroneme", Except rather than positing a unique phoneme, It's being posited that the existing /w/ and /j/ phonemes, While not actively realised unless followed by another vowel, Do affect the underlying KIT and FOOT vowels, Raising them to the positions of FLEECE and GOOSE.
Visiting different Australian cities, there are noticeable differences in the local accent. I remember going to Sydney and thinking they sounded really Australian. (I am Australian too. I grew up in Perth, on the other side of Australia.) I'm guessing they sounded "more Australian" to me, because they sounded like the kinds of voices that are usually on Australian TV shows. Whereas my own local accent just sounds normal to me.
it was very weird hearing "nobody believes in chronemes before" when i was taught about those in phonetics class just four years ago
Geoff Lindsey!
Geoff Lindsij, not Geoff Lindsi:
@@tru7hhimself Tommy Cooper
20:07 Now that is a weird apology to Australia lol
What an eye-opener! An ear-opener!
For phonemic purposes, I prefer the GA ɪ/i and ʊ/u notation for both GA and RP (if we were to have a single system for both). I don't think the non-compulsory vowel/pitch shift in the 'long' vowels is worth notating at the phoneme level. OTOH, I prefer having an explicit 'r' (as in GA) to mark the effect of the (possibly historic) post-vocal /r/ in coloring the preceding nucleus. Note: I am not a native English speaker and I am not familiar with Australian English and its spectrum of dialects.
A study of Kiwi English would be interesting. I had a few friends in Korea who were from New Zealand, and I was fascinated by "bed" as /beed/ and other such things.
It’s like Kiwis threw all the vowel letters in a hat and then assigned them to vowel sounds at random.
Feesh and cheeps
I'm a Kiwi and I'm perplexed as to how anyone could think we pronounce "bed" as "beed". Also "feesh and cheeps" is Australian, not Kiwi. Most non-Kiwis trying to represent our pronunciation of "fish and chips" write it as "fush and chups" (although of course it doesn't sound that way to us.)
@@Myrtlecrack Kiwis say “fush and chups”, not “feesh and cheeps”
@@gcewing I’m Australian and I’ve never heard a fellow Australian say “feesh and cheeps” in my entire life. We don’t elongate the “e” vowel - especially in words that we pronounce with an “I”, such as “fish” or “chips”. We say those words the same way the poms do. So either the poms also say it wrong, or you do. Which one do you think is more likely?
I have a VERY weak Somerset accent, most people can't tell. However, somehow, when i went to Sydney, most people couldn't tell i was English! Quite strange to be honest.
That is odd, given that the most distinctive trait of West Country accents, relative to other southern British, is a degree of retained rhoticity that is not only lacking in other southern British accents but in Australian accents as well.
Oh, my love
@@fromchomleystreetThough as noted at 27:31, rhotic vowels are rearising in Australia, but not in the places where they appear in proper rhotic dialects.
I think people might have been taking the Mick mate.
I just just googled a summer set accent. Was born and raised in Sydney and that accent sounds like the hobbits from lord of the rings.
@louiscypher4186 no I have a weak version of that accent. Even British people struggle to tell. No one can guess where I'm from in the UK either, so what you googled is going to be hyper exaggerated. This also happened too many times by too many different people in completely different scenarios over the course of the year I was there.
5:42 so what I'm getting from this video is that the poshest accent is Scottish English ;) The chroneme thing with ship and sheep having a shared vowel is wild to me, but I couldn't help thinking it sounds a bit like the vowel-length rule in Scottish English, where there's a pronunciation difference between crude and crewed, tide and tied. I'd be interested in a video which explains why the idea of a chroneme wouldn't apply to that!
I'm curious, would you so nicely transcribe them?
As a speaker of General American with a twist of Surfer Dude, I can't imagine the word fleece as a diphthong coming out of my mouth. Am I crazy?
It isn't in AmE
You got those annoyingly high fronted vowels, with no bends, or "Why am I cinstantly rising, but no questions*. What do you think you are? Norwegian. 😅
Think of Southern American instead of General. And try "tea" instead of "fleece".
Personally, I think pronouncing the FLEECE vowel as a diphthong sounds cute.
It's the GVS happening a 2nd time
11:50 Even though he's not trying, Professor Higgins is actually doing a passable Australian accent while trying to mock Eliza's Cockney accent🙂
I got lost when he described fleece and goose as diphthongs. They sound like a single sound each with no glide to me! Haha. Over my head.
They've always sounded like diphthongs to me but it's most likely because my native language is very strict with the vowel qualities. The Tagalog phoneme /i/ can be [ɪ], [e] or [i] but will never become something like the Australian English [ɪi̯] even if in a stressed syllable as in the word ['flɪi̯s]. My ear has always been able to notice that glide in the FLEECE vowel because of this phonotactic rule in Tagalog.
NOTE - Some Tagalog dialects like eastern Batangas do allow diphthongisation of single vowels /i ~ e/ and /u ~ o/, but only at the final syllable of multisyllabic words. Lexical stress doesn't seem to affect this.
Fascinating, as always.
Cue Lindsey's clip in other videos of Mr Spock saying, "Fascinating".
@@sluggo206 That is fascinating company indeed. ....Now I have the vapours from all this fascination. I need a cold towel.
Henry Sweet always wanted to travel the world and seek adventures. He may be gone but there is a little bit of Henry in us all. Here's to Henry.
2:41 the way he said empire.. woof
I'm an Aussie and when I say sheep it sounds more like shape than ship. 😅 Edit: I just realised something interesting; If you say 'shape' in an American accent it sounds like 'sheep' in an Aussie accent.
Loved it. Thank you.
Another great video that makes me sit and say fleece to myself 50 times. As a non native Australian English speaker who can’t be trusted with a consistent accent I think the way I say it is almost indistinguishable with flays.
No worries Doc, it'll be Sweet.
Great work! I've been teaching pronunciation using your videos. The materials, unfortunately, still describe i: as a monophthong...
The "chroneme" thing does exist (albeit, usually described with different terminology) in some languages. Japanese is an excellent example. I've seen theories that PIE might have been in that category, but I don't know how mainstream that idea is.
The word "coup" is not a good example, because everyone over the age of forty remembers when it was still frequently fully expanded as "coup d'etat", and so there is a marked tendency to treat it as foreign and therefore different from other words and therefore to enunciate it with extra care.
what are you on? What do you mean by "croneme" in Japanese, 拍? It's just mora. Also the author was trying to apply cronemes to English, not Japanese, and thus was wrong.
...and noone screws up foreign words more than English speakers. Even JP folks pronounce DE or IT words more carefully than English speakers pronounce anything that's not English
@@JohnValentine-f1swe simply absorb words better. English has dozens of words that are recent additions from other languages, which are now just treated as a standard English word, even if they're spelled weird (Coyote, Schadenfreude, basically any Italian dish) and we just pronounce them with English phonotactics
The length marker chroneme would help to explain Thai vowels very well to foreign speakers. Vowel length is a major stumbling block when it comes to farangs sounding like a Thai native speaker
@@JohnValentine-f1s they're probably referring to a certain phonemic analysis common among japanese linguists, in which the second element of a long vowel is written with the cover symbol /R/ (so that 今日 _kyō_ is /kyoR/); see _The Phonology of Japanese_ (Laurence Labrune), particularly section 2.7.3, for discussion of this point.
@@sungodmoth or every Japanese, who routinely spell double-length vowels with the 伸ばし棒 “stretch stick” aka 長音記号 long-sound symbol” 「ー」
ア /a/ アー /aː/
TH-cam's best academic!
Loved this video. The nods at the end to the debates over becoming a republic and/or altering the flag to something that no longer references Britain do seem to be heating up. The one specific Australian vowel I notice newcomers pick up quicker than others is our "Oh" vowel, which you have referenced in earlier videos and, of course, is used as a meme about Australian accents. I've met Americans, Canadians, Chinese, Germans etc. that have lived in Australia for a few years, and apart from their overall accent giving their origins away, as soon as they say a word with the 'Oh' vowel, the influence of Australian English becomes obvious. I'd be curious to know why that is.
That’s curious. I’ve found the opposite for me personally. My family moved to regional NSW when I was 12 and my sister was 8 and we had the o discussion over dinner at some point, when she had already picked it up and I haven’t yet. I must’ve woken up one day with it finally working properly when I was 14/15, it felt like the last thing I got. ‘Ou’ in ‘sound’ must’ve been the first thing I got since it’s the strongest one I have, the n is almost nonexistent - “seau(n)d”.
Actually I take that back. The strongest one I have must be oi in tiger (toiga). But either way, not the o.
Surely they could have easily thought up in 21:46 of simple open-syllable words like SEA/SEE and SUE
Wonderful. Now I know why I talk funny! All the examples seem to be the strong form of the words, it would be interesting to compare the weak forms. I have a sense that the Australian schwa sound (the middle resting sound used in weak form) is in a different (lower) place that other countries, or what the IPA thinks it is. So, as an Australia learning German, when I say eine and einer they sound exactly the same (in normal speech, where the second sound is unstressed), even though in my head i'm trying to say them differently.
I think reduced vowels are variable Englishwide, they're not actually schwa phonetically, that's just a placeholder.
@@Paul_Ernst I genuinely reckon German is the greater part of why the Adelaide accent is a bit unique. The vowels sound "posh" to most other Aus English speakers, but so do German vowels inserted into English. ;)
For whatever it might be worth, when I was learning German ages ago, I found singing (both listening and doing) helpful to get past that whole thing of trying to make German words with English sounds.
Australians are SPECIAL !!??!! Yes, we are. I knew it.
Been excited for this video for a while now! Thanks for the apology, all is forgiven (almost)
best apology video on youtube 💜
So, how did the Great Vowel Shift work? Did everyone stop speaking at midnight, and an hour later, cautiously start speaking again with the new vowels?
vowels slowly shifted. some shifts effected other shifts, in order to prevent vowels from becoming too similar. this is called a "chain shift"
Shift rather than a switch. From my understanding, it was a 200 year period of time in which English vowels on the whole shifted very dramatically for reasons that are still a bit mysterious. The new system then replaced the prestige of the old system. It was not a uniform change. For example Northern English accents were less affected.
Are “dipthongs” what Australians wear to protect their feet when hoping into beachside rockpools that have sharp seashells in them?
Note that the broad Australian MOUTH vowel also often ends non-back, much as the GOAT vowel does.
This makes so much sense now. I noticed the discrepency between English transcription and what I've heard when I first started learning English. Especially short i is nothing like a shortened version of long i. Also, at 14:18 that's why you were searching for κοινή in the Opera browser..
As a Kiwi, this was super interesting.
I reckon a better way of representing dipthongs without changing standard notation might be a dedicated ligature between each set of two symbols, to join them into single symbols. Unfortunately that won't work with ae though.
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Glad I watched to the end of the video 🤖
I'm yet again reminded how little I actually understand about phonetics.
Your video on the vowel space from about a year ago was quite enlightening. Could you recommend anything similar? Or maybe some introductory teaching materials? After searching a little, I've now also found your video about vocal organs (the one with an MRI recording) so that's what I'm gonna check out next.
I can see these niche theoretical topics don't perform that well, so you probably shouldn't shift the focus of your channel onto them. But what do you think about just gathering what's already there into a playlist? That would definitely help nerds like me discover them quickly.
actually in Australia target is pronounced tagət or Taʒey depending on if it's the store Target or the object
The "Targét" pronounciation is a pisstake though.
Cheers mate, all goods.
A browser with elevator music and psychedelic lighting? Not just no, but hell no!
29:35 did you deliberately copy the pose of the original photo?? Nice work!
Cheers for the info Doc. She's all good but. Avagoodone!
The accent isn't anywhere near as uniform among white speakers as is often reported. However to hear the differences you need to spend a long time here. I can hear which city in south east Queensland someone is from by accent.
Same!
Thank you for pronouncing William Labov's name correctly!
I find the "chroneme" idea very interesting. Though English doesn't have it, there are languages that do. Japanese for example. The difference between "house" and "no" is ie (いえ) and iie( いいえ) respectively, and the latter certainly does collapse into the former when said with speed or laziness.
I'd like to input a topic of how certain region in Northern Ireland pronounces 'owl' -> "[a]il", 'towel' -> "t[a]il" 'cat' -> "[k][i]t' etc....