A conversation with Simon Roper Part 2
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 24 พ.ย. 2024
- This is the second half of my chat with linguist and TH-camr Simon Roper. Part 1 is on Simon's channel:
• 'English After RP' wit...
The starting point of our conversation was my book 'English After RP'
www.amazon.co....
This conversation is a perfect example of natural conversational English. What you need to do is have it in a pub where we see the two of you get gradually more drunk and laugh at the gradually more tangential topics come and go. 'What were we talking about again?' As an EFL teacher I found this very useful and the other videos Dr Lindsey and Simon Roper present. Thank you to you both.
There's something about watching and listening to two chaps talking about phonetics whilst chirping birds and other sounds of the world passing by can be heard in the background. This is right up my alley, love it ❤️
yyyaaayyy two my favourite language youtubers together
(ı know Simon is an archaeologist but still)
Good video but it would be better if you dropped the Franz Boasian antiwhite language like sexism and ageism. I'm here to listen to language not jewish ideology
@@headbuttsforphaticcommunio3731 are you mentally well?
I both can and can't believe I've just spent several hours watching linguistics videos in the wee hours of the morning 😅 Thank you both!
To add on to Simon's comment about Spanish hiatus. You have a lot of variations. High vowels /i/ and /u/ generally become [j] and [w], especially if they're the second vowel and even if they're stressed, in which case, stress moves back to the onset, "la isla" becomes ['lajs.la] (the island) and on occasion, /e/ and /o/ fall in with this as well, so "no está" (he/she/it's not here) becomes [nwes'ta].
Deletion is also possible, this is stress and height sensitive. Stressed vowels win out, so "la hembra" can become ['lem.bɾa] (the female). And when they're both unstressed, mid vowels, especially /e/, are likely to be deleted, "la entera" (the whole one f.) becomes [lan'te.ɾa].
Because of the large amount of /es/ onsets, due to epenthesis and its occurrence in high frequency words, this often interacts with /s/ debuccalization in weird ways. In my Caribbean dialect, initial unstressed /es/ often takes the form of gemination of the following consonant, especially voicless stops, "la escuela" (the school) is [lak̚'kwe.la].
And /es/ is often deleted even when not in hiatus, especially in forms of the verb "estar" (be (at)), add in nasalization and dropping of approximants, among other things; and I definitely agree with the notion that casual spoken Spanish can quickly become incredibly hard to parse for non-native speakers. My realization of "estaba en la escuela" (I was at school) is naturally [tã:lak̚'kwe.la], unless I'm speaking quite carefully.
i'm american but also speak spanish (well but not as much as a native) and i would say in addition to certain accents in spain carribean spanish is the most difficult to understand.
by the way your written english is excellent and english spelling is a mess so este comentario fue increíble.
originalmente aprendistes ingles americano no? y luego, ¿cuándo "descubriste" el inglés británico y otras variedades?
@@NoirL.A. Yo soy venezolano de origen, pero viví en los EEUU de niño, desde los 2 hasta la adolescencia. Así que hablo castellano e inglés nativo. Me acuerdo haber visto la película A Hard Day's Night cuando tenía tipo 4 años y supongo que fue mi primera experiencia con inglés no americano.
@@alejandromartinezmontes6700 muy interesante. my nombre tambien es ALEJANDRO.
fascinating!
Glad I came here to finish the rest of the conversation. Very pleasant, intriguing, and informative.
Thank you!
Simon Roper is amazing. The whole vibe on his channel is brilliant.
Thank you! I've been waiting for this.
I saw part 1 of this conversation when it came out on Simon Roper's channel, but it's taken until now for me to watch part 2, and I apologize for taking so much time. Though I'm an American and an amateur, my big ego qualifies me to weigh in on the subject of how to define RP and Cockney. When dialects are socially stratified, they have to be defined sociologically, just as regional dialects should be defined geographically. It seems accurate -- at least through the 1960s -- to view RP as being the accent of prestigious British boarding schools and Cockney as being the speech of those born (and presumably raised) within the sound of Bow bells. When an eight-year-old child went off to boarding school, that child learned the speech of the other children at the school, just as a child of the same age living within the sound of Bow bells learned the speech of the other children in the neighborhood. It doesn't matter if those language varieties still exist or not. (Children may now be older when their sent off to boarding school, and the language of the streets of London may no longer sound like Cockney.) Language is acquired in childhood, and other children are typically the models for what constitutes acceptable speech.
At the start of this video Simon talks about the lowering of the DRESS vowel found in some women, and there's a slide inserted for it, but it says it's the KIT vowel when it should be the DRESS vowel. It's obvious from the context what the slide is about, but just wanted to point that out.
There's a French film about the Paris Commune that was done with very little scripting (if any), they just found a bunch of people, some of them (maybe rven most of them) not even professional actors I think. It was done as if it was a documentary / news piece on the events, they even had intentionally anachronistic film crews and journalists interviewing people. It's definitely not gonna appeal to everyone but I'm glad it exists. It manages to capture a really authentic feeling despite the blatant anachromisms, because people talk over each other and repeat themselves and stray away from the topic and ramble on and on about whatever they thought of that moment, and monpdy really seems like an actor (pretty sure most of them weren't)
Interesting conversation, thanks. I'm from southern Maine, and when I went off to school in upstate NY and had friends from the New York City area, they made fun of the fact that I pronounced 'hot' and 'law' with the same vowel. I had to look in a dictionary to convince myself that they were in fact 'supposed to be' different sounds. I think it changed the way I pronounced those words because I became self-conscious about it.
I think people laugh at a spot-on impression because hearing it come from a different person is unexpected or "wrong", like the twist of a punchline in a joke, somehow triggers laughter.
Regarding the lack of fall / rise intonation in American English, you do hear it often in the US when the person is speaking to small children, as in Dr. Lindsey‘s example of an English person’s way of addressing a child. using it in addressing anyone else would be considered condescending.
Well, that was fab! I found the conversation to be wicked and sick. It was groovy and gnarly in equal measure.
I am part way through this video, and I am enjoying the discussion about intonation, as someone who knows very little about linguistics; it was enlightening.
I am an American (although I immigrated to Australia 11 years ago), and I never previously noticed that I use a different intonation for yes/no questions compared to other questions. This made me realize, however, that there is another set of questions that I ask in that same rising yes/no intonation: questions that I should already know the answer to. For example, if I ask, “What’s your name?” the first time, it will be with a falling intonation. But if I forget your name and have to ask again, it will now be with a rising intonation.
One other thing I wanted to add (just because I find it kind of curious and interesting): When I started dating my Australian partner and then later moved to Australia with him, the first thing that changed about my voice was my intonation during regular speech. It took me longer to adopt a lot of Australians words and phrasing, and my actual pronunciations have changed only slightly in all this time, but according to friends and family, my intonation changed noticeably just within a year.
Interestingly, my family and friends also noticed that my voice became a lot deeper when I started dating my partner. He has a naturally extremely deep voice, whereas my voice previously tended toward the high side. (We have actually recorded our voices and analyzed them, and the highest note that he is physically capable of hitting is still lower than the very lowest note that I can produce!) It seems that I subconsciously started mimicking his low voice, and now this lower register is part of my new accent.
That's a good point around 57:50 about improv generally being a comedy genre. I assume that's probably because it's much easer to be spontaneously funny than interesting or dramatic.
Certainly comedy is easier to measure: it's easy to know if you're funny because people will be laughing. It's not quite the same with drama, where we don't have as strong reactions from the audience.
In Finnish the normal question intonation is a falling intonation, but the distinction (at least for polite questions) is that you start higher than your regular pitch
Fans get exited when they find out that actors have improvised in drama, so it definitely occurs, though usually only for small percentages of the speech, except for specific directors that encourage much more of it.
Famously in Ocean's eleven, Pitt asks Clooney if he sounded too rehearsed, and Clooney says no, but it's then included in the film as though the characters have said it. Netflix teen dramas will also have parts where it was the actor's word choice, because they forgot the exact line or similar, but what they said instead works well and is included.
Maybe the weird appeal of this kind of youtube content, and of gaming streaming is the appeal of non scripted speech. There is a joy in hearing people talk as close to naturally as possible, within the limitation of still being understood by an international audience.
How l enjoyed finding this video.What a gem.
Born on Merseyside. Lived in Cumbria. Studied linguistics at Preston and Lancaster and a germanist enjoying learning andalusian spanish.
Look forward to following you in the coming year. Can't wait.
Al the best .
This is like the marvel cinematic universe
Great conversation, just want to say that non comedy improvisation absolutely exists, it is less popular or well known but it exists and at least some actors train specifically in dramatic improvisation. Keith Johnstone and Del Close are two pioneers in improv teaching and both have explored non comedy improv.
Here in Vienna, many people don't pronounce "erinnern" (remind/remember) with a glottal stop in the middle, although I've definitely heard it. Rather, we pronounce the r, which is atypical for the "er" verb prefix. It's similar to the English "linking R" phenomenon in that respect, and not the only instance where the phenomenon occurs, especially in broader Viennese dialect.
i would totally watch another 2 hours of you 2 talking
Fantastic conversation! Thank you both for sharing it with us.
I'm an American and regarding the cot-caught merger, some Americans have it and some don't but it can be hard to tell. I have the merger but my mother does not. However, I can only tell by comparing the words "wrought" and "caught" before I can realize the difference whereas my mother can hear it easily. Interestingly, I have been noticing an increasing amount of Americans are developing a merger with words like "mail" and "fell" as in both words have the "ell" sound (or something in between)
The Long Island very/vary and merry/Mary mergers have always been immediately obvious to other Americans.
Outstanding video as always!! I wanted to ask you, are voiced consonants such as [b], [g] and [v] devoiced at the beginnings of words in English? and if so to what extent?
Yes, they will usually be devoiced initially unless immediately preceded by a voiced sound (e.g. the best, the guest, the vest), in which case they may be voiced, esp. /v/. (Plosives may still lose their voicing during their hold/stop phase.) Have a look at the comparison of English and French near the start of my recent video on when not to aspirate.
Fascinating conversation.
Brilliant! My two favourite linguists!
That was fun. Thank you.
Damn, I totally link. I'm also a rhotic American so it's not a surprise, really.
Hi Dr Lindsey, I'm here from Simon's channel.
If you happen to see this I was wondering if you might be able to give insight into an aspect of my own accent which I have been wondering about. It's related to the "near" vowel which you talked about in this video in particular it's occurrence in the word "year". I am roughly from suburban south Birmingham UK, broadly solihull area if you know where that is. My parents have what I would describe as mild Brummie accents but due to either location or upbringing factors my accent much more resembles standard southern british, which I think is not too unusual for many people in similar demographic. One thing that is unlike SSB is that like you my bath, grass vowels often change depending on the word or who I'm talking too and in general are more likely to be a cat vowell.
Another thing which is different about my accent and I have not noticed this in anyone else with roughly ssb sounding accent as far as I am aware is my pronunciation of the word 'year'. While I pronounce 'near' roughly the same as you and Simon do, I pronounce the word 'year' something like "yurr". Is this a Birmingham/Midlands thing do you know (I'm assuming it is) and thus is a near/year split a thing in some midlands dialects? Oddly enough my younger brother who has a very similar accent to me (perhaps his bath/grass vowels are more likely to be as in palm), does not pronounce 'year' like this and pronounces it the same as 'near' I believe.
I guess it is just strange to have this pronunciation in an accent that sounds for the most part like SSB, and that is what intrigued me about it after it was pointed out by a few (SSB) friends.
Besides that great content by the way!
I should say my year pronunciation is obviously non-rhotic so perhaps it would be phonetically like "yuhh" (I don't know IPA too well apologies).
just thought i'd add the "brummie" accent is awesome i love it. my first introduction to it was interviews with the members of BLACK SABBATH. i'm yankee and so therefore do not have the same prejudices as peoples in the u.k. but i cannot for the life of me figure out why so many ppl. in the u.k. dislike brummie, scouse, cockney, etc. i think they're all awesome.
brummie specifically has a very nice flow and rhythm to it. plus i like the way the vowels are so much different from my own the accent in general is so dramatically different from mine and yet we can still talk to each other. i think that sorda thang is very cool. plus that fer anybody whose somewhat familiar with u.k. accents (i bin there 3 times) brummie is an amazing blend of northern and southern accents. sorda like cockney blended with, say, manchester.
i know that regional accents in the states are starting to disappear. when i was a youngster back in the 70's american regional accents were vibrant and strong not so these days. i routinely have to ask where peoples are from now even though they're yankee. i'm from L.A. but i recently spent 3 months right outside new york city and i noticed older people talk like 'GOODFELLAS' whereas younger people have very little of it if any.
would you say the same thang is happening in the u.k.? since accents in the u.k. are so much older and more entrenched i figured it would never happen there. but we all know the internet is very powerful, dominant and ubiquitous so who knows.
would you say that's the case? is standadirzation happening there too?
First, I want to thank you both for this very interesting talks. I really enjoyed watching it!. I didn't only learn some new facts about languages and pronounciations, but also had some "of course, that's something I was thinking of"-moments.
Please allow me to explain why, in my opinion, your thoughts on “pronunciation trends” from 2:45 to 4:35 are actually sexist.
You both have used heteronormative stereotypes to make assumptions based on it. Please dont't get me wrong. I mean it as a well-intentioned exchange of views.
The stereotypes are:
Female are (more) into fashion (than older man)
(younger) female people are (more) friendly
There might be statistically tendency for female persons being more interested in fashion, than man.
But when and where? 2010s in "western" countries?
And does statistic explain the reasons for a significance??
Does it mean, that women are more into fashion as such?
The last is a common common misconception. Let me simplify:
There are much more fashion shops for female people - so females are more into fashion (because they are female)
Young female people are usually very friendly - so this is a female trait
And even if you don't think that way, you've used such stereotypes.
I would say, it's more likely to be:
women have to be beautiful (to please man) - so they must dress nicely - so there are more fashion shops for female people
a (young) female have to act friendly - so being friendly is a female trait
Men are victims of these stereotypes too. How about a man, who is friendly and into fashion?
Btw I really like your lovely scarf, Dr. Lindsey
Of course it's not about statistic, at least you didn't mention any. It's about using stereotypes to explain things.
My experience shows me, that the following phrases are the best indications to identify such misconception and to choose other words.
I don't think it's sexist ..., BUT ...
I am not {placeholder}..., BUT ...
I have to write this comment twice, since I accidentally deleted my much better, more friendly and more accurate comment ^^
I hope you can share my opinion and find some interesting aspects in it.
Thank you both again for this very ineressting talk. You made my day.
Far as I was aware, the Cockneys were not just "working class londoners" but rather a distinct ethnic group formed in London that is now largely dispersed or assimilated.
I was also shocked by the word "good"! It sounded, and still sounds, like "gid" to me.
If /u/ is being fronted to /y/ (ü), then it's quite normal for many English speakers to say or hear it as the unrounded /I/.
Well to a German it clearly sounds like "güd" 🙂
Yayy!! 😃 Thank you ☺️
Regarding intonation of questions:
I think it's quite a large jump to assume that the British intonation is more polite. Politeness varies from culture to culture. We share (much of) a language, but there are many cultural differences and I wouldn't say either culture is better or worse than the other.
I really enjoyed this, gives me the vibes of having a chat with one of my professors!
Whoever edits your videos is HILARIOUS 😂😂😂
❤🏆
?
great video! please make more!
The point about tv shows and learning language through novels was interesting. I've noticed it increasingly in finnish novels and tv shows where the characters have been scripted to talk like casual language. The odd thing is how extremely unnatural it sounds when someone acts spoken language (for example nobody in spoken language says "minä" which is the formal "I/me", but the moment you read the casual spoken version of it in a book or hear it in a tv show, your mouth twists because it sounds like an imitation of real life and wrong, it should be the formal language to sound good in media in my personal experience and opinion).
I think it's because the standard language has been pushed really hard in Finland for a long time as the only correct way to write (even for TV and movies), which I think is a shame and I really hope we'll see the more natural kind of speech become fully normalised in fiction
It does demonstrate really well how arbitrary and how culturally ingrained writing conventions can be, that people find it weird to hear fictional characters speaking like normal people
You can hear the diphthong /ɔə/ in the Cambridge dictionary on the recording pronouncing "spore". The transcription says it's /spɔ:/, but there's clearly a schwa in the end. Well, yes, it's at the end of a word, as you've said, inside of words it's long dead (in England at least), but still. Curious that Daniel Jones didn't have the diphthong /ɔə/ in his pronunciation at all. Here's an excerpt from the article "Received Pronunciation" in Wikipedia:
Daniel Jones gives an account of the /ɔə/ diphthong, but notes "many speakers of Received English (sic), myself among them, do not use the diphthong at all, but replace it always by /ɔː/"
Daniel Jones was born in 1881, I'm sure the speaker on the recording in the Cambridge dictionary is younger. So I think it's not so much about old-fashioned versus new-fashioned pronunciation as about differences between accents. As Simon Roper mentioned his Cockney-speaking aunt had this feature and pronounced "war" as "woruh" instead of more usual "wor".
Dr Geoff Lindsey, please make a video about the diphthongs ending in a schwa, /ɔə/, /ɛə/, /ʊə/, /ɪə/ and why they're dying away.
Btw, in most cases when the transcription says that the word is pronounced with the diphthong /eə/, you in fact hear the monophthong /ɛ:/ on the recording. However you can here the same voice in the Cambridge dictionary pronouncing "pare" as /pɛə/.
The trouble with phonemic transcriptions in dictionaries is they give you an example but the example may be said quite differently by different people. I got into a long argument with someone who insisted the strut vowel is just a short /a/ and everyone says it that way, so of course the right phonetic transcription of colour is /kala/ and everything else is wrong.
i'm american but i also speak spanish and english has always been problematic because it's practically designed to vary alot from one area to the next. spanish has variation too but nowhere near like english. english is relatively new in comparison to several european languages and no academy was ever established and therefore trying to invent some sort of accurate spelling system and trying to standardize the language itself is impossible. the phonetic spelling would change too much from one area to the next (example: between say scotland and idaho) so it's pointless to even try. the spelling of english is an awful mess but at this point i really don't see any reasonable method of fixing it.
@@NoirL.A. English had been in written use far longer than almost any other European language. Yes there was no academy, and it has changed a vast amount in the last 1200 years, but a written vernacular for other modern European languages (aside from Greek) would not appear for another 500 years after English.
@@AutoReport1 yes but it's always been a mess. in SHAKESPEARE's time it was totally up to the individual how they chose to spell it was purely a matter of taste. spanish spelling has always been surprsingly close to how it's actually spoken and that's true even amongst documents from medieval times. english, on the other hand has been an awful mess from day one. and what you claim is not true at all italian was commited to the page long before any form of english. and yeah no matter what period they're referring to it's all considered "english" amongst some people but the differences between english as it has evolved is dramatic enough that i think it's not strictly correct to call it all "english".
@@NoirL.A. only if you call Latin Italian. The oldest Italian vernacular isn't even Italian but the North Italian which is more like French. English and French authors were published at the same time, not long before Spanish. Until the 12 th C. Almost everything on the continent is written in Latin, not the vernacular. German starts replacing Latin in documents sporadically in the 10th. English however is in continuous documentary use since the 7th C. Spelling changes and changes in vocabulary and pronunciation affected French Italian and Spanish just as much as English. None of these languages is stable, they can't be. Even Cervantes had terms which defy translation today. Folk songs which were passed on orally have words which defy comprehension today. How old is a language? They all change so by some measure no modern language is any older than another. If you want to measure by when a distinct variant emerged from an older language, this is hard when there is scant record of the vernacular as opposed to formal writing in an older language such as Latin or old Norse. By the 12 th century it has that the vernacular in France and Italy are distinct. Since regional languages have features not found here we can assume they were also distinct at this time, and had their own Latin dialects before then.
I'm so fascinated that Lindsey quite frequently spirantizes his t's to s (e.g. 16:12 "if you see wass i mean"). Very neat.
He’s from the Liverpool area, and spirantization is a famous feature of Scouse.
Hearing British folks talks about social classes is always a strange thing to me. I am a southwestern Canadian. I have a notion of economic compartmentalization of people, but I don't think I have a notion of social class in Canadian culture. Is it like a subculture and way of language and behaviours? Like rural farming communities versus corporate-backed politicians? Would a stereotypical wealthy, publicly-left-leaning Hollywood celebrity be upper-class? What if they keep to themselves amd live modestly, even though they're still extremely wealthy?
*and
00:40 it was meant to be "DRESS vowel" right? surely not KIT?
Non-comedy improv is getting more and more popular with the raise of D&D (and other tabletop RPGs) streams.
As a non-native speaker I wonder how much do the accent/character voice (which increase artificiality) and the low editing and completely improvised nature cancel each other out. If channel-hopping would they sound like a scripted program or a documentary?
On the first point, the fronting of the 'good' vowel and relating it to positivity, I notice 'thank you' in a lot of American English accents being pronounced as 'think yiü', and I theorise that it's because it 'sounds more smiley'.
One comment after another from me pointing out a quirk of American English :/ I guess just because it's ubiquitous yet different from my speech.
it's also very common many americans from all over the country would say it more like "tank you" with both words heavily connected so that it sounds like a single word. not sure if that sounds friendly or not but it's quite common all over the nation. in the past canadians never woulld've said it anything like that but even they are starting to use expressions and pronunciations common in the u.s.
People from York like me often do that ejected k sound
what about words like soot which are pronounced with a ʊ even tho they dont not have a labial consonant
🤩
How can't u hear the difference between "cot" and "caught"?
realy guud
Is it just me, or does the younger person's speech sound more "syncopated" than that of the older person?
John Cassavetes' work?
👍
I teach my students that the correct transcription of "see" is almost [s j i: ] 😀
i hope you meant [s i: j] and not the other way around 😨
directed by Peter Greenaway
2:08 The organ survey?
“The Survey of English Dialects,” commonly known as the Orrin Survey, was a study from the 50s that many people use to understand conservative English dialects and accents.
Why do you always speak about saksens as your basics.
There as been a migration from the netherland when it flooded 325/425 ad. These were frisians migrating from now is dutch, but than they spoke frisian in that region.
There are a lot of villages relating to frisians.
[0:25] *Dret* 🤨
[0:26] *Dress* 😒
Why don't you rather do this kind of conversations with those who have the intellectual abilities of your level or higher?