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Exercise October 11th

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By midnight October 14th, enter your name and the link to the blog page you have created for this exercise into this google form. If you complete the exercise before midnight October 13th, I may end up showing one of your examples in class Tuesday. In any case, please indicate on the google form whether that’s OK.

On your blog page, provide links to web-hosted videos (e.g. YouTube) that illustrate at least two examples of British English pronunciation that diverge from Mainstream American English. One example should concern vowel pronunciation, and another consonant pronunciation. The examples can be from any variety of English spoken on the British Isles, and the examples do not have to come from the same variety. We will be particularly impressed if you also illustrate a consonantal or vocalic difference between UK  varieties.

For each one, provide a link to each video (or embed them in your blog page – see the “Media” link), the time in minutes and seconds when the relevant word occurs, and phonetic transcriptions of both the consonant or vowel sound that is heard in the British English example, and what you would have expected in American English.

This exercise will count as one of the classroom exercises we “collect”.

Update 10/15  Great work everyone! Here are some examples that I found were particularly relevant to things we are talking about in class.

From Rachel Mallard: [l]-vocalization in “bloody hell” at 0:23 of this clip from Harry Potter.

From Nicole Power: class with [?] at 0:03 of this clip (called “vowel backing” in the slides for today), along with nice David Beckham and Mick Jagger examples of changes in opposite directions on the “poshness” scale.

From Fiona Mieles: an interesting, and kind of puzzling, instance in Scottish English: hill with [e].

Adding a link to a post or page, “t” examples

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I got a question about this, so I thought I’d post the answer here. To add a link in the editing window, select the text, and then click on the link button (looks like part of a chain) and paste in the URL. If you have .mp3s, you can upload and link them in a single step using the Add Media dialog. The text of the link needs to be put in as a “Title” there.

Also, here are the UK “t”s I played in class – they are all from the “Sound comparisons” website.

tyneside-better

better_Edinburgh

rp-better

 

Concatenating with silence in between stimuli

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We got a question about how to put your items together into a single sound file with a second of space in between. Since this might be a question that several of you have, I thought I’d answer it here. Here are two methods:
1. (Covered in class I believe) Save all of your sounds (Save > Save as WAV file…), and the one second of silence that you created to files in an easily findable folder (for the silence, you did Sound > Create Sound from formula, and changed the formula to 0 “zero”). Remove all of the items from the object window, and then add them one at a time to the Object window (Open > Read from file…)in the order that you want (Sound1, silence, Sound4, silence, Sound6, silence …). Then select them all, and do Combine > Concatenate.
2. Copy the silence onto the end of each of your sound files and concatenate after. Select the silence and choose View & Edit. Then select the whole thing (Select > Select…, values 0 and 1 second), copy it (Edit > Copy), and open each of the sound files, click at the end, and paste in the silence.
Update: Maggie Griesmer pointed out to me after class that an easier way to do this is to concatenate your stimuli first, and then paste in silence in between each pair. Thanks Maggie!