Pronounce that again... please.

You know you are studying the right thing when everything fascinates you.  This is both good and bad.  If I could figure out how to not need to eat or sleep.... but I digress.  

May years ago, when I was studying my first Master's program, I studied phonology.  The practical reason was to help deaf students speak English more clearly.  In applied linguistics, it is a piece of language, one of the parts to the whole, so thus needs to be looked at in more detail.  There are many applications for studying phonology and phonetics, and people study it for years.  It took a new twist for me this week.  The workshop is part of the Description of Language Course.  Odd weeks are phonology, even weeks are grammar (syntax, morphology, etc.)  I have decided that I need to rename, for me personally, the phonology seminars to "Phonology: A course in British Linguistics Acquisition".   We are to transcribe, and understand pronunciation for the Queens English.  Understand that this is the dialect of Southern England.  It is also known as Received Pronunciation (RP), BBC English, or public school accent. (Did I mention that the BBC is right next to my Halls of Residence?)  It is not standard English which is a dialect, one of a variety among many. However, if we are discussing Grammar, then it is Standard British English vs Northern  British English.  Are you confused yet?  Good.  

So the goal is to learn the sounds of "English" and be able to transcribe them using the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) and the Cardinal vowel Chart.  British English has 20 vowel phonemes where American English has 14 -16.  So words that would be pronounced the same in American English are not in British English.  So I'm sitting in the workshop with a chart that has 12 words representing the 12 single vowel sounds of RP.  'Law' and 'lot' are both on the list as are 'cat' and 'bath', meaning they have different pronunciations.   Great.  So I turn to Mathan, who is British and my partner in this exercise and ask him to pronounce "law"  , then "lot" , then "law" again.  I have a list in front of me with several words representing the pronunciation of the different vowel sounds, which is only kinda helpful at this point.  So I would ask so like... 'board', 'torn', 'horse'.... yep 'law' goes with those.  'Lot' goes with 'pot', 'gone', and 'cross'. I can agree with those.  'Cat', goes where I think it should, with 'bat', 'man' and 'gas'.  'Bath' however goes with 'card', 'half', and 'pass'.   Good thing I wanted to improve my British accent.  At least this way I will learn to put the correct British accents together, and can become more native like.  Not the intent of the class, but a nice added bonus.  I left class having a desire to watch "My Fair Lady" for some reason... 

Speaking of movies and Britain, a scene from "Mary Poppins" became very clear to me this week.  You know the scene where Michael has a two pence and his dad takes him to the bank and the banker goes off on interest and banking and money..... Yeah, so if you are not aware banking is the British industry.  It is what it does as a nation to make money.  Don't complain in the US about how long the bank holds your money before it allows you to use it.  My loan money was paid to the school on Oct.1st. They cut my check on the 15th.  They kept it for 2 weeks to earn interest on it before handing it over to me.  I took it to the bank and deposited it on the 16th.  It did not show up in my account.  So I went searching and found the chart for when a check is cleared.  It will show up on the 17th in my account, but not as accessible.  On the 20th it will start to earn interest.  I can make a draw against it on the 22nd, though not cleared and could be recalled, and it will be fully cleared for use on the 27th.  If I had wanted to cash part of it, I would have to have paid a large fee, because they wouldn't be able to collect interest on it and they have to get their money out of me somehow.  So my money is held for a month before I can actually use any of it.  Ah, those small cultural differences.... 

So right.  It's been lovely and a brilliant week.  No worries, it's all good. It will all get sorted.  Until next week, Cheers!