domstat.net

Website loading time

during the test: 1.77 s

cable connection (average): 2.04 s

DSL connection (average): 2.3 s

modem (average): 16.37 s

HTTP headers

HTTP/1.0 200 OK

Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

Expires: Tue, 18 Oct 2011 09:41:40 GMT

Date: Tue, 18 Oct 2011 09:41:40 GMT

Cache-Control: private, max-age=0

Last-Modified: Tue, 18 Oct 2011 09:29:25 GMT

ETag: "164b6f94-e211-4834-8a0f-cf9822396e51"

X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff

X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block

Server: GSE

Information about DNS servers

Received from the first DNS server

Request to the server "phonetic-blog.blogspot.com"
You used the following DNS server:
DNS Name: ns2.hosted.servetheworld.net
DNS Server Address: 83.143.81.142#53
DNS server aliases:

HEADER opcode: REQUEST, status: NOERROR, id: 16392
flag: qr rd ra REQUEST: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 4, ADDITIONAL: 4

REQUEST SECTION:
phonetic-blog.blogspot.com. IN ANY

ANSWER SECTION:
phonetic-blog.blogspot.com. 3600 IN CNAME blogspot.l.google.com.

AUTHORITY SECTION:
blogspot.com. 96701 IN NS ns4.google.com.
blogspot.com. 96701 IN NS ns2.google.com.
blogspot.com. 96701 IN NS ns3.google.com.
blogspot.com. 96701 IN NS ns1.google.com.

SECTION NOTES:
ns2.google.com. 121049 IN A 216.239.34.10
ns1.google.com. 121049 IN A 216.239.32.10
ns3.google.com. 121049 IN A 216.239.36.10
ns4.google.com. 121049 IN A 216.239.38.10

Received 212 bytes from address 83.143.81.142#53 in 135 ms

Received from the second DNS server

Request to the server "phonetic-blog.blogspot.com"
You used the following DNS server:
DNS Name: ns1.hosted.servetheworld.net
DNS Server Address: 80.65.50.171#53
DNS server aliases:

HEADER opcode: REQUEST, status: NOERROR, id: 19953
flag: qr rd ra REQUEST: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 4, ADDITIONAL: 4

REQUEST SECTION:
phonetic-blog.blogspot.com. IN ANY

ANSWER SECTION:
phonetic-blog.blogspot.com. 3600 IN CNAME blogspot.l.google.com.

AUTHORITY SECTION:
blogspot.com. 161635 IN NS ns2.google.com.
blogspot.com. 161635 IN NS ns4.google.com.
blogspot.com. 161635 IN NS ns1.google.com.
blogspot.com. 161635 IN NS ns3.google.com.

SECTION NOTES:
ns2.google.com. 195005 IN A 216.239.34.10
ns1.google.com. 195005 IN A 216.239.32.10
ns3.google.com. 195005 IN A 216.239.36.10
ns4.google.com. 195005 IN A 216.239.38.10

Received 212 bytes from address 80.65.50.171#53 in 138 ms

Subdomains (the first 50)

Typos (misspells)

Location

IP: 209.85.175.132

continent: NA, country: United States (USA), city: Mountain View

Website value

rank in the traffic statistics:

There is not enough data to estimate website value.

Basic information

website build using CSS

code weight: 102.23 KB

text per all code ratio: 23 %

title: John Wells’s phonetic blog

description:

keywords:

encoding: UTF-8

language: en

Website code analysis

one word phrases repeated minimum three times

two word phrases repeated minimum three times

three word phrases repeated minimum three times

B tags

He pronounced it ˈæbseɪl

The etymology of the word is straightforwardly German: the neuter noun Seil means ‘rope’ or ‘cable’, and its derivative abseilen means ‘to lower (something, or oneself) on a rope’, hence ‘to abseil (down)’, and also, figuratively, ‘to skedaddle’. No doubt it was borrowed into English by the early pioneers of mountain climbing in the Swiss Alps.The German pronunciation is zail, ˈapzailən

ai

So why, despite this, does our prevailing pronunciation have eɪ

eɪ

aɪ

iː

All other German loanwords with ei, as far as I can see, have English aɪ

I think the explanation must be contamination from sail, even though abseiling has nothing to do with sails. According to LDOCE, abseil is BrE only, the AmE equivalent being rappel ræˈpel, rə-

Both my pictures (found on the web) are captioned as abseiling. One has one rope, one has two.As an afternote: on the melodeon discussion forum there is currently some speculation about the origin of the model name Double Ray for certain Hohner melodeons from the 1930’s onwards. One plausible suggestion is that it is from the German doppelreihig ‘double-rowed’, since these melodeons had two rows of treble buttons at a time when most had only one. This model was commissioned by a Scottish accordion dealer from Hohner, which is a German company. If true, this would another case of German ei ai

It’s not just a question of possible typing errors or misprints such as [intʃ] instead of [ɪntʃ] inch. What we have here is gross ignorance on the part of the author about the ‘phonemic spelling’ of English words.• Leaving aside the Scots and Ulstermen who have no GOOSE-FOOT contrast, every native speaker of English pronounces foot as fʊt

fuːt

• Every NS of English pronounces pint as paɪnt

pɪnt

• Every NS pronounces gallon with -lən

-lɪən

• No NS of English pronounces ounce as oːnts

oː

• As far as I know, no NS pronounces Fahrenheit as ˈfɑːnhaɪt

ˈfærənhaɪt

• The citation form of the plural of degree ends in z

-ˈɡriːz

n

m

ˈɡʌvnmənt

In his CPD (1972) Jack transcribes this word as ɡʌvm̩ənt

the term government … can be heard every day over and over again in countless news bulletins and current affairs programmes. Both EPD15 and LPD list first the variant which contains the /-nm-/ sequence. However, anyone who listens at all attentively to recordings will soon discover that this is not merely not the predominantly heard form of the word, even in situations of the greatest prominence or highlighting, but that it is actually even a relatively unusual form of it.Now Giovanbattista Fichera writes to take me to task over the same issue, expressing surprise that I have not acted on Jack’s criticism. (In LPD the main entry (BrE) for this word continues to read ˈɡʌv ən mənt

In my opinion, it requires a great deal of effort to articulate the sequence without assimilating the n

sa'm:auro

san'mauro

mm

I replied I think my entry is correct. It unquestionably corresponds to my own slow-careful pronunciation of the word. I certainly don't have to make “a great deal of effort” to pronounce it as shown. (But then my L1 is English, not Italian or Japanese.) The alternatives that follow represent reductions which are also admittedly very common in speech - but they are just that, reductions. I am in no doubt that for me (at least) ˈɡʌvənmənt

Some of these reductions may indeed be frequently heard from speakers, in radio or TV news bulletins as elsewhere. That does not make them the mentally stored forms, which are what I think a dictionary ought primarily to record. As for GF’s comments on San Mauro, he is perfectly correct as far as Italian is concerned. Italian, like Spanish, Japanese and various other languages, does not admit sequences of nasals at different places of articulation. But English does. Even JWL’s CPD shows -nm-

ˈɪmmeɪt

U tags

played

Thom

Lon

me

think

I tags

My uncle Gilbert was not only a marathoner but also a climber, and I suppose it is from him that I must have learnt the verb to abseil

down

Seil

abseilen

ei

So why, despite this, does our prevailing pronunciation have eɪ? It could easily be accounted for as a spelling pronunciation — compare eight, rein, veil, vein

eider, height, kaleidoscope

ceiling, deceive, Keith, seize

either

neither

Eiger, eigenvalue, Einstein, Freiburg, Geiger, gneiss, Holbein, Leipzig, Weimar, Zeiss, zeitgeist

abseil

sail

rappel

doppelreihig

I refer you to a horror story reported in Alex Rotatori’s blog. The above is part of a page in an English phrasebook published in Italy by a respectable publisher.It’s not just a question of possible typing errors or misprints such as [intʃ] instead of [ɪntʃ] inch

foot

put, push,

good

pint

gallon

ounce

Fahrenheit

degree

eighty-six

86 degrees

Pons Travel Kit Inglese

con Audio Trainer

I remember Gimson, probably sometime in the 70s, telling me that Jack Windsor Lewis was trying to convince him that he ought to change the EPD entry for government

government

San Mauro

I am in no doubt that for me (at least) ˈɡʌvənmənt accurately represents the succession of articulatory targets presumably stored in my mental lexicon as the phonological specification of this word. As I told GF, it also represents the way I pronounce it when articulating carefully (not overarticulating, but also not applying running-speech reductions).Some of these reductions may indeed be frequently heard from speakers, in radio or TV news bulletins as elsewhere. That does not make them the mentally stored forms, which are what I think a dictionary ought primarily to record. As for GF’s comments on San Mauro

inmate

If I congratulate my friend Thomas by saying Well done Thomas! — how would you analyse that grammatically? In this structure there don’t seem to be any other possibilities for the first slot, well

played

to

You have well done

You have done well

That was a job well done

Well done Thomas

me

Well done me!

Private Eye

well done me

The first exercise in my book English Intonation

Jacob Chu writes from Hong Kong to claim that when the female speaker says Silly old fool!

As you can see, the tracing for the fundamental frequency for the bit we are interested in (ringed in red) does seem to show two slightly falling tones. On the face of it this looks like that bugbear of intonation work, a mismatch between what the human ear perceives and what physical measurements of the speech signal tell us. Then again, Jacob Chu must either be a native speaker of Cantonese or at least very familiar with it. And Cantonese tone 4 is described as “low-mid to low, falling” (the IPA Handbook

In Daniel Jones's description (Principles of the IPA

I estimate that the Oxford Dictionary of Surnames by Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges (also published as part of the Oxford Names Companion) contains about 35,000 surnames with their etymologies or origins. Yet the number of surnames in Britain must be many more than that, judging by names that crop up in the news but are not to be found in the ODS. And that is without considering names of recent arrivals from other countries. If we add in other English-speaking countries, particularly the United States, the number of current surnames is very large indeed.The current crop of Members of Parliament includes one Michael Dugher. I came across his name in the newspaper and was wondering how it would be pronounced. It looks vaguely Gaelic: compare Irish dúghlas

Douglas

Dugger

Cray

Ó Craoibhe

Dan(iel)

I replied along the following lines.1. There is no universal enumerable list of discrete “sounds”, and therefore there can be no set of symbols in a one-to-one relationship with them. Rather, we are faced with a multi-dimensional continuum of possibilities. Putting it another way, there is no super multilingual phoneme system in the sky, of which the sounds of each particular language are a subset.In principle, the IPA contains all the symbols needed to represent the pronunciation of any human language so far described — that is, it is adequate to cover the contrastive sounds (phonemes) of any language. Not all finer shades can be represented except by ad hoc symbols. For example the English ʃ sound in sheep

sharp

short

ch

sh

images

headers

H1

H2

Tuesday, 18 October 2011

Monday, 17 October 2011

Friday, 14 October 2011

Thursday, 13 October 2011

Wednesday, 12 October 2011

Tuesday, 11 October 2011

Monday, 10 October 2011

Search This Blog

Followers

Blog Archive

About Me

my blog March 2006 - 6 March 2009

John Wells's phonetic blog

Subscribe To John Wells's phonetic blog

H3

Tuesday, 18 October 2011

Monday, 17 October 2011

Friday, 14 October 2011

Thursday, 13 October 2011

Wednesday, 12 October 2011

Tuesday, 11 October 2011

Monday, 10 October 2011

Search This Blog

Followers

Blog Archive

About Me

my blog March 2006 - 6 March 2009

John Wells's phonetic blog

Subscribe To John Wells's phonetic blog

H4

H5

H6

internal links

external links