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From: Philip Baker <news@thalasson.com>
Newsgroups: alt.languages.english
Subject: Re: English Lesson: Monty Python
Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 01:25:40 +0000
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In article <501b6$45e6adfb$3e18e6cb$32446@news.vispa.com>, Richard
Polhill <richard.news@polhill.vispa.invalid> writes
>gadfyl@mosquitoe.net wrote:
>> Richard Polhill wrote:
>>> gadfyl@mosquitoe.net wrote:
>>>> For example, you claim, "The letter 'l' is quite often silent."
>>>> But in some of the examples you give, the 'l' is weakened to a 'w'
>>>> (psalm --> sawm, not sam).
>
>>> I know Americans ... tend to pronounce "r"s fully, it is by no means
>>> universal.
>
>> Some people fully pronounce the 'l' in 'calm' and 'psalm', some
>> pronounce it like 'w'.
>> Is that your point?
>
>No it is not. I said:-
>
> >> In British English, the "l" in "psalm" is completely silent, serving only
> >> to lengthen the preceding "a", sounding like "aa" in "aardvark", much as
> >> the "r" does in the same word when spoken by Brits."
>
>Meaning, that the "l" in "calm" and "psalm", and the "r" in "aardvark" are
>silent modifiers to the preceding vowel in typical British English
>pronunciation, so what the OP said is true for his given locality.
>
> >> I know Americans, probably due to Noah Webster's ideas on how language
> >> should be taught, tend to pronounce "r"s fully, it is by no means
> >> universal.
>
>I suspect that somewhere in the world you'll find people speaking English with
>an accent that does pronounce the "l" in "calm" and "psalm", but that is not
>what I was trying to say. I was attempting to allay any following argument
>that the "r" in "aardvark" is fully pronounced.
>
>My point was that anything you want to define about pronunciation is true but
>only for a given value of "true". ;-)
>
>In fact anything you want to say about how words are pronounced is only valid
>for a given subset of the speakers of the language.
>
In my vaguely RP accent 'calm', 'balm', 'psalm', rhyme with 'arm' and
'farm'. There is a feature of Estuary English where 'l' after a vowel is
indeed weakened to a 'w' like sound, a feature that has been around for
a long time - before the use of the term 'Estuary English'. But that's
another issue.
--
Philip Baker
PJB Software
Thalasson Web Resources
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