On Fri, 2 Mar 2007 01:25:40 +0000, Philip Baker
<news@thalasson.com> wrote:
> 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'.
In any of those do you pronounce the 'r', or is it pronounced as 'cahm'
and 'sahm'? The latter is how I pronounce them (with my own "vaguely
RP" accent -- thanks for the term).
Note that the 'p' in 'psalm' is silent, as it is in 'milk'.
> 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.
I haven't heard that (or perhaps my ear can't distinguish it), but a
certain speech defect common in people from the south-east of England
replaces 'r' with 'w', as exemplified by Jonathan Woss (sorry, Ross).
The common perception that Chinese and Japanese people reverse 'r' and
'l' is incorrect, they actually use a sound between the two for both of
them so that if one is expecting an 'r' then it is perceived as being
"more like an 'l'" and vice versa. The same is true of a lot of
European 'v' and 'w' confusion, the actual sound used for both is
somewhere between the two.
Chris C
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