John Wells’s phonetic blog

Britain’s latest UNESCO World Heritage Site is the Pontcysyllte aqueduct, north Wales.

The structure, built by Thomas Telford and William Jessop, is the longest and highest aqueduct in Britain.

Pontcysyllte is such a lovely name that it would be a pity to let the occasion pass without mention.
Wikipedia tells us that its Welsh pronunciation is ˌpɔntkəˈsʌɬtɛ. Myself, though, I would transcribe it ˌpɔntkəˈsəɬtɛ (or more simply as ˌpontkəˈsəɬte). The Welsh schwa is indeed stressable, despite being mid central, and has the same quality in the penultimate syllable of this word as it has in the antepenultimate. There is no reason to use the symbol ʌ in transcribing Welsh itself. The reason some people do is that in Welsh English the equivalent sound is used in STRUT words.

The first part of the name is the Welsh word for ‘bridge’, pont, an obvious Latin borrowing (pons, pont-, hence French pont) dating from the time before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain, when the Latin-speaking Roman urban population and legionaries interacted with an indigenous British-speaking (= early Welsh speaking) rural population. (That is why there are several hundred Latin loanwords in Welsh.)
What is the second element? It looks like a local dialect form of cysylltau, plural of cyswllt ˈkəsʊɬt ‘joint, junction’. This is related to the rather more frequently encountered verb cysylltu kəˈsəɬtɨ ‘join, connect’. So perhaps the name means something like ‘junction(s) bridge’.

The nearby village is called Froncysyllte, ‘junction brow’. Somehow it sounds less romantic when turned into English. Bron (when soft-mutated, fron) is the brow of a hill but the breast of a person or animal, hence the name Bronwen ‘white breast’.

The stem of cyswllt, cysylltau, cysylltu, too, is of Latin origin. It can be traced to the Latin word consolidus, which has given us English consolidate.

The aqueduct is only two hundred years old, so did not exist in Roman times. I wonder, though, whether there might have been a Roman bridge nearby, called pons consolida.

[I remember at the oral exam when I did a GCSE in Welsh the first question the examiner asked me was, Beth yw eich cysylltiad chi gyda Chymru? ‘What is your connection with Wales?’, to which I could only answer Dim ond diddordeb ieithyddol ‘just linguistic interest’. Sorry, that’s nothing to do with phonetics, it just relates to cysyllt-.]

Keith and Sybil Thomas, in a letter to the editor published in Saturday’s Guardian, ask

Are we the only people who, on saying they were going to see Phèdre, were asked whether we expected him to win at Wimbledon?

The tennis player Federer is ˈfeːdəʁɐ in German, ˈfedərə(r) in English. The schwa in the middle of his English name meets the conditions for combining with the following r to give a syllabic r, which in turn can become non-syllabic by the process of compression: ˈfedrə.
Racine’s play, Phèdre, is in French fɛdʁ(ə). I suppose in English that’s ˈfedrə or ˈfeɪdrə. So in an English context confusion with the tennis player is only to be expected.

In EFL, mistakes in pronunciation may contaminate written English.
As we know, many people have problems with the pronunciation of r and l.

...and with iː and ɪ.

But this causes problems in spelling, too. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it causes problems in sorting out apparent homonyms (homonyms when mispronounced).
Oh dear.
(Authentic pictures from engrishfunny.com.)

Listen! Here’s Ben Crystal, David Crystal’s son and author of Shakespeare on Toast (blog, 14 April 2008), being interviewed about Shakespeare’s accent, complete with an attempt to recreate it.

I can’t go along with Ben’s claims that RP is “only about a hundred years old” and that is “man-made, not natural”. What can he mean? It may not be natural for him, but it is (and for well over a century has been) natural for those who speak or spoke it natively.
Ben told me once that he is longing for the day when instead of saying to him “Gosh, are you David Crystal’s son?” people say to his father “Gosh, are you Ben Crystal’s father?” He seems to be on his way.

A choir I sing in is going to Helsinki (though without me) to sing in a festival. Naturally, out of respect to our hosts, we want to be able to sing Sibelius’s Finlandia hymn in Finnish. We had a speaker of Finnish to demonstrate the pronunciation, and fortunately singers are usually quite good at mimicry: so the results were actually very acceptable (I think).

Oi, Suomi, katso, sinun päiväs koittaa,
Yön uhka karkoitettu on jo pois,
Ja aamun kiuru kirkkaudessa soittaa,
Kuin itse taivahan kansi sois.
Yön vallat aamun valkeus jo voittaa,
Sun päiväs' koittaa, oi synnyinmaa.

Oi nouse, Suomi, nosta korkealle,
Pääs' seppelöimä suurten muistojen.
Oi, nouse, Suomi, näytit maailmalle,
Sa että karkoitit orjuuden,
Ja ettet taipunut sa sorron alle,
On aamus' alkanut, synnyinmaa.

After my many years of teaching informant classes at UCL, Finnish is naturally one of the fifty-odd languages about whose phonetics I am fairly well-informed, even if I can’t speak a word of it beyond hyvää päivää and kiitos. I was interested to note which particular aspects of Finnish pronunciation seemed to cause particular problems to this choir of English speakers.
Finnish orthography is very regular. Given the spelling, the pronunciation is predictable. So it’s mainly a matter of learning the letter values. Orthographic y ö ä are IPA y ø æ; everything else is pretty much what you would expect.
The front rounded vowels, orthographic y and ö, seemed not to be a problem — perhaps because people had some familiarity with French. As in the case of English people’s French, however, some singers overcompensated and tended to use an y-like quality even for back u.
The other umlauted vowel, ä, caused more difficulty, because people tended to equate it either with English e, eə (DRESS, SQUARE) or with an Italianate a. Although this vowel is usually transcribed æ and equated with English TRAP, it doesn’t sound entirely the same. I think it may be to do with the pharyngeal constriction that typically characterizes the English vowel but not the Finnish one.
The singers found it hard to maintain the difference between the front quality in että and the very back ɑ quality at the end of koittaa.
The opening diphthongs uo, yö were difficult for people, as was the closing diphthong äy and even the superficially easier äi. I had to bite my tongue not to intervene with a practical phonetics lesson: I wanted to explain that yö is simply ie plus lip-rounding.
Unlike the English voiceless plosives, the Finnish ones are strikingly unaspirated. The singers were mostly able to imitate this. To my surprise, it didn’t seem to cause difficulty. The big problem was the preconsonantal h in uhka. It’s the phonotactic differences that are trickiest.
Fortunately, the fact that we are singing to strictly timed music takes care of stress and segment duration.
Among the improbable comments overheard from chorus members were that Finnish pronunciation sounds (a) like Afrikaans and (b) like Klingon.

BBC Radio 4 has a programme called Americana. (For the next few days it is available on the BBC iPlayer, or as a podcast, here.)
The various presenters and announcers cannot decide how to pronounce the title. They agree that it ends -ˈkɑːnə. But how does it begin? Is it əˌmerɪ-, with the secondary stress on the second syllable? Or ˌæmərɪ- (or even ˌæmerɪ-), with the secondary stress on the first syllable? The continuity announcer goes for the second syllable, just as in America, but the presenter Matt Frei goes for initial stress.
It reminds me of the difference not only in meaning but also in pronunciation between German eventuell ˌeːvɛnˈtu̯el and Enɡlish eventually ɪˈventʃuəli. Or (perhaps better) between the two meanings of English certification. According to Daniel Jones, and I tend to agree with him, the nominalization of to certificate is səˌtɪfɪˈkeɪʃn̩, but the nominalization of to certify is ˌsɜːtɪfɪˈkeɪʃn̩.

The uncertainty over secondary stress placement and possible vowel reduction in Americana is good news for EFL learners, since it suggests that for this and perhaps many other rather arcane words it doesn’t terribly matter \what you do.

Simon Hoggart, writing in Saturday’s Guardian, commented

Another of Gordon Brown's weird mispronunciations: he says "gross" to rhyme with "floss" or "dross". The word is in common usage, especially when taxes are being considered, so you wonder if he really does listen to what anyone says.

In fact all words in -oss have ɒs, i.e. the vowel of CLOTH or LOT, with this one exception. We have ɒ in boss, joss, loss, floss, gloss, moss, (a)cross, dross, albatross, toss. Only gross and prefixed engross have əʊ, the vowel of GOAT.
Unless you are Gordon Brown.
Note the inference that can be drawn if you produce a one-off spelling pronunciation: it means you don’t listen to what anyone says.

Words in -ost, though, are unpredictable in this respect. On the one hand we have cost, frost, lost with the CLOTH vowel, but on the other hand ghost, host, most, post with GOAT. Does hostage rhyme with postage? Or foster with poster? No.

It’s the same with -oth. CLOTH: cloth itself, and also Goth, moth; but GOAT: both, loth and, for most of us, sloth.
Not only EFL learners but native speakers too must learn the pronunciation of a word when they learn its written form. Otherwise people mock.

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