What if English actually SOUNDED like this?? 

Okay ✅

Why are we still using the anachronistic term "received pronunciation" to describe modern speech? "Standard English English" is problematic but still preferable.

@@DadgeCityStandard Southern British English is the term that makes most sense.

It says the address is invalid :(

I do NOT like the IPA symbols. They sometimes sound similar depending on the accent but NOT the same. Only ONE phonemic symbol is used for different accents and even languages. The quality is different in every language, for sure. The /u:/ symbol for the word GOOSE is WRONG! Even if we change it to /ʉw/, it won’t sound exactly the same as people do really say the word GOOSE. It won’t sound natural. The /ɑ/ as in father in the IPA sounds too rounded. The /ɑj/ will sound like oi/oy as in coin/boy.

we absolutely do

If we re-phoneticize the spelling, then the various dialects of written English would start to lose mutual intelligibility.

If British people could keep the same vowels for more than 20 years, this wouldn't be such a problem

Exactly. You got it. The IPA in dictionaries is a second irregular non-phonetic writing system.

My next video looks at this

Right Proper innit!

RP isn't really posh though. If you listen to royalty or aristocrats, they have a very different accent. Sounds like they have their teeth wired together and are being strangled! Back in the 60s, BBC announcers spoke posh, but that's changed a lot over the years. RP is def higher status than a regional accent though!

@@LittleNala When I was young, we referred to anyone with a posh English accent as having a plum in their mouth, which makes little sense as trying to talk with a modern plum in your mouth is nigh on impossible.

​@@utha2665 when a hitch hiking student back in the late 1960s got a lift of a chap in a Rolls. !! Lovely man but mouth so full of plums I had no idea what he was saying. And I grew up speaking RP. I was reduced to hoping my nods and yeses and nos were relevant.

Ree-li Pɒsh

So alien that in Northern England 'here' is still straightforwardly /hɪə/

@@joaodavid2001Probably more accurately [ˈhɪjɘ]

And it's a great loss for the show! Cause it sounds less immersive, more like they just dressed up for some reason.

​@@aborigine3716 'Original Pronunciation' Shakespeare is quite popular, I think it'd be interesting to see the same done for more recent literature - like Austen, Dickens or even early 20th Century stuff. We are so used to hearing things translated into essentially a modern accent with a few nods to the period. There's an interview on here with a woman who grew up in Victorian London and I remember thinking how different she sounds to the actors in Dickens adaptations. I bet Regency era would be especially odd- all those posh folk going to balls all the time would sound nothing like modern RP. I think some of their accent features would sound quite working-class to modern ears.

​@@joaodavid2001isn't it normally two syllables in the North?

😮

i cannot believe he talked about sacks such publicly and openly. there are children watching, you know...

👁️👄👁️ the viewer discretion is advised

ba dum tisssss

😂😂😂😂😂😅😅

That’s exactly what I thought when I got to that part too 😂

You noticed! Took me a while to edit that.

@@DrGeoffLindsey i noticed most of them were kind of musical, but this one obviously stood out, amazing work as always, it's details like these that make your videos much richer!

Almost like a certain bell ringing. Very British!

@@DrGeoffLindseyBless you, sir!

It's pretty much like this for most languages. Except a few like Italian and Spanish. Foreigners trying to learn Mandarin Chinese from Pinyin have the same problem. Once I freed myself from pretending Pinyin was phonetic people started understanding me (-:

⁠​⁠@@andrewdunbar828Italian is so lovely because, once you know all the sounds for the various phonemes, you can read almost anything aloud with a high degree of accuracy, even if you don’t actually understand what it is you’re saying 😂

​​@@VenomHalosItalian is very accurate to the pronounciation. You can read it completely accurately almost always. Only thing that sometimes confuses me is how c and g gets different values based on vowels, and ch and gh. Vowel length and accents and syllable stress are not always shown either, but usually doesn't matter at all Finnish is even better, it is almost 100% regular, the exceptions are very few like not having an ng sound in the alphabet.

@@tj-co9goTry Turkish. It’s almost completely 1 symbol 1 sound. Only the letter E has two pronunciations according to environment, at least in fairly careful speech. Colloquial speech does shorten some vowels almost to the point where they aren’t heard. And g/k get palatized around high vowels.

@@sazjiYup, I have studied some basics of Turkish, and that is correct. The g with circumflex is irregular too, but it is mostly very accurate orthography

That is much too funny, much more than it has any right to.

what the brit understood: I came here, yes, to die.

I think English just really really wants to be like the languages that actually have contrastive vowel length. It's like a vowel measuring contest.

In my diction for singers class we just referred to them as "open" or "closed" instead of long and short

The terms "long vowel" and "short vowel" *in this context* refer to phonemes of spoken English. Yes of course you can say [ʊ:] for as long as you can exhale. But spoken English doesn't do that. There is nonetheless a point to distinguishing between short vowels on the one hand, and long vowels and diphthongs on the other.

@@brunoparga The FLEECE vowel is high, front, long and tense; the KIT vowel is near-high, near-front, short and lax. Which of those criteria are contrastive and which are not? The idea of a binary, a single criterion being either contrastive or not contrastive, is problematical. It implies that one of two statements is true: either 1) the language has two vowel phonemes which contrast in length and are identical in all other criteria; 2) that criterion is irrelevant to each and every vowel phoneme in the language. The trouble is that differences between similar vowels in a language are not always as simple as differences in one and only one criterion.

Oh boy you are going to love writen Greek.

Still and all, RP is a great standard that should have never been abandoned due to basic social prejudices: LOOK AT SPOKEN ENGLISH IN BRITAIN NOW!! Dropping t's, simplifying everythng to the point of pronouncing and sounding like functionally illiterate brutes.... AND LOOK AT BRITAIN NOW!! Everyone should aim for a better society, not for a more brutal and lacking one!! Haters of RP probably hate themselves and their own country as well.

So where do you live now, and how do others describe your manner of speech?

@@edwardenglishonline "Prejudice"; effectively the power-elite in the UK spoke a language which was hardly understood by the masses and as the video illustrates, the power-elite had been shown to be laughable lying hypocritical failures who due to their own social prejudices had allowed traitors with the correct school-tie and manner of speech to infiltrate the military intelligence services, so there was quite a long history for the British people to judge by. There was nothing "Pre" about the rejection.

Answering so I get notified if he answers

Wow, I didn't even knew Dr Geoff worked on the Whitechapel case! How old is he?

@@jerrysstories711He’s been around since well before the 21st century

Do you recall the name of the documentary?

@@rianrenegade4441 It was a series, maybe for History or Discovery, called something like "Finding Jack the Ripper". It was about a descendant of H.H. Holmes (often credited as America's first serial killer) who was convinced that Holmes and Jack were the same person. The evidence, though voluminous and compelling, was nonetheless inconclusive.

The irony is that the RP vowel symbols are now so inaccurate that they've become a *second* irregular and unphonetic spelling system....

It's always been a problem with a writing system that should vary when you moved a few miles from city to city. But now I am older I notice the effect of the decades. Even my impersonation of "posh" English has become archaic.

I also found myself lost when I first started. Now I find RP to be one of the most interesting English "nuances", far more preferable and better sounding than the current dropping of T's, the tearing down of any subtleties, the destruction of complexity, the simplification of everything "so that anyone may be able to understand it without thinking"... (Look at the UK then... look at the UK NOW!! The appalling consequences of rife ignorance and basic and brutal social status anxieties and prejudices. Very, very sad, indeed!).

@@edwardenglishonline they are replacing the t with a glottal stop rather than dropping it entirely as in silent t words like hustle, castle, ballet and listen. It's not well regarded, but saying t clearly distinct from d seems to be a habit losing ground. I am old enough to be grumpy but it's things like "I have went" or Brits saying Americanisms like "take it off of the table" when just a single preposition off or from is needed and avoids triggering my "error lights".

the fact that someone bothered to write a news article about the queen's accent changing a bit in 20 years is insane

I thought slurring was the epitome of posh. Stiff upper lip, so the servants couldn't lipread you.

Yes, Paul Whitehouse too. They're in my long video about the symbols being wrong. They also nailed that early 20th century GOAT vowel.

I was thinking of this as well while watching, due to the mention of shows like The Crown and Jeeves And Wooster.

He's probably the most well-known RP speaker around the world

Seriously endangered

He’s the only living example I know of an RP speaker still saying ‘zebra’ as ‘zeebra’ not ‘zebbra’ like posh people did decades ago (which ironically makes them sound more like typical Americans than typical Britons)!

Same here

@@fuckdefed Is this related to how some old British speakers pronounce Kenya as "Keenya"?

As a Melburnian I was very surprised at just how Australian those vowels sounded. It could have been something on the ABC, or even that older gent on Nine News Melbourne

Yes, Australian English is a fascinating mix of things that are distinctively different from the Brits and things that have stayed closer to RP. The same is true in a different way for Cockney-Essex.

​@DrGeoffLindsey The correlation between Cockney-Essex and pie & mash shops is rather striking. Aussie pie & mash shops aren't proper pie & mash shops; they don't serve eels.

That’s interesting. I’m Australian. When I was young it was often assumed by other Australians that I was English. I’m now middle aged. It’s a couple of decades since I was asked that question.

It must depend on where you're from because I'm from Sydney and those vowels sounded really weird to me; much closer to each other and much more nasal than the more distinct (I think) and I would say 'lazy' vowels sounds we use.

Woodentops, the one with Weeeeed and those terrifying geese.

No hang on, weeed was Bill and Ben

@@DrGeoffLindsey Oh yes the Woodentops. I had a colleague that used " woodentop " as a term for those he thought were stupid.

@@DrGeoffLindseyYes, it was Little Weeeeeeed!

Australian English solved that problem by raising /ɪ/ to [i]. I was hoping Dr Lindsey would mention that in his French Google Translate video.

@@tinfoilhomer909 Don't the South African and New Zealand accents back /ɪ/ to /ɨ/ (aka the Russian ы sound)?

Did Latin actually use /ɪ/? It seems hard to believe that it did given that all the modern Romance languages use only /i/.

​​@@GCarty80It was lost as the result of the /e:/-/ɪ/ merger. These mergers (/e:/-/ɪ/ and /o:/-/ɔ/) are the main reason why the short Latin vowels are reconstructed the way they are (lower and more central than their long counterparts). For a more detailed description see pp.47-48 of Allen's Vox Latina.

@@GCarty80 ​ NZ uses the lower [ɘ] and South Africa is similar. The schwi [ɨ] sound is rare in my Aussie accent but unstressed "just" sounds quite close to it.

Earbuds?

I find the accent of Jacinda Ardern absolutely wild.

With languages as a hobby, a lifetime is too short to ever get bored.

@@paulbreen8533It is. Even to my ears. Check out Lynn from Tawa 😅

If you look at our dictionary CUBE, we have a toggle for simplicity. My co-editor Péter is the simplicity guy, I'm the Gimson in the double act. Sad that some have pigeon holed me as a Gimson hater

​@@DrGeoffLindseyah I hadn't realised your co-author was Hungarian. Nagyon jó! I spent some happy years in Hungary, including teaching at EKTF (now EKKE). Ironically, for someone who went to "Grammar School", I only really started to understand my own language when I was teaching overseas.

Same for Australian English. Skippy from the '60s sounds like everybody is in England. The Paul Hogan Show in the '70s might need subtitles for young people (-;

There’s a video of an American Civil War veteran, born in the South in the 1840s and interviewed as a very old man. He sounds almost British to me and nothing like a modern American.

Midwestern isn't really generic, though?

Interesting; to me (speaker of geographically mishmashed American English) the first vowel in "boys" sounds much more open than how I would pronounce it.

That's probably due to the following l. It happens in other English varieties too.

You can also find all the wonderful sounds of the English Language upon the last pages of most well-documented English ESOL Textbooks. RP sounds much better than the current "street mess". England also looked like a much nicer, kinder place back then. Oh well... "todo se pega, menos la hermosura" 🙃 Even if it is "justified" by an "expert".

well, *a* pin/pen merger, anyway... I think the southern pin/pen vowel converges on a different value

Well pin and pen didnt actually merge, he makes the point that the vowel quality in pin was very similar to today’s pen, making RP pin and pen very close acoustically but not quite the same

Ägriid äs önaðör Fin, ai oolweiz fäund Inglish raiting to bii räðör inkönsistönt and illodzhikl. Lakili mai neitiv längwidzh häz a moo föynetik speling sistöm

@@tj-co9goBouþ ëv juw ar nëts.

My book English After RP tries to use IPA symbols accurately for a modern 'neutral' ish pronunciation. I'm thinking of a second edition with audio

@@DrGeoffLindsey That'd be so great.

I can't help you with British English, but here are the IPA sounds of my geographically-mixed-up American English accent: [i] as in 'be' and 'bean' [ɪ] as in 'bin' [e] or [eɪ] as in 'bane' and 'bay' and 'bait' [ɛ] as in 'bet' [æ] as in 'ban' [ɑ] as in 'ball' and 'bawl' and 'bot' and 'bought' [ʌ] as in 'bun' [o] or [oʊ] as in 'bone' and 'bow' [ʊ] as in 'bull' and 'bush' [u] as in 'boo' and 'boot' [aɪ] as in 'by' and 'bite' [aʊ] as in 'bout'

Go to any of the many London ghettos and see how the "erban yoof" make their utterances, and you'll sound a lot more contemporary!! (Just kidding! 🙃).

Not interested in the least to learn how the "erban yoof" evolve in their thinking, doing, behaving, speakiing or anything else that comes with their de-evolution (or is it "involution"? Decadence? Crass simplification? Impoverishment?). Naaah!! Not interested AT ALL!!

Exactly. You got it. The IPA in dictionaries is a second irregular non-phonetic writing system.

where roman letters corresponding to kanji, phonemic IPA to hiragana and phonetic IPA finally to katakana

Soon speakers of the English Language won't be able to communicate with each other. Oh! Wait! It HAS already HAPPENED!! Let's keep on worshipping diversity of irregular, non-phonetic writing systems to continue "strengthening" our communication.

@@erkinalp No. Just no. Youre just completely wrong. Hiragana and katakana are two sets of identical sounds, which can be used to spell kanji.

Japanese has zero alphabets, because the term "alphabet" is just the first two letters of Greek, "alpha" and "beta" run together. It's fair to call the writing systems of Europe alphabets. If you want to refer to the Semitic languages, you could be a little more precise and call them "alefbets". If you REALLY wanna stretch the meaning of the word "alphabet", you could even call Korean Hangul one, but Japanese has two sets of syllabaries (kana, that is hiragana and katakana) and one indeterminate collection of concept-symbols (kanji). But Japanese has no alphabets.

I, a Finn, speak a very much bastardized version of British English. The books and scientific papers I read are usually written in "Briton" but any attempt at pronouncing a word in English is usually a mishmash of cockney, scottish and australian. Which is odd since American English is such a huge part of my life in IT.

The 'newscaster accent' which is often what prescribed is basically the accent of Upstate New York from the early 20th century, chosen cause it was relatively neutral on a national level at the time. Since then that region has undergone the Northern Cities Vowel shift so barely anyone talks like that anymore. For instance: It has /ʌ/ as a phonemic quality separate from /ə/. There are accents that round /ʌ/ to /ɔ/ or front it to /ɜ/ and there are still accents where it is phonemic in the Northeast due to the lack of the HURRY-FURRY merger there, but on a national level it probably should be considered an allophone of /ə/ Since especially the 1980s the COT-CAUGHT merger has become the national standard, much to my chagrin as a speaker that moves the THOUGHT/CLOTH vowel to an /oə/ or an /oɐ/ in resistance to this merger via the Mid-Atlantic back vowel shift, with my dialect essentially opting to be more similar to dialects across the pond than GA in this regard. The prescribed GOAT vowel is a very narrow diphthong /oʊ/. I find this to be too closed, I think the median GOAT vowel is probably more like /ʌʊ/ now adays, with speakers in the South and California fronting it further to a more British /əʊ/ Likewise it seems to me that the median face should be analyzed as /ɛɪ/ rather than /eɪ/. Also a certain level of GOOSE fronting is becoming increasingly common but I don't think the median speaker has quite reached where Brits are yet outside of the Sunbelt region (the South and California) where GOAT fronting is also common. Resistance to both occurs in Northern and AAVE accents.

The GA ipa vowel chart is pretty much as oldfashioned as the standard British one. Most Americans front their /u/ vowels to an extent, especially southerners who may even sometimes realize it as /y/ (being an allophone of /ʉ/) The /ɑ/ sound is higher than the chart says. It uses /ʌ/ instead of /ə/. since they are mostly merged GA accents they didnt even bother putting /ə/ on there, which is lame. And, ofc it also fails to show the glides in certain sets, much like the British symbols. lots of things like that

I'm not Geoff but I think in very rapid speech all the closing diphthongs can be monophthongised to some extent. Separately there's also the smoothing rules where diphthong plus ə can become simply a long monophthong with the first element of the diphthong (and no schwa).

@@Muzer0 Yes, you're right. But what I've read about all diphthongs except /i/ and /u/ says they lose they schwa's in this case, but those two behave differently: they don't lose the final element but merge into something in-between the core sound and the glide according to Dr Lindsey. My knowledge is limited, so I thought maybe it's not always the case, and those two also may lose their glide... or maybe the other English diphthongs may merge into something average between the core vowel and the glide.

Have you seen the AR rap that I stole for my previous video?

@@DrGeoffLindsey no - I’ll look it up now. Thanks 🙂

I worked in a school and taught phonics; my own accent is fairly standard southern British but it was interesting to hear the slight variations of my colleagues' when they taught phonics. Alas I didn't work in the same classroom with anyone with a very different accent to hear what they did, but I very much wondered whether they stuck with their native accents or modified for individual words whilst teaching the phonics.

Couldn't agree with you more!!

Just to be clear, I mean no social or value judgement on these accents. That said, Lester Pearson was a superb individual and deserves more respect and recognition than he deserves. Not only a Nobel Peace Prize winner, he also faced down fierce opposition and created a flag that is perhaps the most iconic post-imperial flag of any former British colony

I found looking at old political speeches that Mackenzie King sounded different from HIMSELF. He had varying amounts of "Canadian dainty" in different settings.

Being a nobel peace prize winner doesn't make you a good person. Adolf Mr. pin wheel had one.

@@robinpayne125I like the old flag better, taking away the value of having a post-imperial flag into consideration, as I find it esthetically superior and reflective of our history as Canadians. I should also say that as a Canadian I find the way Pearson speaks completely different to the way J Trudeau speaks.