Pronounce English Accurately

Video Text

Every language has some aspects which are easy and some which are difficult. The most difficult aspect of English for most learners – and not just for learners, for native speakers as well – is its quite haphazard spelling, and the eternal problem of relating this to the pronunciation.

Native English children generally learn to say words before they learn to spell them, so they usually know very well how words are pronounced but have trouble spelling them.

Non-native learners on the other hand often see words in print that they have never heard spoken aloud, so they often have more trouble with pronunciation than with spelling.

How has this mismatch between spelling and pronunciation come about?

Well, first, we have an obvious problem of numbers: the Latin alphabet has five vowel letters, a, e, i, o, and u, or six if you count the y in 'happy’. English has 20 different vowel sounds. Thus we have an immediate problem: how to represent these 20 vowel sounds with the much smaller number of letters.

This problem has been tackled in many different ways throughout the long and convoluted history of the language, and most of these methods are, unfortunately, still with us today.

Let’s have a very brief overview of the major developments which have lead up to modern English being the way it is.

At the core of English is the native stock of words which have been with us since Old English (about 600 AD), many of which retain their original spelling unchanged, despite the fact that their pronunciation has changed enormously in the intervening time. These are responsible for some of the strangest spellings we have today, including those with gh such as 'daughter’, 'enough’, 'laugh’, 'bough’, 'brought’ and 'borough’.

All of these words once had a [x] sound in them, so the 'gh’ represented that sound and made perfect sense. A very long time ago indeed, that sound disappeared from the language and was either deleted completely from these words or replaced by the /f/ sound as in 'laugh’. But the 'gh’ spelling was never changed.

The Viking invasions, which started in the 8th Century and lasted until the 13th, brought a certain amount of new vocabulary – words like 'sky’, 'egg’, and 'cake’, 'window’, 'hit’, 'run’ and 'skill’, as well as 'law’ are all from Scandinavia and have long been part of our core English vocabulary. The Vikings also brought a very large number of place names to the areas of Britain they inhabited.

In the 11th Century, the Norman Conquest led to the complete take-over of government, law and education by French speakers. The English language almost died out – of official use at least – and when it recovered some 200 years later it had changed beyond recognition: the mass importation of vocabulary from Norman French had changed a purely Germanic language into a hybrid, one still with a core Germanic structure but now overlaid with a largely Romance vocabulary.

From the 14th Century onwards, a far-reaching change called the Great Vowel Shift began, which gradually but profoundly altered the vowel system of English; over the centuries, the pronunciation of all the long vowels in the language radically changed.

Before the Great Vowel Shift began, the word 'name’ would have been /'naː.mə/, and the final 'e’ would have been pronounced. It was a two-syllable word, just as the spelling indicates it should be.

The modern word 'bite’ would have been /'biː.tə/, 'mouse’ would have been /muːs/ and 'house’ /huːs/. 'Mouse’ and 'house’ didn’t have a final letter 'e’ in those days.

Notice how at that time, spelling and pronunciation matched perfectly. The letters 'n-a-m-e’ were pronounced exactly as we would expect – /'naː.mə/ – as those four letters are pronounced in every other language of the world, but not in modern English.

The Great Vowel Shift messed all that up. It’s the most important reason for the mismatch between English spelling and pronunciation now.

It’s the reason we have pairs of related words with different vowels in them: 'nation – national’, 'hostile – hostility’, 'incise – incision’ and hundreds of other pairs like that.

Often we have dual pronunciations of a word, one applying the Great Vowel Shift, one not. Examples are /'miː.greɪn, 'maɪ.greɪn/ and /'ɪd.i.ɒl.ədʒ.i, /'aɪd.i.ɒl.ədʒ.i/, both of which are common.

Similarly, all the words like 'economical’, 'ecological’, etc., have dual pronunciation, /'iː.kə.nɒm.ɪk.əl/ and /'e.kə.nɒm.ɪk.əl/, /'iː.kə.lɒdʒ.ɪk.əl/ and /'e.kə.lɒdʒ.ɪk.əl/, again the result of the Great Vowel Shift.

It can also be a source of great confusion when unfamiliar or foreign-looking words crop up, and we don’t know whether to pronounce them as though the Great Vowel Shift has happened or not.

We all agree – I think – on how to pronounce the name of this popular Scandinavian furniture retailer; it’s Ikea /aɪ.'kɪə/, isn’t it?

But only in English, where the Great Vowel Shift has been applied to it. In other languages it’s /ɪ.'keə/, pre-Great Vowel Shift style.

How about this van and truck manufacturer?

Is it European-style /ɪ.'veɪ.kəʊ/ or English-style /aɪ.'viː.kəʊ/? You will hear both, but only in English.

All that confusion, unique to English, is the direct result of the Great Vowel Shift.

Although the Great Vowel Shift was at its most dramatic in the 15th and 16th Century, it has never actually finished. It’s still in process today, and it’s the basis of some of the different accents of English and explains why some Australians pronounce 'Australia’ [ɒs.'traɪ.lɪə].

At the same time as the Great Vowel Shift was at its most radical came the times of the Great Explorations, and later the British Empire.

From this time onwards, the English and their language came into contact with hundreds of languages, from all over the world, and adopted many foreign words for new ideas. Examples are numerous and include 'bungalow’, 'chutney’ and 'juggernaut’ from Hindi, 'chimpanzee’, 'dengue’ (the fever), and 'zebra’ from various African languages, and 'kiosk’, 'cassock’, 'kebab’ and 'caftan’, all from Turkish.

From the 18th Century onwards came great advances in scientific and medical knowledge. To cope with this, many terms from Latin and Greek were adopted and many more new terms invented based on these classical languages, bringing in a new sophisticated layer of vocabulary intelligible only to the initiated. This is the basis of medical terminology today.

This process of adoption of foreign words continued apace. Just one page of my dictionary yields representations from Eskimo and Chinese ('kayak’ and 'kaolin’), German and Cantonese ('kaput’ and 'ketchup’), Japanese and Malay ('karate’ and 'kapok’), American Indian and Australian aborigine ('kazoo and 'kangaroo’)!

With such a history of amalgamations and adoptions, coupled with a conservative spelling system which was essentially fixed with the invention of printing in the 15th Century, it’s unsurprising that the relationship between spelling and pronunciation is an uncertain one.

Delving into the history of our language will tell us how 's-a-k-e’ may not always rhyme with 'make’, and why 'p-l-a-i-t’ never sounds like 'plate’.

It will shed light on why 's-i-t-e’, 'c-i-t-e’ and 's-i-g-h-t’, are all homophones – they’re pronounced exactly the same – yet 'r-e-a-d’ can either rhyme with 'bed’ or 'bead’.

So we use the International Phonetic Alphabet to look words up in a dictionary, and to distinguish the various target sounds. Once you can make the various target sounds reliably, you can use the IPA to produce the right sounds accurately in every word.

We will start with a chapter covering all the consonant sounds, then one on all the vowel sounds, and after that we’ll do exercises on reading the IPA until you can read from it easily, quickly and accurately.

Then we’ll move on to special topics, such as clusters of consonants together, and how pronunciation alters in connected speech.

To get the most out of this course, you may very well want to invest in a specialist pronunciation dictionary. Not all pronunciation dictionaries are created equal so the next lesson is a review video comparing three of the best known ones and giving my recommendations on them.