Received Pronunciation

Principal types of pronunciation.RP as a teaching norm.

National Language – written (generally accepted standard) and spoken forms (may vary from locality to locality)

Dialect – differ in grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation - dialectology, sociolinguistics

Different types of pronunciation may vary in all components of pron system.

Orphoepic norm – dialect that became standard pron. due to economical, geographical, political factors. Other dialects – illiterate, uncultural.

Within standard variant there also can be some differences – ex. Moscow\st.Peter pron.

All national types of English pronunciation have many features in common due the common origin. And have many differences due to the different development after the separation from the GB.

In British isles: southern English, Northern, Scottish

Before 1870, the use of spoken dialect was not stigmatised. However with the development of public school English to become RP – the accent of the social and educational elite – the use of non-standard pronunciation became a marker of low social status and lack of education by 1890.

Therefore, the use of RP quickly spread from the educational context to become a general super-regional spoken standard. The Army and the Imperial Civil Service were two important institutions to fuel this process.

With the invention of radio and television the dissemination and authority of RP was further strengthened: the BBC adopted RP as a pronunciation standard. They even founded an advisory board that had to decide on the right pronunciation of difficult words and moreover developed pronunciation guidelines for radio and TV speakers. Therefore, RP is also known as BBC English.

New tendencies in pronunciation of present-day English

In the dilemma arising from the tendencies to keep traditional spellings and yet to have easy rules for pronunciation it is perhaps well to keep in mind the fact that a change in spelling does not trouble readers very much, provided it goes in the right direction, i.e. gives well-known values to well-known letters and uses them consistently where the ordinary spelling is inconsistent. English people will therefore have little objection to such a spelling as tsar for czar or skeptic (or even skeptik) for sceptic, but scin for skin would be intolerable. We should therefore avoid irritating the ordinary West-European by telling him that ca and co are to be pronounced as [tsa, tso]:? such deviations from his time-honoured habits would only be palatable if they could be proved by unanswerable arguments to be absolutely necessary - which is not the case. Esp caro will be taken by the uninitiated to mean either `dear,' or `meat,' but it stands for `tsar.'

The spelling must be as regular as possible; there should therefore be no mute or silent letters: English and French learners must be specially warned that all written final e's should be clearly sounded with the same vowel as in the middle of a word. For E rhythm, D rhythmus, F rythme we must write ritme (two syllables; cf. the I spelling ritmo). Words beginning with th should be written and pronounced with t: teatre, teologia, teorie, tese; also in the middle of a word: entusiasme, sintese, E synthesis. In all such cases the sound [t] is found everywhere except in E and Greek.

Дата добавления: 2015-05-31