Re: YAEPT alert! [Re: Not phonetic but ___???]

Christophe Grandsire scripsit:

> The Harrap's only presents word pronunciation in the "British Received
> Pronunciation", a sort of neutral British flavour which has an existence
> only in the mouth of teachers teaching English to non-English speakers.
Well, that's a little strong: there definitely are people who speak RP,
and there's an even larger number who speak dialects closely related
to it.  And RP is on the top of the dialectal hierarchy in England
(but not in the anglophone world as a whole), though its position may
be slipping a bit.

> Remember one thing: English *doesn't* have an Academy, it *doesn't*
> have a hierarchy of dialects, it *doesn't* have a standard form. It
> doesn't even have a majority dialect!
Well, there are probably more people who speak General American than
any other kind, so it is at least a plurality dialect.

> English is a jigsaw puzzle, with each piece being a dialect, and no
> piece is much bigger than the other.
Context and perception is all.  I don't think of English as particularly
diverse dialectally, certainly not compared to Arabic, or Hindi (where
mutual intellibigility is lost about every 100 km!), or Italian.
(Splitters like the Ethnologue call dialects like this "languages",
so dialect diversity, like most things in linguistics, is partly a
matter of definition.

What makes English unusual, indeed, is how little diverse it is outside
Britain: one can go for thousands of miles in North America or Australia
and discern only the finest possible differences in dialect.  The lack of
a standard dialect, though, is much more unusual for a language so widely
spread and with such a substantial literary tradition (the differences
between *written* Englishes other than lexis are absolutely trivial).

> Most languages, including all written ones, are no more than collections
> of reciprocally intelligible dialects, with  *none* being truly standard.
I really don't think this is true: it's the norm for there to be a single
top-level standard based on a particular dialect, abstracted from it a
little: for example, standard Mandarin is founded on, though not identical
with, the Beijing dialect.

> >"Surely you've studied 'Hamlet'?"
> >"Don't call me Shirley!"
> >Ha ha groan
>
> LOL. I think Philippe should get it now ;))) . The example was very good
> :)) .
AFM idiolect, I have /Sur\/ 'sure' but /S\r=li/ 'surely'.  Go figure.
There is also the story about mishearing the hymn "Surely the Cross I'd
bear" as "Shirley, the cross-eyed bear."

--
"Take two turkeys, one goose, four              John Cowan
cabbages, but no duck, and mix them             http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
together. After one taste, you'll duck          jcowan@reutershealth.com
soup the rest of your life."                    http://www.reutershealth.com
        --Groucho

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