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0:00
All over the world, practically every day, people are teaching these symbols for BritishEnglish vowels. The problem is that this chart is wrong, in fundamental ways. It explains hardly anything about how the English vowel system works, and so it prevents teachers from explaining things correctly, it leads them to tell their students things that aren’t right, and it leads to avoidable pronunciation errors. In this fairly long video, I’ll go through
0:31
why the chart is organised wrongly, why this is because these symbols are misleading, I’ll talk a little bit about how the misleading symbols got established, and I’ll show you the alternative, evidence-based way of presenting the vowels that’s been around for centuries. Let’s start with the layout of the chart. We’ll be focussing here mainly on the long vowels. So we have these five long monophthongs or pure vowels, and these eight diphthongs, right? Wrong. The correct division is like this.
1:13
Don’t take my word for it, this is how the vowels are divided up by my famous teacher, Professor John Wells, editor of the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary. Here’s the way he presents them in his introduction to RP vowels -- the link’s in the description below. John Wells calls the two main groups the high vowels and the non-high vowels. We’ll get to that in a bit. For now, let’s ask why you would divide the vowels into these seven seven and these six.
1:45
Well there’s a whole stack of reasons, including Linking R, Pre-L Breaking, Phonotactics, Smoothing, 'Glide Insertion', Pre-Fortis Clipping, the list goes on and on. Let’s take Linking R. In Standard Southern British pronunciation, the six vowels on the right can trigger a following linking R when another vowel follows. Here are some verbs that end in these six vowels. The written letter R isn’t pronounced in my kind of speech: hear, care, purr, etc. But just put the suffix -ing after them, and
2:22
we get a /r/ consonant before the vowel. hearing, purring, starring. That’s the Linking R. Now the seven vowels on the left never trigger linking R. Look at these verbs. You can follow these with a vowel, but there’ll never be an added /r/ consonant. Seeing, doing, vowing, etc. Never see-ring, do-ring, vow-ring, etc. So Linking R is like a litmus test. It shows us that the vowels belong in these two separate groups. That’s just for starters. Let’s look at phonotactics.
3:04
This means how sounds combine in a given language. One of the basic facts of English words is that the seven vowels on the left are the only vowels in the language that can be directly followed by another vowel. So we have lots of words like museum, chaos, lion, voyage, ruin, poem, flower. Inside a basic English word or morpheme, the rest of the English vowels absolutely cannot be followed by another vowel. Showing, again, that these seven vowels are
3:37
a distinct group. In fact, when they’re followed by a final L, these seven vowels can get an extra vowel, inserted before the L. This is pre-L breaking. The exact details depend on which accent of English you speak, but the following are all possible. This only happens with these seven. So yet again these seven vowels are a group, even though the symbols suggest the vowels belong in different groups, monophthongs and diphthongs.
4:15
So what’s going on? The clue is in what we just saw with phonotactics. Languages don’t much like putting vowels one directly after another. When it happens, it’s called hiatus. English is a language that really hates hiatus, and most of all British English like my accent. Think about 'a chicken' but 'an egg', 'a plum' but 'an apple'. Without the /n/ we’d have 'əegg' or 'əapple'. This is also why we have Linking R, like in starring. My kind of English does not
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want to say /stɑːɪŋ/. In fact a better name than Linking R would be Separating R, because that’s what it does: it keeps vowels apart. So why does English allow adjacent vowels in words like these? The answer is that these aren’t examples of hiatus at all. All seven of these vowels are closing diphthongs, which start as vowels, but end in what we call glides or semi-vowels, like this. Or, using the official IPA symbol, like this. Phonetically it makes sense. Listen to these speakers saying 'Yes?'
5:34
Well, they’re not saying 'Yes'. That’s actually just the word 'say' played backwards. This way of understanding closing diphthongs has been practically since Shakespeare’s time. We can find it Thomas Gataker’s treatise On Diphthongs and this famous work by John Wallis in 1653. Wallis, by the way, was the mathematician who introduced the infinity symbol into mathematics, and he said, in Latin, 'The sounds called diphthongs, when correctly pronounced, are made up of preposed vowels,
6:18
followed by the consonants y and w, though the consonants are vulgarly, or commonly, regarded as subjoined vowels. Let’s jump forward to 1809, and Thomas Batchelor’s wonderful orthoepical -- that means phonetic – analysis of English, with its lovely diagrams of tongue positions and its proposal for a Romanistic phonetic alphabet decades before the IPA. Batchelor’s symbols for our seven modern diphthongs were these. Here are his transcriptions of 'you stray' and 'relieve distress'.
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The great phonetician Henry Sweet laid the foundations for the IPA itself. Sweet called ij and uw 'consonantal' diphthongs, and gave examples like 'this, these', 'these special attributes', 'human beings', 'doing ‘is best to keep off', 'and prove that he hadn’t', and 'it was a ruined chapel'. And if you know the famous Story of Arthur the Rat, from it here is the beams were all rotten'. The rightness of this kind of approach was aken for granted by major figues of American linguistics
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like Bloch and Trager -- 'fly, house, breathe, frequent'. And Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle -- 'laundry, felonious'. And the world’s foremost sociolinguist William Labov, here in the twenty-first century Atlas of North American English. It’s not just in scholarly research. The Routledge textbook The Sounds of Language uses these symbols for Received Pronunciation, RP. For example 'say the following sentences making all the vowels nasalized'. And as you might expect, given all the evidence,
8:12
I use the same kind of symbols in my book English After RP. And these are the symbols with glides that I’ll be using for the rest of this video, leaving explanations for details like this symbol for another video. You've noticed, of course, that ɪj and ʉw are among these seven closing diphthongs. Remember 'yes' and 'say'? Well just listen to Kate Winslet saying 'me', and then played backwards. Batchelor said that 'Those who attentively examine the articulation' of the vowel
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'will find that the tongue makes a nearer approach towards the palate in the termination of that diphthong than happens in the beginning of it.' And what about ʉw? Let's listen to a few of the excellent recordings that come with this textbook by Carley and Mees. Here are the words 'blur, blue, blow'. And here are their familiar transcriptions, which tell us that 'blur' and 'blue' are long, steady monophthongs, while 'blow' is a diphthong.
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Well now let's look at physical reality. Here are the spectrograms of these three recordings. Which two are more similar? The two on the left? Or the two on the right? Well anyone can see that 'blur' has these flat, unchanging dark bands or formants, which is exactly what we expect of a long, steady vowel, while in 'blue' and 'blow' the bands are changing, and in a very similar way, because these two vowels are both closing diphthongs. As has been known
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for centuries. So these symbols are misleading, and evidence-based symbols would look more like this. Like the other closing diphthongs, ɪj and ʉw can become more monophthongal when they get shortened, for example in rapid speed, but in their full form they’re diphthongs. 'When one word ends in an ʉw sound...' The phonotactics now make perfect sense. Of course these seven diphthongs can occur directly before vowels. They don't end as true vowels, and so don't violate the English hatred of
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hiatus. This is why, when English borrows words from languages that are more tolerant of hiatus, like Japanese 'karaoke' and Spanish 'paella', the first vowel has to be transformed into one of our seven closing diphthongs. Linking R, remember, is actually Separating R. Its job is to prevent vowels coming into contact. But our seven closing diphthongs end in glides or semi-vowels. So when a true vowel follows, there’s no need for a separating /r/ approximant.
11:19
So Starring but paying and seeing and doing. And when we look back at pre-L breaking, this turns out to be a little vowel breaking apart two approximants -- the glide on the end of a closing diphthong, and the following L. Like 'file', which is how the Merriam Webster Learner's dictionary transcribes this word. And now we can see it's exactly the same pre-L breaking that can turn American 'girl' into 'gir/ə/l'. The little vowel breaks apart two approximants.
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You might be wondering how phoneticians who use the familiar, established EFL symbols try to explain all these phenomena. Of course most of the time they don't bother. But those that do usually resort to the labels I showed you on Professor Wells's chart, high and non-high. Let me explain this, and why it doesn't work. The idea would be that the vowels on the left end with a high tongue position, while those on the right don't.
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So for example, pre-L breaking is seen as a mechanical consequence of tongue position. In 'file' and 'foul', using the familiar symbols, the diphthongs end in these high or close vowels, and when the tongue moves from these vowels to the following L, somehow a schwa vowel appears. Why doesn't this explanation work? Well just think of 'fill' and 'full'. Here we've supposedly got the same high tongue vowels followed by L, but there's no breaking. We don't pronounce
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these words fi/ə/l, and fu/ə/l. These symbols don't explain the facts. An explanation that does work is that 'file' and 'foul' have glides which breaking breaks apart from the following L. 'Fill' and f'ull' have no such glides. The high tongue idea doesn't work for linking R, either. The idea would be that in 'day after day', there’s no linking R between 'day' and 'after' because 'day' ends with a high tongue position.
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Whereas in 'year on year', we get a linking R between the first 'year' and 'on' because 'year' ends with a non-high tongue. Makes sense, right? No, it doesn’t! This vowel is typically monophthongized to /ɪː/ when it’s followed by a /r/ consonant, as it is a very large percentage of the time.
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and dozens more.
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/ɪː/ rather than /ɪə/ And speakers are increasingly using the monophthong form all the time.
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And this, from the Carley and Mees recordings, sounds to me like 'is p*ssed'
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but in fact those words are 'ears' and 'pierced'.
14:47
Now listen to this speaker saying 'year on year'. Inflation is here. Consumer prices have jumped by 4.2% year on year. Neither of these words ends in /ə/. They’re both /jɪː/, with a high tongue position throughout, and this doesn’t prevent the linking R.
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So this /ɪ/ symbols just doesn't explain why there's no linking R in 'day after day'. The answer, as has been observed for centuries, is that this vowel ends in a semivowel glide, which means there’s no need for an added /r/ approximant to keep it separate from a following vowel. Before I get on to how this affects pronunciation teaching, a quick look at pre-fortis clipping. That’s the technical name for a shortening effect that happens before voiceless consonants.
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The word 'his' ends in a voiced /z/, but the word 'hiss' ends in a voiceless /s/, and this makes the preceding vowel shorter. The word 'serve' ends in a voiced /v/, but the word 'surf' ends in a voiceless /f/, and again this makes the preceding vowel shorter. We see from actual measurements that the clipped words, 'hiss' and 'surf', are only seventy something percent of the length of 'his' and 'serve'.
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Now let's look at words with different vowels. Let's compare 'leave' with 'leaf', and 'save' with 'safe'.
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It's a much stronger effect. 'Leaf' and 'safe' are only around half the length of 'save' and 'leave'. Why is this? Here are the symbols that are familiar to teachers and learners of English. What is it about the vowels that causes this difference between the two examples at the top and two at the bottom? Is it a matter of short versus long vowels? No, these are all long, right? Is it a matter of monophthongs versus diphthongs? No, these are all monophthongs, right?
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Okay… is it about the vowels ending in a high tongue position? No, we've got the same tongue height here and here, right? You see, these symbols explain nothing. It would be naive to expect these symbols to explain anything, because they're wrong. All we need to do is replace them with symbols like these, and the difference is simple and obvious. It's the closing diphthongs that are clipped more, and that includes /ɪj/.
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So it’s our seven closing diphthongs where it’s most important to teach clipping to learners of English, so that 'safe' isn’t confused with 'save' and wanting peace isn’t confused with wanting peas.
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Staying with teaching, let’s look at an example of the confusion that the familiar but misleading symbols can cause. Take so-called glide insertion. All round the world, teachers of English are telling their students to insert /j/ and /w/ into connected phrases like 'I always have', 'they avoided it', 'go away', 'you and I'. Now native speakers of English can definitely hear and feel the /j/ and /w/. These teachers
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are absolutely right that these phrases contain glides. The problem is that there’s no insertion. We’ve seen masses of evidence that the glides are already there, on the end of the first word. The fault here lies with the deficient transcription system, which doesn’t show any glides, and so leads these excellent authors to add glides that are already there. Take 'he hearns' and 'you ache'. Yes, there’s a glide in 'he earns'. Henry Sweet showed us
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the glide, it’s on the end of the word 'he'. If you insert an extra glide, you get 'he yearns', which has a different meaning, and has two glides, one on the end of 'he' and one at the start of 'yearns'. It’s the same with 'you ache'. Yes, there’s a glide. Henry Sweet transcribed 'you' like this.
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If you insert an EXTRA glide, you get 'you wake', which means something different and has TWO glides. The same applies to all these examples.
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So the glide in 'I always have' is the same glide that’s in 'paella', and 'lion'. And, as Henry Sweet told us, the same applies to 'beings' and 'ruined'. Such glides are not inserted, they're simply there, inside thousands of words. And so for example if students could see the glide in 'cooperation', they wouldn’t keep mispronouncing it so that it sounds like 'corporation'.
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It's worth dispelling a couple of faulty ideas that have actually been suggested against using glide symbols for the glides in closing diphthongs. One is that these diphthong glides tend not to be as forcefully articulated as the glides at the start of words like these. But that's exactly what we should expect! Batchelor knew that, two hundred years ago. /j/ should have the same sound quality, whether before or after a vowel
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Look at this waveform of the word 'lilt'. The /l/ before the vowel is far more forcefully articulated than the one after the vowel. Does that mean we shouldn't transcribe them with the same symbol? Of course not. Secondly, there's the issue of whether forms like /ɛj/ are one phoneme or two. A lot of people see transcriptions like this and jump to the conclusion that it must mean two phonemes, because /j/ also functions as a phoneme in its own right. But what about the familiar symbols?
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Does this symbol for /eɪ/ mean two phonemes? The vowel of DRESS, followed by the vowel of KIT? I think people assume an implicit tie bar which means that the two sounds should be taken as one phoneme. And we can do exactly the same when we show the glides as glides, rather than misleading people into thinking that the glides are the vowels of KIT and FOOT, which leads directly to transcriptions that simply ignore the English avoidance of hiatus.
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Let's make a direct comparison between these two ways of transcribing our seven vowels. Do the symbols show these as the isomorphic group we absolutely know them to be? These do, these don’t. Do the symbols explain the pronunciation of /ɪj/ and /ʉw/ as closing diphthongs? Well obviously these do, and equally obviously these don’t. Do the symbols explain pre-L breaking? As we’ve seen, yes, these do, no these don’t. Do they explain linking R? Absolutely, and not.
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Do they explain phonotactics? Yes. No. Do they explain the glides that teachers imagine are inserted? Obviously. And again, not. We could go on like this, and talk about things I haven’t even covered, like smoothing. But let’s leave it there. We have enough reason to say that the symbols on the left are evidence based, while the symbols on the right are not evidence based. So how did the English teaching world end up with this?
23:13
I’ll just mention a couple of contributing factors. One is Daniel Jones, who came after Henry Sweet. Jones became the first Professor of Phonetics in Britain, at UCL. He created the English Pronouncing Dictionary and the UCL Summer Course in English Phonetics, both of which are still going. He was a great man of huge influence. But some of his ideas were a bit, well, odd. Jones discarded Henry Sweet's insight that /ɪj/ and /ʉw/ are consonantal diphthongs,
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and chose these symbols instead. But what he meant by them was long versions of the short /ɪ/ and /ʊ/ vowels, which he wrote like this. You see, Jones believed in something that he called a chroneme, which created long and short versions of a single vowel phoneme.
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So Jones quite literally believed in the idea of 'short and long i', which in pronunciation teaching is a terrible idea. Don’t forget pre-fortis clipping, which causes more drastic shortening of so-called 'long i' than of so-called 'short i'.
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And remember that nowadays the real 'long i' is the vowel of 'series', 'period', 'experience', 'year on year', etc. So it's more important now than ever to teach that /ɪj/ belongs with the closing diphthongs.
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The other historical factor I want to mention is out-of-date fashions in pronunciation. In the first half of the twentieth century, there clearly was a fashion among the upper classes for actually pronouncing these sounds as the symbols suggest.
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We know that that's not how Batchelor or Sweet pronounced them in the nineteenth century, and it's certainly not how they're pronounced today. But in the period when Received Pronunciation was being strictly defined, it was all the rage for posh people to talk like these old teaching records.
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These pronunciations are more like the /iː/ and /uː/ of German, as in 'die' and 'du'.
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Now compare German 'Kuh' from the Duden dictionary with English 'coup'.
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That speaker is fairly posh and conservative, but even he clearly pronounces /ʉw/ as a diphthong. Fifty to a hundred years ago, symbols like this would have been a phonetically accurate representation of fashionable pronunciations. Not any more. Nowadays, the kind of pronunciation in those old Linguaphone records is a joke. Literally a joke, because for years it’s been used by comedians to evoke the silly, stiff and condescending attitudes of a bygone age.
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Now some non-native viewers of this video may have felt that those old records sounded perfectly normal, because around the world English is very often being taught with outdated materials. And don’t take my word for it. Listen to two giants of English Phonetics and pronunciation teaching, and editors of the two most influential pronouncing dictionaries, Professor John Wells, and Professor Peter Roach.
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'The existing descriptions of standard British English pronunciation, known as RP, are outdated' 'The subject of the phonetics of the standard English accent has been in the doldrums' -- that means unsuccessful or showing no activity or development -- 'and most pronunciation materials in current use are outdated.' This is hardly a ringing endorsement of the field today, is it, from these two emeritus professors who’ve contributed so much to it over the years.
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Those quotes come from their kind reviews of my English After RP, which presented the vowels as I’ve explained them in this video, with seven closing diphthongs, and six long vowels that can trigger linking R. So I’m not alone in feeling that there’s room for improvement. Now I know, it’s not easy to change your teaching. Since I took over the UCL Summer Course in English Phonetics which Daniel Jones founded,
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so far I've only changed one symbol in our chart, reflecting the fact that the vowel of 'area' and 'parent' and 'square' is no longer a diphthong. But I did revise the introductory lecture on vowels, reinstating Professor Wells's correct categorization of the vowels, and explaining the set of seven closing diphthongs that are such a key feature of English pronunciation. We should at least explain the facts of English phonetics and phonology, and avoid teaching
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nonsense that’s suggested by the familiar symbols. For example, we can now see clearly that these twelve vowels, though often taught together, are not in any way a coherent group. In fact there are four groups of vowels here, which should be taught separately. These two, as we've shown repeatedly, are closing diphthongs. As closing diphthongs, they can occur directly before other vowels, as in 'museum' and 'ruin',
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and learners should be taught how to transition from them into a following vowel, especially without losing a syllable. Both of these are often short, because they're strongly affected by clipping and they belong not with the other ten vowels here but with ɛj, ɑj, oj, əw and aw. These three are true long monophthongs and learners need to be taught to keep them long, especially as these vowels are not so strongly affected by clipping. They can of course trigger
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linking R and they belong not with the other nine vowels here but with the long vowels of 'period' and 'parent'. These six vowels are the short lax checked vowels which are always followed by a consonant and so never occur on the end of a word. Learners need to be taught not to pronounce these six vowels too long, especially when they're heavily stressed, and these should be taught as a separate group, not mixed up with any of the long vowels.
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Finally schwa is in a category of its own. It's the most common vowel in the language and in standard accents it's always weak and very short, but unlike the other short lax vowels, schwa very commonly occurs on the end of a word, and it can trigger linking R. If you teach these miscellaneous vowels as some kind of distinct group, you're not teaching pronunciation, you're teaching symbols, and misleading symbols at that. Now the mistake
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of treating these vowels as a group is not the fault of the teachers who do it. They're just following a tradition that goes right back to Daniel Jones. Here's Jones's seminal Outline of English Phonetics, with his vowels 1 to 12, jumbling up short and long vowels in accordance with his theory that a single vowel phoneme can have short and long manifestations. This made little sense then and, with the transformation of the old centring diphthongs
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into monophthongs, it makes even less sense now. The right vowel categories, as John Wells has told us all along, are like this. These are the lax checked vowels, which learners should keep short. These are the linking R vowels, which learners should keep long. These are the closing diphthongs, which can be clipped quite short and which learners have to link carefully to a directly following vowel. And this is schwa, which is lax and very short, but isn't checked and can trigger linking R.
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And what prevents teachers the world over from teaching all of this in an evidence-based way? The symbols. If you’re interested in available resources that present the vowels as I have in this video, there’s my little book, which provides an update on RP, but isn’t for beginners. If you want a pronouncing dictionary, the free online dictionary CUBE, which I myself co-edit, provides for each word both a more accurate transcription with glides, and also,
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if you want, the relatively inaccurate, conservative transcription for comparison. At Luke Nicholson's Improve Your Accent, he has an interactive vowel chart that allows you to see the equivalences between various transcription systems, including the CUBE transcription with glides.
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There are people in various parts of the world using the more accurate, evidence-based kind of transcription in their teaching and their studies. And here it is in the extremely useful resource YouGlish.
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I hope I've explained a wide range of interesting and basic facts about English which in the pronunciation teaching world are often forgotten, or ignored or simply not known. And I've described a long-established way of seeing English vowels that explains a lot. If you found it interesting, please give it a like and maybe consider subscribing. This long video’s taken a long time to produce, but if you’d like to see more videos more often, or have questions or requests,
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please let me know in the comments below. Until next time, take care.
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