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Venting about "father" | ||
Tags: Pronunciation | English | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5693 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes  Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 25 of 34 11 April 2011 at 11:59pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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pinkeyemusic has a good point... there don't seem to be that many words in English that have that particular sound AND write it with an "a." I'm kind of pleased with my "pa and ma" idea, though...
Or, you could use loan-words/names like "Pablo" and "kana" and "Stalin" and "taco" and "Bahamas." I guess all of those A's could be pronounced a bit more "brightly" than the sound we're going for here, though. Or you could tell people to pronounce "Nevada" the right way (e.g. with the "a" in the middle sounding like the first "a" in "California") and then the wrong way. ;) Now I have this urge to come up with the longest possible list of English words that use the "a" in question! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6011 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 26 of 34 12 April 2011 at 12:26pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
But... what the hell is "that particular sound", cos to me "father" is just like any other A. It's hard. It's not a soggy aw-like sound. It's practically no different to "cat". Which brings us back to the point that the book author has no idea of how I or you speak, so the whole pronunciation guide is worthless, which I think was your original
"Pablo" and "Stalin" both have a hard A in the original that they're borrowed from. If the A "sags" or "softens" in your area, that's the local accent, and it's irrelevant that these are borrowings. Because of course...
"Nevada" has the same A as "taco" and "Pablo". The sagging "wrong way" for "Nevada" is just as bad for "taco", "Pablo" and "Stalin". 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6949 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 27 of 34 12 April 2011 at 3:20pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Cainntear, I was right there with you until "[father is] practically no different to
cat". Note to self: stay far away from those "a as in father" descriptions written by Scotsmen or Massachusettsfolk ;) By the way, wouldn't this make IPA transcriptions suspect as well, unless they're accompanied by a rather detailed description? I believe that the IPA has quite specific standards for what an /ɑ/ or /æ/ or /e/ or anything else sounds like, because you often come across descriptions like "this language's /e/ is rather high and front" which seems to be measuring it against some kind of ideal "prototype" phoneme. Yet, most language learners who are familiar with IPA but are not phoneticians probably don't check their idea of how these segments are pronounced with these (what I assume to be) official IPA-approved pronunciations, and as a result might end up with quite different ideas. For example, the guy providing the audio for the chart at the bottom of this Wikipedia article [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel] and I hardly seem to agree on anything! So what can we depend on, in order to convey pronunciation in print? Jinx's "Imagine a British person saying, Ahhh!" was good, but a little difficult to retain clearly in my mind's ear. Along similar lines, how about "a as in McCully Culkin's famous line in Home Alone" [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5CSBZz3eOI] or "a as in This is SPARTAAAA!" [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZeYVIWz99I] This would capture the different flavors of "a" in a universal and memorable way. We could then keep the original films in an environmentally-controlled underground vault in Europe in order to preserve them as the international standard pronunciations. Edited by Lucky Charms on 12 April 2011 at 3:21pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| cntrational Triglot Groupie India Joined 5127 days ago 49 posts - 66 votes Speaks: Hindi, Telugu, English* Studies: French | Message 28 of 34 12 April 2011 at 4:46pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Yeah, they are.
The a in those words would be pronounced near the front of the mouth, but this sound is near the back. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| SamD Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6659 days ago 823 posts - 987 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 29 of 34 12 April 2011 at 5:18pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Jinx, you're far from the only one who has been frustrated by the explanations of target language sounds in some books.
I don't pronounce the vowels in "father" and "bother" quite the same. I've noticed that people in the States tend to pronounce "sari" and "sorry" the same way. I pronounce "sorry" with the same vowel sound as in the word "four." My accent is Canadian. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5693 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 30 of 34 12 April 2011 at 6:58pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
"That particular sound" of which I speak is the common foreign-language "a" as used in, for example, German. It's a sound that I would venture to assume most of us language-learners would pronounce quite similarly, DESPITE the fact that we may all say "father" differently! Although I haven't studied Spanish myself, one of the simplest and most helpful pronunciation-guide experiences I've had is when they simply tell you "The vowels are pronounced as in Spanish" and leave it at that. Sure, maybe some fine-tuned precision is lost here – after all, you can't assume that native speakers would pronounce the "a"s in "habla," "ragazza," and "danach" all identically – but it gets the point across, so that you can pronounce words in your head without constantly stumbling over your "mental tongue," and can then proceed to listen to lots of audio to refine your pronunciation (if that's your preferred method of learning). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6949 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 31 of 34 13 April 2011 at 4:28am | IP Logged | ||||||||
OK, then how about this one: "a - as in the German a. C'mon, you know what we mean." 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5693 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 32 of 34 13 April 2011 at 5:30am | IP Logged | ||||||||
That would work fine for me! Unfortunately, you can't assume that all native English-speakers know what the "German a" is. ;) I assume that's also why the "pronounce the vowels as in Spanish" method isn't more widespread. Yes, it's very likely that more people in the US are familiar with the sounds of Spanish than the sounds of German, but you still can't assume that your average monolingual English-speaker will pronounce vowels correctly after reading that tip. That's why it would be great if we could find a common English word (or common loanword into English) that has this particular sound and is generally pronounced the same by most English-speakers. A good example of what I'm talking about is when pronunciation guides tell you to make the "zh" sound "like the J in bonjour or the S in pleasure." With "bonjour," you have a foreign word (which, however, many English-speakers can pronounce), and to back it up you have an English word with the same sound. I doubt many English-speakers would fail at saying the "zh" sound after reading this explanation. ...Now, is there anything like that for the "ah" sound? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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