Aspiring to pronounce Phelukwayo

 Teachers of foreign languages know that the last thing you do is write down a  word before students have learnt to say it. If they see the spelling before hearing the sound, their first reflex will be to attach to that spelling the phonological characteristics of their mother tongue – in most (if not all: discuss) cases, a pronunciation they're going to have to unlearn.

Which brings me to /p/, which (in most English speech I've met) is aspirated in some contexts (the allophone can be transcribed as [p^h]) but not in other contexts. It's something speakers of English as a mother tongue [henceforth "FLES" for "First-Language English Speakers"] find hard to hear: "  A p is a p, isn't it?". But if they know what to listen for, most FLESs can be taught. 

<experiment>
Wet a finger and hold it in front of your lips as you say "pin". You should detect a little puff of air.

<autobiographical_note>
When I first met this test, when the Cambridge Linguistics Department was a converted cricket pavilion in the early 1970s, no-one suggested wetting the finger. That's my own addition. The water makes the puff of air have a cooling effect, making the finger more sensitive.
</autobiographical_note>

Next say "spin". There's next to no puff of air  (I say "next to no" because the sound of the word involves the passage of air; but aspiration after the [p] is not a contributor).
</experiment>

When a FLES sees "ph" at the beginning of a word, it obviously represents /f/ (as it does in English words). This brings us to Phelukwayo (not an English word). When, in early June 2019 cricket commentators started to meet it most days (he had been in South African teams before then, but June 2019 – the Cricket World Cup in England and Wales – was the moment when it first started to register on my mentions-per-day meter) the English commentators had to learn from the South African ones. Some were quicker than others. For example, in early June Jonathan Agnew was saying /felə'kwejəʊ/ (with the /fel/ of *phel [except that there's no such English word] and the /wey/ of  English "way", but by mid-June he'd learnt. Some of the Test Match Special team have insisted on their Little Englander pronunciation. (No names, no pack-drill, but I bet they voted for Brexit.)

This question of aspiration is something I've dealt with before, here for example:

First World War Tommies, hearing the word blanc (used to refer to a drink of wine – which, in that part of France, was typically white), heard no aspiration after the b and heard p. When they returned home it was just 'wine', which – in 'San Ferry Ann' pronunciation – was 'plonk'. They showed little respect for its precise colour meaning....

Here, also, I mentioned Audrey Hepburn, who (raised in a mixture of Belgium, England, and the Netherlands) did not aspirate her voiceless plosives.

<mea_culpa>
I got it wrong first time around in that post, but fixed it in an update.
</mea_culpa>

It didn't give her a foreign accent, but it probably contributed to the je-ne-sais-quoi that made a viewer of her first screen test say "the kid's got something". It wasn't something that she had, but something that she didn't have – those little puffs of air following p and t and k ("aspirated voiceless plosives").

But aspiration wasn't my first port of call, surmise-wise. As South Africa was involved (and South Africa boasts many of the world's languages that use clicks), I initially went for the more exotic idea of a bilabial click (not unlike the little pop a child makes when imitating his^{(oh yes I did)}/her  mother applying lipstick).

Don't be misled by the Play symbol;
this is just a screenshot.

But this "masterclass" (what qualifies it for that epithet, I wonder –  just that it's from the horse's mouth?) shows that the initial consonant is just an aspirated voiceless plosive: Masterclass-what-masterclass?

That's all for now, Duty calls.

b

Update: 2019.07.01:14.30 – Added PS
When I first  noticed this, and heard the (Anglophone) South African commentators I wondered where their /f/ came from (as their first syllable seemed to be ...

<old_dogs>
That "seemed to be" indicates a certain diffidence here.
</old_dogs>

... /pef/).

I think what's happening is this: English has no phonemic /hl/, but in Phehlukwayo's own pronunciation there is some sort of aspiration before the /l/. As the lips of the speaker are close together after the initial [p^h], this takes the form of /ɸ/ (the voiceless bilabial fricative  used in Greek. In English, the nearest we have to that is /f/ (as in all those words borrowed from Greek, philosophy, for example) so the Anglophone South Africans hear an /f/. (Alternatively, though, they get it right, and I hear it wrong; my ear for this stuff isn't as keen as it once was.)

Buying spiced pies

See? That's how you do it. Four syllables, one idea, three plosives. (I'm talking about my title.)

It (the title) is a rewritten version of  Buy a pie for the spy – an interesting post that points out some interesting stuff about plosives voiced unvoiced and aspirated but  misses a couple of tricks. The first is in the title, which in contrast to my 4/1/3 count (syllables/idea/plosives) has a count of 6/2/3 and introduces a needless arbitariness (Why should a SPY want a PIE?) and an  irrelevant specificity (Why THE spy?).

I sense, though, that the writer teaches in the Far East, so that six simple monosyllables (avoiding the tricky /st p/ cluster) do the job better. And the very arbitrariness of the spy/pie thing may make it more memorable for a student; I'm not sure. Anyway, I prefer my more elegant version.

We come now to the second missed trick – a more serious one. It is summed up in this sentence:

In IPA, the three words buy, pie and spy are represented as [baɪ], [pʰaɪ] and [spaɪ] respectively.

Let's try a rewrite of that sentence:

In IPAUsing the symbols recognized by the IPA, the three words buy, pie and spy are can be represented as [baɪ], [pʰaɪ] and [spaɪ] respectively.

The notation I (and many other EFL/ESOL teachers) prefer for teaching purposes is phonemic (what I used earlier to refer to 'the /st p/ cluster [where spiced meets pie]'). But this post doesn't begin to introduce the concept of the phoneme; well, it does use the word 'phonological' once, which is in the right ballpark. It suggests that the writer knows so much about phonetics that s/he has made a conscious decision to avoid phoneme.

I think this is a mistake, particularly as every IPA chart that I've ever seen – among those that are likely to be referred to by an EFL/ESOL student – is called something like a phonemic chart of the the sounds of English.

But the post is interesting and illuminating, and well worth a read. I will, however, make up for the lack of phonemes by republishing a passage from my #WVGTbook:

The International Phonetics Association specifies a number of symbols and diacritics that can be used to transcribe any speech sound in any natural language, to a greater or lesser degree of precision. Learning the whole system would be a huge undertaking, and is unnecessary for any practical purpose.  A precise transcription is conventionally presented within square brackets [...]; this could be used to represent how a particular speaker makes a particular utterance. It is phonetic.

Many teachers of English as a Foreign Language need to do something different. They don't need to represent how one speaker speaks; there is no one model speaker. What these teachers want to do is to model how speakers of English distinguish bad from bed, bid, bod, bud, bode, bide, bard, bawd, bead, bayed, bowed, beard... and so on. Between such words ('minimal pairs') there is a phonemic distinction in the vowel^†. The consonants on either side of the vowel are more or less the same (there are slight differences to do with the neighbouring vowel, but they are phonemically identical): phonemic script is conventionally presented between slashes – /.../ . The /b/ phoneme that begins bad, bed, bid, bod,.... etc. is distinct from the  /l/ in lad, led, lid, lead, lard,  lewd, load, lied and so on. The fact that the first consonant sound in leek and the last consonant sound in keel are phonetically distinct  does not signify; they are both representatives of the /l/ phoneme. Similarly, the consonant sounds at the onsets of keel and call are phonetically distinct, but they can both be represented by the /k/ phoneme.

Different experts have specified various different characters for a broad transcription of English. For example, I have used /e/ for the vowel in 'led'. Others prefer /ɛ/. But neither is 'right'. The sound that I, and many other teachers,  transcribe as /e/ is more open (that is, the mouth of the speaker is opened more widely) than the IPA's cardinal [e] but more close than [ɛ], and more central than either. The phonemes necessary for an unambiguous transcription of British English are generally agreed to number somewhere in the mid-forties. The system used in the  Macmillan English Dictionary is the one used by the British Council, among many other influential participants in the EFL/ESOL world. It uses as a basis the phonemes encapsulated in Adrian Underhill's phonemic chart. (Some of the examples given in this book use a different selection from the IPA; for example, Collins English Dictionary uses /ɛ/ rather than /e/. Neither is right and neither is wrong; they simply choose to use different IPA symbols to represent the same speech sound phonemically^‡.)

When a dictionary gives a phonemic transcription (as all worthwhile modern teaching/learning dictionaries do) it is not implying 'This is how to pronounce this word'. It is implying 'native speakers of standard English typically use these phonemes'. When, as on several occasions in this work, this book says 'the dictionary's transcription doesn't match the audio sample', it is not saying 'They goofed'; an actual speech event rarely matches its phonemic transcription. Indeed, when it seems to, it just means that on this occasion the phonemic characters look the same as the phonetic characters that might be used for a narrower transcription (as is usually the case in, for example, Spanish).

b – signing off for the year. My [ahem] aspiration is that you should ʰave a ... whatever, possibly buying spiced pies before the event.


Update 2013.12.31.16.35 – Added afterthought in red.
 
^†Update 2014.01.01.14:20 – Added afterthought in blue, and this PS
PS: I touched on this issue here (about halfway down).

‡Update 2014.01.01.16:30 – And another, in brown

Update 2014.01.0216:30 – Added this PPS:
PPS: We were talking about this a while ago at UsingEnglish.com, at which I brought up my accustomed example, Audrey Hepburn:

Originally Posted by yangmuye ...

I'm interesting if English speakers are able to tell the difference between aspirated and dis-aspirated p (like in Chinese), or full voiced b and dis-aspirated p (like in Spanish).

I think native English speakers may be aware of it, without giving it much (if any) thought. For example, few people would say 'Audrey Hepburn sounds foreign'. In fact, I'm not sure myself. But her Dutch-speaking background gives her voiced plosives enough aspiration* to make me wonder.

I'm sure the Hollywood executives who first hired her had no idea about her aspiration, but it probably influenced their thinking that 'the kid had something special about her'.

b

PS You're interested, though it is an interesting question.

pps Her mistake was the reverse - not aspirating initial voiceless consonants

Update 2018.02.08.18:30 – Removed old footer

Update 2018.04.04.15:30 – Added link to When Vowels Get Together ("#WVGTbook"). This book was later released in a slightly different format as Digraphs and Diphthongs (which included a partial "sound-index" – quite a neat addition, but a lot of work). As I am now working on a book that is in effect volume 2 of the When Vowels Get Together family: WVGT...with Sonorants, I have made reference  to the earlier format (which I will, in due course, re-release as WVGT...with Other Vowels.