Talk:Received Pronunciation

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The contents of the Conservative Received Pronunciation page were merged into Received Pronunciation on 6 October 2018. For the contribution history and old versions of the redirected page, please see its history; for the discussion at that location, see its talk page.

Misleading statement about /r/[edit]

"While the IPA symbol [ɹ] is phonetically correct for the consonant in 'row', 'arrow' in many accents of American and British English, most published work on Received Pronunciation represents this phoneme as /r/. "

This paragraph is worded in a very vague and misleading way. Which sign the phoneme is conventionally 'represented' with and how it is actually realised are two different things, but they seem to be confused here, implying that the RP realisation of the sound is an alveolar trill. That is just totally wrong. Even Daniel Jones' pronouncing dictionary from the early 20th century already describes /r/ as a 'postalveolar fricative' (meaning approximant). [r] might occur very rarely in certain positions, but most of the time it's [ɹ] in any form of modern RP, or, I dare say, in RP as used during most of the 20th century, although the more old-fashioned varieties did display the variant [r] (or, more commonly, [ɾ]) more often than it is heard now. *Nobody* speaks RP with [r] as his main realisation of /r/, and I doubt if anybody ever has. --94.155.68.202 (talk) 03:13, 15 January 2019 (UTC)

I don't think you need to worry about this being vague and misleading. It is perfectly normal to state that (in the present case) a given phoneme is phonetically [ɹ] but for the sake of typographical convenience is written phonemically as /r/. The slant brackets stand for an instruction to the reader NOT to interpret the symbol as a precise phonetic value. Representing the phoneme with /r/ therefore does not imply that the realization is an alveolar trill. On a separate point, I wonder on what you base your claim that nobody has ever pronounced /r/ as an alveolar trill. RoachPeter (talk) 08:42, 7 October 2019 (UTC)

1685 v 1848[edit]

Here is Thomas Babington Macaulay in 1848 in The History of England from the Accession of James the Second contrasting the rural gentry of 1685 with those of his own day:

We should be much mistaken if we pictured to ourselves the squires of the seventeenth century as men bearing a close resemblance to their descendants, the county members and chairmen of quarter sessions with whom we are familiar. The modern country gentleman generally receives a liberal education, passes from a distinguished school to a distinguished college, and has ample opportunity to become an excellent scholar. ... The heir of an estate often passed his boyhood and youth at the seat of his family with no better tutors than grooms and gamekeepers, and scarce attained learning enough to sign his name to a Mittimus. ... His language and pronunciation were such as we should now expect to hear only from the most ignorant clowns. His oaths, coarse jests, and scurrilous terms of abuse, were uttered with the broadest accent of his province. It was easy to discern, from the first words which he spoke, whether he came from Somersetshire or Yorkshire.

This suggests RP, the idea of a unified class accent, originated some time in the 18th or early 19th century. jnestorius^(talk) 09:07, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

Missing clarification: "weak vowels"[edit]

There is a vowel chart right under the monophthong chart, the description of which is "Ranges of the weak vowels in RP and GA". The term "weak vowels" not defined in this article. Yordan Grigorov (yoreei) (talk) 17:23, 8 January 2020 (UTC)

"Conservative RP"[edit]

Section 5, "Conservative RP" was previously a separate article. I'm afraid that moving it into Received Pronunciation has not improved things much. This section is almost entirely based on one piece of writing by one author. The "Conservative RP" described there is presented as a current variety of RP used by some speakers instead of "Contemporary RP", but it is clear that what is being described is in fact simply normal RP of 50 to 100 years ago. Consequently there is a large amount of overlap with Section 4.3 (Historical variation), as well as with Section 1.2 concerning nomenclature (where the terms Conservative, Traditional, Upper and Contemporary used in Section 5 might be explained). I propose to move any useful material to be found in Section 5 into Sections 1.2 and 4.3, and then delete Section 5. RoachPeter (talk) 11:16, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

I have now made the changes proposed above. RoachPeter (talk) 07:49, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

ANHDUC - WIKI 2

Saturday, May 23, 2020