Say it right
If you want to speak properly, you may want to know that there is more to A.E.I.O.U than meets the eye.
THERE should be no excuse for not being able to pronounce English words correctly – if you have a computer with speakers! This is because the Internet is now rich in English online dictionaries which allow you to listen to both the British English and US English pronunciations of words by clicking on certain icons.
Some mispronunciations, however, have become ingrained in many Malaysians. This week, I am going to analyse three words that are commonly pronounced a tad incorrectly: develop, penalty and faculty.
All English words of more than one syllable have a stress on one of their syllables. This means that we put greater emphasis on this syllable when the word is pronounced. The position of this stress is fixed, wherever you place the word in a sentence.
For example, the stress in the word “develop” is in the second syllable (as in de-vel-op). However, the Malaysian mispronunciation happens when placing the stress on the wrong syllable. In the case of develop, the first syllable is often stressed and pronounced “dev” instead of “div”.
Before going further, I have to draw your attention to the attached graphic of English vowels (Table 1) as well as a list containing the correct and incorrect pronunciations of the above words (Table 2).
I have used the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) in indicating the sounds of the vowels and words. This alphabet is easier to learn than you think, and knowing it helps immensely in the learning of any language.
How does one find out which syllable should be stressed? This is indicated in the IPA by a high vertical line before the syllable (see Table 2). The other two syllables have vowels in (usually) unstressed syllables, which are the short capital “I” in the first syllable, and schwa (an upside down small “e”) in the third (see Table 1).
Schwa, sometimes called the neutral vowel, is a unique vowel in English, in that it is used only in unstressed syllables. It is hard to explain in writing what it sounds like and so I usually say that it is the first sound in words like “across”, “about” and “ago” (all of which use an “a” to indicate it). Using Bahasa Malaysia (BM) examples, it is the sound of the “e” in “perang” meaning “war”, not “perang” meaning “reddish”. It used to be rendered by the letter “e tanda” (accented e) in the old BM spelling.
The word penalty, should be pronounced with the stress on the first syllable, which has an “e” sound, followed by schwa and an “i” sound respectively in the subsequent syllables. But it is often mispronounced by placing the stress on its second syllable and using the long “a:” as the vowel there, with schwa shifted to the first syllable.
The final word I want to consider here is faculty. Like penalty, it is stressed on its first syllable, but this has the more open vowel “ae”. It is also often mispronounced by placing the stress on its second syllable and using the long “a:” there, thus shifting the schwa to the first syllable.
Let me run through the vowels in English and their IPA symbols, in Table 1. There are three “i” sounds: the long one indicated by a small “i” with a colon after it – “i:”; the very short one that looks like a short capital “I”; and the one of intermediate length, looking just like a small “i”.
What looks like an “e” is pronounced like the “e” in “pen”, but what looks like an “a” and “e” put together (“ae”) is the more open vowel used in “man” or “that”. The even more open long “a” sound, like the long “i” sound, also has a colon after it. In fact, the colon in a phonetic symbol indicates length. The very short “a” sound as in “cut” is represented by an upside-down “v”.
It is important to note that the short “o” sound as in “hot” is represented by a symbol that looks like a back-to-front “a”, while the long “o” sound as in “ball” is indicated by a back-to-front “c” with a colon after it. There are also three “u” sounds, with the short one as in “full” looking like a short capital “U”, while the intermediate and long ones are indicated by “u” and “u:” respectively.
I have described schwa near the beginning of this article, but there is also a long schwa, as in the word “turn”, whose phonetic symbol looks like a back-to-front small epsilon (the Greek letter) with a colon after it.
For further reference, the online Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary has the full list of IPA symbols used in English pronunciation on its website, at the following page: http://oald8.oxfordlearnersdictionar ies.com/pronunciation.html.
Next week, we shall look at other mispronounced words. For instance, the British way to say “restaurant” has only two syllables! And when you’re in a classy eatery, do you pronounce “l” sound when ordering grilled “salmon”?