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Файл:Английский язык в его национальных вариантах. Учебно-методическое пособие
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laBORatory), schedule (SKedjul vs. SHedjul) and tomato (tomEHto
vs. tomAHto).
Second, Canadian raising with the first element of diphthongs
from /a/ to /ə/ or /ʌ/ with /-u/ is customary before voiceless
consonants (such as stops /p/, /t/, and /k/ and fricatives /f/, /θ/, /s/,
and /t/. this is the case with words such as about, like, out, type, and
house, ice, south, wife, etc.
Third, CE speech shows a lack of distinction in the low back
vowel. For CE speakers this typically means that words like cot and
caught, don and dawn, or holler and hauler have the same
pronunciation, while speakers of other varieties of English, such as
American English, would distinguish these words through the vowel
sounds they use in pronouncing them. This distinction provides
helpful vowel charts for CE and American English. Currently there is
some evidence, however, to suggest that a vowel shift is taking place
in CE, including variable rounding of the unrounded vowel.
Fourth, though not unique to CE, speakers tend to use a voiced
flap or tap more frequently than those of other varieties of English.
In this case, a “t” spelling in a word will often become a “d” sound in
CE speech, as in the example words that follow: better, butter,
Ottawa, water, etc.
Fifth, not only Canadians but also other anglophones are aware
that CE speakers use ‘eh’ differently. This is because CE speakers
use eh 1) more frequently than speakers of other English varieties,
and 2) often either as a continuer in narrative speech (i.e., “I was
goin’ down the street, eh, and this guy …”) or to ask for
confirmation in a tag question (“It’s $2, eh?”). Although these uses
for eh serve grammatical functions, they uses typically only found in
CE speech, not writing.
Finally, in addition to the distinctions noted above, there are a
number of words that many CE speakers simply pronounce
differently from those in other English varieties. These Pronunciation
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innovations include such words as arctic, khaki, placate, resources
and species.
QUESTIONS
1.
How does prosody (intonation, stress) differentiate American
English from other English varieties, such as British English?
2.
In what ways does American English simplify or innovate
verb morphology compared to British English (e.g., “gotten”
vs. “got”)?
3.
Why has American English retained archaic constructions
(e.g., “fall” for “autumn”) that have faded in other dialects?
4.
How do loanwords from Indigenous, Spanish, and African
languages shape the unique vocabulary of American English?
5.
To what extent does African American Vernacular English
(AAVE) influence mainstream American English, and how is
this contested?
EXERCISES
Ex. 1. Fill in British Pronunciation of some American and
British words
Words
British
American
advertisement
[ædvз:'taismənt]
clerk
[kl3:k]
either
['iðə]
neither
['niðə]
forehead
['forhed]
erase
[i'reis]
herb
[з:b]
hurry
[hri]
leisure
['liЗə]
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medicine
[medisin]
missile
[misl]
nephew
[nefju:]
schedule
[kedЗul]
vase
[veiz]
z (a letter)
[zi:]
Ех. 2. Mark a Stress in some British words. Discuss the
differences.
American English
British English
‘address
ba’llet
‘ca’fe
‘cigarette
‘laboratory
‘magazine
‘princess
‘translate
‘dictate
‘weekend
Ex. 3. Give the translation into British and American English
of the following words:
Аккумулятор, тачка, печенье, подтяжки, умный, автобус,
компания, зубрить, смокинг
Ex. 4. Write down the spelling of American English. Give the
translation into Russian.
British English
American English
colour, favour, labour
travelled, cancelled
catalogue, dialogue
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theatre, metre, centre
defence, pretence
organise, analyse
maths (сокр.)
cheque (сущ.)
grey
tyre
manoeuvre, diarrhoea,
aluminium
whisky (Scottish)
gaol
Ex. 5. Comment on grammar differences.
British English
American English
Negations
I haven’t got
enough money
I don’t have enough
money
Questions
Have you got
enough money?
Do you have enough
money?
“Have” constructions
He has got a lot of
money.
He has a lot of
money.
Subject-predicate
agreement
The crowd
was/were very big.
The crowd was very
big.
‘This’ and ‘that’ in
telephone
conversations
Is that Tom?
Is this Tom?
Impersonal subjects
One has to be
careful.
You have to be
careful
Ex. 6. Extract from “New York Tawk” by Michael Newman,
considers a rather different variety of American English. This is a
popular account of the New York dialect, intended in part to increase
its readers’ awareness of spoken diversity in the United States, and
45
to challenge the negative way in which ‘Brooklynese’ is often
portrayed. As you read, consider the following questions:
1. How does Newman describe the English spoken in New
York City?
2. What similarities can you find between this and Asprey’s
account of Black Country English?
Extracts from “New York Tawk”
Back in the early 1970s, all the students in my Manhattan high
school were given speech diagnostic exams. I passed, but the boy
next to me was told he needed speech class. I was surprised and
asked him why, since he sounded perfectly normal to me. “My New
York accent” he explained unhappily. Actually, this reason made me
less thrilled with my exemption, as if my Detroit-born parents had
deprived me of being a complete New Yorker.
As my classmate’s predicament shows, my longing for New
Yawk sounds was a distinctly minority taste. My school was hardly
alone; there was a time when many New York colleges, including
my present employer, Queens College, had required voice and
diction courses, and their curriculum targeted certain local dialect
peculiarities. Furthermore, a person with too many of these features
was not allowed to teach in the New York City public schools.
Although these efforts were abandoned decades ago, many
New Yorkers still talk of their speech as a problem to be overcome.
When I was researching this article, a number of my former
schoolmates claimed that their accents weren’t ‘that bad’ or boasted
that they had overcome “the worst features”. As a New York accent
fan, I would be more depressed by these claims if they were not
actually based almost entirely on denial. Take the case of the r,
which New York dialect speakers tend to leave out whenever it
comes after a vowel sound. Many New Yorkers believe that
dropping r’s is a serious flaw, but they usually imagine that it is
someone else’s. An employment agency owner once proclaimed to
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me that anyone who did not pronounce their r’s could not possibly
qualify for a professional job – all the while calling them ahs.
Perhaps because this man was middle-class, he believed he
had to be pronouncing his r’s. In fact, he was not altogether wrong;
he sometimes put an r in where none belonged, a feature called
intrusive r. It may seem bizarre to pronounce r’s that aren’t there
while skipping over those that are, but in fact, intrusive and missing
r’s are two sides of the same coin. For r-droppers words like law and
lore and soar and saw are homophones. However, they do not usually
drop r’s all the time. They sometimes maintain them, particularly
when a final r sound comes right before another word that begins
with a vowel sound. Just as the r is sometimes pronounced in lore
and legend, so it can appear in law-r-and order. When they are
speaking carefully New Yorkers even occasionally maintain r’s when
there is no following vowel. You get the idear? […]
My colleague Chuck Cairns developed a diagnostic list of 12
[New York] features […]. A particularly important one involves the
vowel sound sometimes written as aw, as in all, coffee, caught,
talked, or saw and the New York r-less shore. In New York dialect,
this vowel becomes closer to the vowel u in pull or put followed by a
slight uh. Strong New York dialect speakers say u-uhl, for all and cuuhfee, for coffee, and they don’t distinguish between shore and sure.
A similar process applies to the short a in cab, pass, and avenue. In
this case, the vowel can come to sound like an i or even ee, again
followed by uh. Many New Yorkers try to catch ki-uhbs that pi-uhss
by on Fifth i-uhvenue, although not all of us are so extreme.
In our pronunciation of these vowels, we New Yorkers are not
unique; related pronunciations can be found from Baltimore to
Milwaukee. However, none reproduce exactly the same pattern.
Specifically, in New York all the aws are affected, but many short a
words are not – a differentiation called the ‘short a split’. So in New
York, pass, cab, and avenue have different vowels from pat, cap, and
average. In most cities between Syracuse and Milwaukee, by
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contrast, aw is nothing like it is in New York, while all the short a’s
are pronounced like i-uh. They not only say pi-uhss for pass – as in
New York – but also pi-uht for pat, which no New Yorker would
ever do. Detective Andy Sipowicz on NYPD Blue may seem like the
archetypical New York City cop, but his aw’s and short a’s are
obvious clues that Dennis Franz, the actor who plays him, is really
from Chicago.
To be fair, it might be hard for Franz to sound like an
authentic New Yorker. While there are rules that determine which
short a words are shifted and which are not in New York, they are
quite complicated. For instance, can is key-uhn in can of soup but not
in yes, I can. The system is so complex that most unfortunate New
Yorkers whose parents speak another variety of English never really
learn them. We are condemned to not be full New York dialect
speakers.
Although these vowel changes are an inherent part of the mix
that receives condemnation, New Yorkers seem less concerned about
them than they are about r’s. Only the most extreme pronunciations
receive condemnation. In fact, there is an aspect of their speech that
many New Yorkers appear to be actually proud of – the distinctive
vocabulary. There are childhood games like Ring-a-levio, a kind of
street hide-and-seek, stickball, baseball played with a broomstick,
and salugi, the snatching of a kid’s bag or hat, which is then thrown
from friend to friend, just out of the victim’s reach. More widely
known are the Yiddishisms, such as schlep – to travel or carry
something an annoying distance – to pick one out of many. Such
terms are used by Jews of Eastern European origin the world over,
but in New York they have extended to other communities. A
teenage Nuyorican (New Yorker of Puerto Rican heritage) rap artist I
know rhymed, I’m gonna spin you like a dradel, a reference to a top
used in Chanukah celebrations. His schoolmate, also Latino, often
says, What the schmuck! as an expression of surprise, misusing, or
perhaps just appropriating, the vulgar Yiddish term for ‘penis’. Some
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of these terms may be in decline – I don’t hear many young Latinos
using schlep – but there are recent replacements from other
immigrant languages. Besides Nuyorican itself, there is the offensive
guido, an ignorant Italian American tough guy. More positively, we
have papichulo, a suave, well-dressed Latino ladies’ man.
The appeal of these words lies in their evocation of immigrant
roots, and New York dialect, like the city itself, serves as a kind of
counterpoint to mainstream Anglo America. The dialect is often
called Brooklynese, more because of Brooklyn’s status as an icon of
urban ethnic life than any real linguistic priority of that borough over
other parts of the metropolitan area. The key to understanding the
disparagement of New York pronunciations is similarly that they
symbolize lack of integration into the American mainstream, and so
being stuck in the working class. […]
Those, like my high school speech teacher, who wished to
cure us of such features as intrusive r’s did so because they thought it
would be a social and professional handicap. They were mistaken.
Many middle-and upper-middle-class New Yorkers of all ethnicities
use the dialect, to say nothing of billionaires like Donald Trump. One
dialect speaker, former Governor Mario Cuomo, even became
nationally famous for his eloquence. Instead, as New York dialect
speakers have moved up socially, their speech has lost much of its
outsider status. Older speakers may think they speak badly, but they
do so almost out of inertia. In fact, many professional Latinos, Asian
Americans, Caribbean Americans, and African Americans have
adopted their distinctive dialect features, in whole or in good part.
In assuming what has become a common New York middleclass dialect, these speakers either leave behind or alternate with the
speech commonly associated with their ethnic communities. Today,
this working-class minority speech has taken on the outsider status
the classic Brooklynese has left behind. Among young New Yorkers,
r-lessness is replaced by aks for ask and toof for tooth as examples of
how one shouldn’t speak. Some expressions, such as using mines
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instead of mine, in the sentence That’s mines, occupy a kind of
middle ground for these minorities (actually together the majority of
the city) of marking roots while still being understood as ‘incorrect.’
Again, minority youths often seem proud of their special vocabulary,
which expresses their roots in urban life. The speech of minorities is
less unified than that of the previous generations of children of
European immigrants. But, despite the variation, there is a tendency
for some characteristics to be shared widely. Also these forms often
extend to other immigrants, particularly Middle Easterners, and even
to many European Americans and Asian Americans who associate
with rap and hip-hop culture generally. […]
A former Nuyorican student of mine remarked after he got out
of the Army, “No matter where I went, people could tell I was from
the city.” He was obviously pleased by that fact, just as I am when
out-of-towners identify me as having a New York accent despite my
over-abundant r’s and lack of a proper short a split. The ultimate
resilience and uniqueness of New York dialects lies in our intense
local pride, and this is as true for the minority versions as it is for the
so-called Brooklynese.
Ex. 7. British English And American English Quiz
1. Where does a true-blue BE-speaker find the engine of his
car (assuming it is a standard model and not, for example, a
Volkswagen)?
under the cap
under the hood
under the bonnet
in the boot
2. What would a Brit use to remove his erratic pencil
scribblings?
a rubber
an erazor
a gummer
a wiper
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3. What part of the street do pedestrians walk on from the BE
perspective?
the pavement
the curb
the sidewalk
the kerbside
4. How does a BE-speaker get from one side to the other side
of a busy square if he wants to be 100 percent safe from road surface
traffic?
via a tunnel
via a subway
via a bypass
by underground
5. Which of these terms occurred in British English and still
occurs in some British dictionaries as the predecessor of "escalator"
for a means to get from the first floor to the second floor in a
department store?
rolling stairs
moving stair
elevator
lift
6. What does a BE-speaking housetrained dad help to change?
baby's nappies
baby's nappers
baby's naps
baby's diapers
7. What does the traditional BE-speaker ask for at the end of
his meal in a restaurant?
the check
the bill
the account
his wife's pocketbook
8. What does a civilised BE-speaking football fan eat while he
is watching his favourite football team on the telly?
potato chips
crisps
French fries
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