Sound and vision blog

It’s not clear what the purpose of this word list is, but it’s one of ten created by linguists at UCL, probably in the 1950s. It might be a prompt for phonetic transcription practice or possibly a pronunciation guide to English vowel sounds. In the 1980s UCL phonetician John Wells established his ‘lexical sets’ – a list of key words used by linguists to capture, describe and compare the pronunciation of English vowel sounds in a variety of accents. The first words in this list would be represented in Wells’ lexical sets as TRAP, SQUARE and STRUT. The accent here reflects Received Pronunciation (RP) at the time of recording. The pronunciation of the second word chair is particularly interesting as it's a diphthong here (i.e. two vowel sounds). Many RP speakers now use a monophthong (single vowel sound) for words in the SQUARE set, like chair, bear, dare etc.

Have you recently visited the new British Library Sounds website and tried out its new features?

The British Library Sounds website (http://sounds.bl.uk) now has 50,000 sound tracks, all freely available for listening online. It represents the most diverse online collection of scholarly sounds anywhere, and now has improved interactive features, including tagging, favouriting, playlist generation and timed annotation features.

Simply register on http://sounds.bl.uk, then those features are enabled. Registering allows you to make notes, add tags and personally manage items using favourites and playlists.

An example of timed annotations is here:
http://sounds.bl.uk/Accents-and-dialects/Survey-of-English-dialects... (& see the screen grab image below), but please do register yourself and add your own notes to other tracks.

Watch this space over the next few weeks as we announce more collections that have recently been digitised and copyright-cleared for public access.

Yesterday saw the launch of The Listening Project, an exciting new collaboration between the BBC and the Library in which members of the public are invited to share intimate conversations with friends and family. A selection of these conversations will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and local radio stations then the original recordings preserved for future generations in the Library’s archives as part of our vast oral history collections.

The conversations should make fascinating listening. Fi Glover – the programme’s presenter – speaks of the ‘humbling’ experience of being privy to the thoughts, memories and hopes of the nation. For researchers, the conversations also represent a unique social, linguistic and historical record. The Project was inspired by Storycorps, an astonishing scheme in the United States, which - in the last decade - has gathered over 40,000 recordings of conversations of Americans of all backgrounds. The StoryCorps recordings are preserved in the Library of Congress.

Broadcasts will start on Radio 4 on 30 March and the Library’s curators will be blogging about the conversations and highlighting related materials in our collections.

You can find out more about the project on the BBC website and on the British Librarys Listening Project page

Twitter tag: #listeningproject

Launched today, the new British Library Sounds website at http://sounds.bl.uk lets you listen for free to 50,000 tracks of music, spoken words and environmental sounds. Listeners at licensed UK universities and colleges may additionally download tracks for their research.

Here are 10 'taster' clips:

Originally launched as a service for UK universities and colleges in 2007 as 'Archival Sound Recordings', with support of JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) under its Digitisation Programme, the new British Library Sounds site introduces a number of enhancements available to anybody:

• completely redesigned pages
• improved navigation
• new audio player with waveforms
• improvements for linking to pages
• improved sound maps
• and if you sign up for free registration, you can:
• add notes at specific points on the audio timelines
• create your own playlists
• add tags and 'favourite' specific tracks so that you can easily find them again on return visits to the site.

More information.

Feedback on the new site is welcome and will help us add further improvements to the site.

Jonnie Robinson, Lead Curator, Education and Sociolinguistics, writes:

Would you guess this speaker was from Oxfordshire? He’s one of a remarkable set of recordings of British POWs recorded in captivity on German soil during the First World War.

http://sounds.bl.uk/View.aspx?item=021M-C1315X0001XX-0459V0.xml

'Recording of the Week' highlights gems from the Archival Sound Recordings website, chosen by British Library experts or recommended by listeners.

Jonnie Robinson, Lead Curator of Education and Sociolinguistics, writes:

You might be intrigued by John Hickman’s Oxfordshire pronunciation of father [as ‘vaather’], recorded in Sennelager Prisoner of War camp in Germany in 1918, but probably less surprised to hear John Townend, from Huddersfield, recorded in Güstrow in 1917, pronounce it to rhyme with ‘gather’. We’re delighted this week to publish a set of early dialect recordings recorded in extraordinary circumstances that allow you to compare English dialects at the start, middle and end of the 20th century. In some cases the contrast is marked – compare, for instance, John Hickman with Evelyn Johnson, recorded in Oxford in 1998. Elsewhere traditional features persist – Steven Elsden, recorded in Bradford in 1999, shares John Townend’s distinctive pronunciation of father.

The Berliner Lautarchiv British & Commonwealth Recordings is a subset of an audio archive made between 1915 and 1938 by German sound pioneer, Wilhelm Doegen. The British Library acquired digital copies of the recordings in 2008. The 66 recordings available here feature British POWs recorded in captivity on German soil between 1915 and 1918 reading from the Parable of the Prodigal Son. They differ from the other collections available on the site in that they represent ‘performances’ rather than spontaneous speech and thus inevitably prompt questions about the authenticity of the voices. Nonetheless they are some of the earliest known recordings of ‘ordinary’ English speakers and it’s reassuring to note that many of the words, pronunciations and grammatical constructions elicited are confirmed by later, more naturalistic recordings.

We are still working on the analyses of the Scottish data collected by the BBC. But afore ye go...

Jonnie, one of the Voices researchers, has been working for many months as part of the team who have made Evolving English: One Language Many Voices. The free exhibition will open to the public next week (on Friday 12th November) and run for six months in the British Library's main exhibition gallery.

Last week we began talking about the exhibition in the national press, and on TV and radio. One of the key features of the exhibition will be that visitors can contribute their own accents, words and voices to the national collection using recording booths in the library — and also online using the online voice-blogging application, AudioBoo — more details to come on this.

The BBC website ran a magazine feature (here) about how we pronounce the eighth letter of the alphabet, which we also wrote an information box for. Are you an /ɛɪʧ/ person or a /hɛɪʧ/ person? This reminded me of one of the last times the debate surfaced in the British media — the Guardian in London published a very prescriptive opinion piece on it in 2007, but I very much liked the response on the same page from poet, language activist and friend of the British Library sociolinguistics team, Michael Rosen (see here for Michael's remarks).

Catherine Burton has also blogged about the exhibition and the 'H question' for the Independent here.

We will write more about the exhibition on this blog in the coming weeks, but in the meantime you can plan your visit and book the related talks and events running through the exhibition at www.bl.uk/evolvingenglish. The same link will allow you to access the online parts of the exhibition once it's officially open next week.

The interviews that we’re listening to are all centred around a discussion of vocabulary. Each participant is asked to provide their words for a number of different concepts such as ‘attractive’, ‘to sleep’ and ‘friend’. We’re just over halfway through the recordings and have already noted down a wide range of words, showing that regional variation in vocabulary is still very rich.

In these two audio extracts people in Braemar, Aberdeenshire and Dalmellington, Ayrshire talk about their words for ‘tired’. These include ‘trachled’, ‘knackered’, ‘wabbit’ and ‘forfochen’. So far we’ve found ‘knackered’ to be used in most parts of the UK but the other three seem to be particular to Scotland and the north.

It’s interesting to note the discussion the participants have about these words. In Braemar, for example, one speaker remarks that he would use ‘trachled’ to describe a person who is walking slowly. Another comments that for her the word is associated with a mother who has been worn out by young children. The Dalmellington speakers debate the nuances of the meaning of ‘wabbit’ which also evokes the idea of being exhausted by children.>

All of these words have the same literal or denotative meaning of ‘tired’. This is what would be found in a standard dictionary definition. It’s the connotative meanings, the associations and value judgments that people attach to the words, that vary. In some cases these are very personal but they can also be socially or regionally shared.

We all have our own range of words for expressing the idea of being tired, each with its own set of connotations. These can influence the word we choose to use in a given situation and might go some way to explain why one person will say ‘trachled’ when another would use ‘wabbit’.