Dental fricatives

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I’ve been watching Lucy Worsley’s latest TV series on the monarchy – “Fit to Rule”. Dr Worsley is the Chief Curator of Historic Royal Palaces, and this is not the first series she has presented. They all seem well researched, and I’ve enjoyed them.

Even her Wikipedia entry notes her over-rounded /r/ (which it calls rhotacism) and she occasionally uses a bilabial trill when a word begins with ‘br’, but this post is about something else. In addition to her problems with the /r/ phoneme, she seems to have no dental fricatives in her armoury: /θ/ and /ð/ are almost invariably replaced, either by /f/ and /v/, or, in the case of /ð/, by /d/. To have one well-educated speaker in a TV programme who has failed to learn these phonemes is disconcerting enough, but she seemed to go out of her way to find others to interview with a similar problem. At least two of the other experts – both with otherwise approximations to RP and both clearly not just ‘experts’ but Experts – exhibited the same feature.

What was once characterized as a Cockney dialectal feature, and disparaged by people who thought they knew better, now appears to be gaining ground at an increasing rate. Are we seeing the beginnings of the loss of a pair of phonemes? In certain words, such as murder from earlier murther for example, this has happened in the standard language, and is recognized in the spelling. In one word, it may have gone the other way: the place name Keighley, which was presumably originally pronounced with a velar fricative, is, uniquely for words spelled ‘gh’, now pronounced with /θ/. Was it formerly /ˈkiːfli/?

6 Comments

  1. “Are we seeing the beginnings of the loss of a pair of phonemes?”

    They’ll survive in North America, just like nonprevocalic /r/.

  2. Dr Lucy Worsley is cert·ny an entertaining person especially for phonetic “twitchers” like you and me, Graham. The writer of the useful Wikipedia article on her makes the common layman’s mistake of alighting on an impressionistic label that in fact means little more than ‘unusual’ in referring to her /r/ realisations. They’re usually anything but ’rounded’ but they’re int·resting coz they seem to vary between labiodental and bilabial and both together. As well as weak bilabial “trills” she seems to have affricates like [bβ-]. I dont like the Wiki writer referring to her r’s as an ‘impediment’. They’re cert·ny idiosyncratic but they dont ‘impede’ her communication.
    I don’t find I’m very aware of her low incidence of dental fricatives praps coz she uses dental stops which I dont find strikingly unlike the orthodox fricative in effect — nor are they very uncommon.
    What I do find notable in her speech are some isolated items that suggest traces of the influence of an associate with some northerly characteristics. I’ve he·rd her use /É’/ in one and once and /á´§z/ for us — features that stand out from her gen·rally modern-southern accent.

  3. Jack – She certainly uses dental stops in place of the voiced dental fricative, but if you listen to her saying ‘three’ or ‘fifth’ (as in George the Fifth) you can hear quite clearly that she is using ‘free’ and ‘fiff’. I can’t remember if she said ‘sixth’ – although in the first programme, about the Tudors, she must have referred to Edward VI. But many people say /sɪks/ for ‘sɪksθ/, so we probably wouldn’t be able to tell if she was doing something non-standard.

  4. JWL:
    “…I don’t find I’m very aware of her low incidence of dental fricatives praps coz she uses dental stops which I dont find strikingly unlike the orthodox fricative in effect…”

    I agree. Using dental stops in place of the dental fricatives is supposed to be a feature of Irish English (outside of Ulster), but I don’t even notice it most of the time.

  5. TH-fronting was reported by Joseph Wright for Windhill, although he said that it was recessive when writing in 1892. Windhill is close to Keighley, so it’s likely that the pronunciation /ˈkiːfli/ has been around for a long time.

    There is actually no reason to believe that TH-fronting began in Cockney. If you look through the incidental material for the Survey of English Dialects, you’ll notice that TH-fronting was found right the way up the east coast.

    You say, “Are we seeing the beginnings of the loss of a pair of phonemes?” I would respond that we’re seeing the end of this process, since it’s been remarked upon for almost as long as phonetics has been practised. It has now spread to virtually every part of England.

  6. When she says “wuwe” instead of “rule” it all turns a bit Life of Brian.

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