This is not an North American English versus "British" (i.e. English English) thing. For instance, my dialect (an NAE one, a somewhat odd NAE one I should state, but one really with a lot in common with other dialects in the Inland North and Upper Midwest) conservatively actually retains a distinction between /tr/ and /tʃr/ and likewise between /dr/ and /dʒr/ (even though the two can pairs can only contrast medially) as [tʂɹ͡ɰˤ] versus [t̠ʃɹ̠͡ɰˤ]* and [d̥ʐ̊ɹ͡ɰˤ] versus [d̠̥ʒ̊ɹ̠͡ɰˤ]*, and it is not hard to find younger people who have this distinction, even though my own idiolect has completely merged the two pairs as [t̠ʃɹ̠͡ɰˤ]* and [d̠̥ʒ̊ɹ̠͡ɰˤ]*. Likewise, many other NAE do have such a distinction while, conversely, many English English varieties do not.adder wrote:I know /-tʃɹ-/ is by no means wrong in BrE and it's not some American standard. I just thought /-tɹ-/ was kind of supercorrect, i.e. something that dictionaries would give.Astraios wrote:Don't do this, it sounds completely wrong.adder wrote:And for BrE I would change all /-tʃɹ-/ to /-tɹ-/.I just didn't want to sound like someone uneducated in situations when you have to show your language abilities e.g. when I took an IELTS test, I kept using a rhotic accent during the speaking part so there was no inconsequence. I know the recording of the conversation is analyzed in the UK, anyway I wonder if people who assessed my speaking ability really paid that much attention if I had been consequent (and while writing I try to keep the spelling American because there was a time I used to mix up both sets of spelling and that wasn't good for me myself so I decided to spell everything like it is in AmE),
* Normally I do not mark this, but the starting points of my /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ are normally postalveolar rather than alveolar, which I specifically chose to mark here to highlight a difference in articulation that is particularly apparent in the contrasts being made here.
I do have to say that the lack of teaching of the details of English phonology, regardless of the variety chosen to be taught, is a major pet peeve of mine... (I'm always like "why can't people teach actual English phonology, or at least teach people IPA and show them how English vowels map to it...")adder wrote:But it depends on the region, right? From what I remember <path> was taught to be pronounced with a back vowel, I mean that's how my teacher pronounced it in the middle-high school, she had finished English studies and she had a great pronunciation, I must say. And the British variant is the one taught in schools (grammar, e.g. "as if I was/were" and not "like I was/were", pronunciation, e.g.//'ɜ:li/ and not /'əɹli/, and spelling, e.g. learnt and not learned, spelt and not spelled, travelled and not traveled and so on). But sadly nobody really goes into such nuances like /ʌ/ vs. /ɑ/ or /ɔ/ vs. /ɒ/. And I'm sure 99% pupils leaving secondary school can't tell apart /æ/ and /ɛ/ (e.g. <cat> is pronounced by most /kɛt/). I'm to move to England in a matter of a few months and my pronunciation is definitely much closer to American rhotic than Received Pronunciation. Even though English has been a lingua franca for quite a lot of time in business, politics etc. and people care less and less about their pronunciation, I prefer to sound right as linguistics is my hobby right after chemistry.AnTeallach wrote:BrE can have either, of course, though BrE speakers who have "/æ/" there will usually realise it as [a].
I should note, though, that there are indeed English dialects that have [ɛ] for historical /æ/... mine being one of them (except when it decides to turn it into a diphthong...)... but they normally do not merge it with historical /ɛ/, at least in stressed syllables, and rather do something else to prevent it (e.g. shift historical /ɛ/ to something like [ɜ] as mine does).
Now this is one of those weird corners of English English dialect phonology that I'm really not very familiar with at all, as this is something that really has no parallel in NAE and which I have not really seen described all that well or consistently except ad hoc-ly like this...adder wrote:That's too much for me (I'm a chemistAnTeallach wrote:Phonemically /kɒnstɪ'tju:ʃən/, but /s/ after /n/ is [ts], and /tj/ is an apical [tʃ].). I know what you mean but I simply can't give such detailed pronunciations. That's why I didn't use square brackets in this thread..
