Phonotactical Advantages

Had another student, this time for a Czech accent. This student is a friend which is always nice - they're more forgiving. A good thing when I've never had anything to do with Czech accents before. So I put in a lot of research time, and managed to pull together some notes and resources for her, and she was really happy.

The vowels were the hardest to pin down for me. On the surface it looked easy: Czech only has 10 monophthongs - 5 long and 5 short (versions of a, e, i, o, u essentially), and only three diphthongs occuring regularly in the language, with others occuring more often in foreign words and with distinctive qualities. But it was how these were applied to English words which presented the challenge. The prosodic features of Czech are also very complex - I didn't concentrate on them, although they'd probably explain a lot of what I observed just listening to speakers.

Mostly the /u/ and /o/ vowels seem very rounded and dark. The "e" sound is very open, tending towards the TRAP vowel at times. While Czech language has the long and short vowels the distinction appears less clear in English, so "who" and "would" sound quite close, as do "his" and "ease."

Consonants are much easier. Voiced "th" becomes "d" while voiceless "th" becomes "s" (more often in the intial position - I heard it pronounced as "th" in words like "with") There is the "v/w" confusion most stereotypical of Russian, mostly observed initially as in "very" and "video" - but "v" can be devoiced in the final position in words like "of" and "love." "l" is quite dark. "z" tends to be devoiced when final, as in "was" and "keys." Plosives tend to be "poppy" - voiceless and voiced being a little close to Western ears as the voiceless tend to lack aspiration. Although, when occuring in a consonant cluster such as after "s" there is a very marked aspiration - as in words like "sport", "start", "script", or "scary".

The difficult consonant to pin down is "r" - there are two separate phonemes in Czech, a trill and a fricative. They can both also be voiced or unvoiced (I think I've got that right). In English we only have one /r/ phoneme, with numerous allophones occuring in different speakers, in different contexts, eg. "rare" means the same thing if the first "r" is an approximant and you don't pronounce the second (as in Australian or British English) as if you pronounce both "r's" as approximants (as in US English) or if you roll the first and tap the second to lead into a word starting with a vowel (as an RP speaker may). But in Czech these different realisations could affect the meaning of the word - hence the distinctions are harder for English speakers to hear and realise in the appropriate context because we conceive of the phoneme differently.

I found a YouTube video of a Czech model giving a message to her fans and appealing for help for people in Prague who had lost property, etc during floods. Was very useful. There were also a few vlogs in English from Czech speakers.

In any case my student was happy. She has her first meeting for the play next week I think - it's a relatively high profile production so it would be good for me to have a link to it.

Phonotactical Advantages

Had a new student for American accent today for an hour and a half (hooray for cash-in-hand). Young Kiwi woman who'd done a lot of work on her accent. As usually happens though I didn't even notice until she mentioned it. Not sure if that's just a perceptual slip (I'm not always listening with my accent ears) or if it's because as soon as she mentioned her homeland and spoke about it her natural tendencies resurfaced.

The best example I've seen of this was a contestant on Big Brother a few years ago. 2006 I think. Zack the corset-maker and uber-fabulous city gayboy. I quite liked him on the show I must say and would have loved him to win over whoever that blonde Queensland girl was. She was nice too, but you know, gotta side with the team. ANYWAY! He had that (stereo)typical Sydney gayboy sound. Don't get me wrong I'm not negatively stereotyping here, accents and dialects are intimately linked to stereotypes, and when analysing them we're not being judgmental. One day - in the diary room - he started talking about his family back home - in the country. As the inevitable diary room tears started to flow his voice gradually slipped from "cultivated Sydney scene" to "rural/Broad" Australian. It was a very marked slide, and fascinating to watch. Suddenly he was dropping his final /g/ and vocalising medial /t/. Vowels got tighter and more nasaland we heard a lot more high rising tune (that thing where statements all sound like quesitons).

So back to my student. Nice girl, but very business like. Not a bad thing - I'm just used to teaching actors that have been referred to me or that I know. This woman found me on Quiet on Set - a lisitng I posted a long time ago, so hooray, it's still working for me!

She was pretty good at the American accent - had already done a bit of accent work - and had studied linguistics so I didn't have to explain any of the phonetics - so refreshing! I could even say "/l/ vocalisation" and "levels of transcription" and she didn't even bat an eyelid.

She had a scene from The Ghost Whisperer to work on - brilliant writing, and a drastic oversight by the Academy. Expected difficulties involved final dark /l/ which often trips up or gives away Kiwis, as well as the "bet-bat" vowel distinction. Interesting difficulties she had were with the difficulty with long /i:/ and /u:/ and the /ei/ diphthong (possibly related to the "bet-bat" thing through the diphthong's onset). She clearly had some Maori background and had that slightly choppy rhythm I've observed in other Islander voices. A challenge for her was to let the laid back articulation of GenAm come through and let the words breath.

I'm now wondering if I can get phonetic symbols on this blog... Would make future posts a lot easier.