Linguistics 001      Fall 2001      Homework 4      Due Mo 10/15

1. Pick any two consecutive couplets (four lines altogether) from G. Nolst Trenité's poem The Chaos, and write them using the system discussed in the lecture on English pronunciation. Assume careful "dictionary" pronunciation of each word, and use American pronunciations even though the poem's author clearly assumes British norms of pronunciation (so that via rhymes with choir for him).

Note that the poem's lines are grouped in rhyming pairs, alternating between masculine (stressed-final) and feminine (stressless-final) rhymes; your choice of four lines should respect this structure. Also, there are some obscure words in the poem, so pick lines whose words you know, or use a dictionary for any that you are not sure of.

2. Listen to the this bit of between-song chitchat by Gamble Rogers, musician and raconteur from Florida, who learned guitar picking from Doc Watson, and taught it to Jimmy Buffet.

We got any dog lovers in here tonight?
You notice the way I said that word?
I said "dawg". That's D A W G -- "dawg".
That's man's best friend I'm talking about, lovable, loyal and lop-eared.
(He'll) bring you brandy when you're lost in a snow drift,
lay his grizzled snoot up on your knee
and look up at you with those big limpid brown eyes and say "I love you, I'm a dawg."
And then there're dogs: D O G S -- yip yaps.
(They) weigh about a pound and a half apiece:
be-jeweled, be-ribboned, be-furred, pomaded, powdered,
painted toenails, rhinestone collars,
designed by God and nature to be trolled in the wake of a slow moving boat
in search of large trash fish ... such as hammerhead sharks.

In the lecture on sociolinguistics, we'll take up the connections among class, gender, formality and dialect that this passage expresses. Your task today is simpler: just figure out how to spell Gamble's pronunciation of the phrase I said "dawg" from the passage quoted above, in the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Here is a higher-fidelity copy you can use for careful listening.

You can assume that the consonants are basically spelled in IPA as they are in English: so the result will be something of the form:

V sVd dVg

where each V is replaced by some IPA vowel or vowel sequence.

You can see a display of the IPA vowel space here, with links to sound files so that you can hear the sound corresponding to each symbol. Note that vowels blended together may seem different to you than they do in isolation.

 
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