From a discussion about coordinates and words from another topic I’d like to add this:
Are they really directions though, for the people to use them and have words for them?
In the local dialect - the everyday use - we do not even use “north/south, east/west” but instead garbled phrases turned into words that mean “this way, that way, up way, down way”:
The funny thing about this system of coordinates is that it is totally subjective depending on who is using it, where they are coming from or even what day it is. The same person one day might say “I am going up” towards the town square or say “I am going down” or I say “I didn’t have the change to come down to town X” but people coming from town X say “we are coming down to your town”.
Village coordinates are very funny But word garbling is very interesting here.
Particularly here there is a small village that the residents there are known to be very sneaky and when you meet them and you ask “hey, where are you going?” they answer “sapansakat” grarbling now BOTH directions, practically saying “I am going up and down”, to avoid saying where exactly they have been.
Germans combine words to create longer words. Greek villagers combine them while crunching them, almost beyond recognition when they talk fast.
I ask for explanations from English native speakers.
What’s the correct pronunciation for “residue”?
On Collins I find rezɪdjuː but in the song “Orestes” from “Mer de noms” by “A perfect circle” (watch out: explicit or disturbing contents) I think I hear something like rezaɪdjuː
Could it be maybe some sort of local pronunciation or something? Any idea?
I think it sounds like re-ZAH-due because of the metre. Musically the emphasis seems to fall on the second syllable, instead of the first as it ought to be. The other factor, is that it is very hard to sing certain vowels loud at high pitch (in particular closed vowels where your tongue is high), so in the last chorus it makes sense that they change the pronunciation from a rather closed /ɪ/ to a more open /a/ or /e/.
REZ-i-doo: This is my pronunciation and maybe the most common in California.
REZ-i-dyoo: This seems to be the standard dictionary pronunciation. Maybe more common worldwide.
As @Vsotvep said, singers sometimes bend or alter pronunciations for rhythm, rhyme, or emphasis or to fit the melody. So that could be what’s happening in the song. This isn’t necessarily wrong, just stylized artistic license.
In my dialect, there’s no distinction between ʌ and schwa: they are the same vowel. (I guess you could say the former is always stressed and the latter never is, but that doesn’t really make them two different vowels.)
So the vowels in “butter” would be the same? Isn’t the first vowel closer to the /ɑ/ in “father” /ˈfɑːðə/?
I’m not an English speaker, but for me the /ɑ/ in “father” and the /ʌ/ in mother /ˈmʌðə/ would seem much closer to each other than to /ə/.
Dutch makes extensive use of /ə/. I’d say it’s clearly more like the vowel in “err” than in “are”. And stressed it becomes more closed and rounded like /ʏ/ or /ɵ/ than more open and unrounded like /ʌ/ or /ɐ/.
[Those linked vowel pages have audio samples, so you can compare them]
Stressed schwa in Dutch:
Stressed schwa in English?
Then again, I can also find that /ʌ/ in English is not quite like /ʌ/ in that official IPA diagram. In standard US and British English accents the location of /ʌ/ seems much closer to IPA /ɐ/ than to IPA /ʌ/.
I just talked through these four words with my wife, who grew up in the Toronto area but has English (U.K.) parents; she’s somewhat mid-Atlantic I suppose.
For her, the vowels in “butter”, “mother”, and “father” match my accent (the “tt” in “butter” is completely different). The “o” in her “bother” is a bit shorter than the “a” in her/our “father”; seems closer to “father” than to “mother” though.
When I map vowel-like sounds (by F1 and F2 formants produced by Praat) to Dutch vowels, and I compare that to the diagrams Dr. Lindsey created with it for English vowels, it seems that several English vowels, among which the /ʌ/, are sort of in a “forbidden zone” for Dutch vowels:
[the curved black envelope is mine as are the red IPA symbols and “forbidden” region, the black IPA symbols are from Praat, presumably for English vowels)
Perhaps this explains a bit why it blows my mind that /ʌ/ (which in my mind is close to /ɑ/) can cross that “forbidden zone” to become confused with /ə/.
I think this identity is the cot-caught merger, and these two vowels are identical in mine as well (USofiAn midwest), while the other one (mother) is essentially ʌ
Trying to figure out how to phonetically spell my pronunciations of words that are caught in the cot-caught merger is an activity I find very distressing: English vowel phonology kind of stops making sense to me as soon as you collapse /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ and /ɒ/ into a single phoneme, but that seems to be what the speakers of our dialect have done.
Edit: failed to turn the alpha ɒ on first posting.
But word garbling is very interesting here.
