Per ardua ad nauseam

First draft of "al" > /æl/ notes

1. algal, and alkali
   The stressed (first) syllable has this vowel. See also under AL:/ə/.
2. allied
   This is the adjective (as in, for example, "allied troops"). When used as a past participle this word has the same stress (and the same unstressed vowel) as the verb "ally" – see under AL:/ə/.
3. alloy
   This is the noun. The same letters appear in words such as "unalloyed", which has an unstressed second syllable – see AL:/ə/
4. balalaika
   The first syllable has this vowel; the "al" in the second syllable is unstressed – /ə/.
5. caloric
   Not in Macmillan English Dictionary but in several other dictionaries – for example, Collins.
6. counterbalance
   This is the sole representative of compound words and idiomatic phrases (such as "balance of power" and "checks and balances").
7. Dalai Lama
   Transcribed thus in the Macmillan English Dictionary but in the audio sample the sound is /ɑ:/
8. gallant
   This is the adjective, with stress on the first syllable. In the noun, the first syllable is unstressed – see AL:/ə/.
9. genealogy
   Perhaps because of the popularity of genealogy on the Internet, the American English pronunciation (which Cambridge Dictionary of American English gives as having either /æl/ or /ɑl/) is often misheard, misreported, and then mistakenly learnt as /ɒ/ and misspelt as "geneology".
10. hallowed
    The noun and the verb have limited (largely literary and/or poetic) use, but the past participle formed from the verb is still used in idioms such as ‘hallowed ground" or the hyperbolic – mock-reverential – "hallowed turf" in certain sports venues.
11. hallucinogen
    The Macmillan English Dictionary gives this word the vowel sound /æ/, but the audio sample has /ə/ (like hallucinate and other derivatives, which are transcribed that way.
12. heraldic
    It is not clear why the Macmillan English Dictionary does not include this word. Many others (for example, Collins) do.
13. maladjustment
    This is the sole representative of the many words that use the prefix "mal-" – with certain exceptions. These exceptions are generally cases where the remaining word, after the "mal-" is removed, is a recognizable word in its own right
14. malfeasance
    This is included because the word "feasance", while it exists, is archaic and used chiefly in a legal context.
15. malapropism
    This is included because the word "apropism" doesn't exist (except, perhaps, in a jocular context).
16. malcontent
    This is included because, although the word "content" is recognizably etymologically relevant, the word is normally not a noun (except in the House of Lords).
17. mall
    The Macmillan English Dictionary gives a total of four transcriptions, two marked as British English and two marked as American English. The two BE ones are /æ/ and /ɔ:/, but they both use the pronunciation /æ/. However, the one marked /ɔ:/ uses /æ/ in the context "shopping mall" – a context that tends to attract one of the American pronunciations /ɔ/ (typically realized by speakers of BE as /ɔ:/).
18. mallrat
    The Macmillan English Dictionary gives a "British English" pronunciation with /æ/. But as the word is American slang this pronunciation seems to be questionable. Certainly I have never heard it.
19. malodorous
    The word "odorous" is not simply "giving off a smell", with a prefix indicating whether that smell is good or bad. (Similarly, "smelly" has an automatically negative connotation.)
20. malware
    The "mal-" refers to the effect of the "-ware" rather than to its quality.
21. palpitations
    Note the plural. The singular also exists, but the plural refers to a specific (though ill-defined) physical condition.
22. phalanx
    The Macmillan English Dictionary transcription is thus for British English, and gives /eɪ/ as American English – although the /eɪ/ pronunciation is common in the UK. In fact, the /æ/ seems to be common enough in the US for the /eɪ/ transcription to be linked to an American voice using /æ/.
23. salmon and salmonella
    Note that in "salmon" the l is silent, whereas in "salmonella" it is not.
24. shall
    In most other cases of words that end "-all" - "ball", "call", "fall", "gall", "hall" .... – the pronunciation is /ɔ:/. Philologists are generally not surprised to find exceptional pronunciations in words that are dying out: scroll down to the very bottom of http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/shall for evidence of this decline.
    <comment>
    This seems rather cumbersome. I'll probably include this pictue:
    </comment>
25. shallows and valuables
    This is a noun. Note the plural ending.
26. shalom
    The Macmillan English Dictionary gives this transcription, but the audio clip has /ə/. Moreover, especially when sung, the vowel is commonly heard with the long vowel /ɑ:/.
27. shalt
    This is archaic; it is the second person singular of the verb "shall", but is still used in Biblical (and pseudo-Biblical) quotations – particularly in the form "Thou shalt not...".
28. tala
    Indian English musical term.

b

Slowly slowly catchee breathee

First draft of "al" > /əl/ notes

<comment>
I shall be posting here highlights  of the work in progress. Unlike the first #WVGTbk, I have separated out the notes and sorted them by phoneme; there are only twelve for this phoneme, but there are often more (42 is the record so far). So, if the notes were organized per spelling (as they are, for example, for "AE") they might reach into the hundreds. In any case, the idea of footnotes as a whole needs revisiting.
<comment>

1. Nouns such as "aerial", "annual", "constitutional" and many others can also be adjectives, but unlike the originally adjectival "hymnal" and "missal" they don‘t (yet?) enjoy "splendid [substantive] isolation"
2. algal, alkali and balalaika
   These words appear also in the /æ/ section. The /ə/ is in the second syllable in all three cases.
3. alleged and allegedly
   The addition of the final ‘-d‘ to make the simple past form does not change the syllable count: both ‘allege‘ and ‘alleged‘ have two syllables. But ‘allegedly‘ has four, with a schwa in the third.
4. alloy
   This is the noun.

   <comment>
   This looks very odd. I must do some checking, though I suspect that Homer nodded (Doh!") Probable fix: for noun read verb
   </comment>

   The Macmillan English Dictionary does not include the verb, but other dictionaries – for example, Collins – do. It is not common as a verb (with unstressed first syllable), but the past participle is, particularly with the prefix "un-".
5. ally
   This is the verb. The noun has different stress and a different vowel sound – see under /æ/.
6. analogical
   This exception to the ‘no adjectives‘ rule is included because the cognates ‘analog[u]e‘, ‘analogis/-ze‘ and ‘analogy‘ all have stress on the second syllable.
7. gallant
   This is the noun. The word with stress on the first syllable is an adjective – see under /æ/.
8. Kalashnikov
   The Macmillan English Dictionary transcribes this with /əl/, but the first syllable in the audio clip is clearly /æl/. Other possibilities are heard – as is the case with many foreign names.
9. marshall
   This is the noun/verb, unlike the homophonous (and etymologically unrelated) "martial".
10. normalcy
    The noun "normality" is excluded like other "-ality" words. This is included because it follows the pattern of many "-nt" adjectives (such as "lenient") – but not so far as to drop its final consonant before adding "-cy".
11. salami
    The Macmillan English Dictionary transcribes this with /əl/, but some speakers of British English show more respect for the original Italian vowel.
12. vocalise
    The "-alis/ze" verb is excluded. This noun (with the third syllable /i:/) is not included in the Macmillan English Dictionary, but is in several other dictionaries (for example, Collins).

A New Hope

For a little over three years, my one and only blog has been here. It combined a certain amount of whimsy with reflections on ESOL, choral, musical, autobiographical, and linguistic issues. It also had details of #WVGTbook progress , and – for lack of Blogger nous  – a footer at the end of each post (which was all very well when I had only a handful of footers to update, but has become increasingly embarrassing/onerous as I approach my 250^th post).

From now on I shall confine this blog  to work on the book, and I'm kicking off with an excerpt from its proposed Introduction.

First draft of part of the Introduction

One of the most striking things about English, for an ESOL student, is its inconsistency of spelling. When Vowels Get Together showed how vowels could come together with other vowels to represent new sounds – sometimes as many as a dozen. When a vowel comes before a consonant, the result is generally less variable. The first two vowel sounds of parental are different from the vowel sounds in paternal, although the letters are the same.  And those four different vowel sounds are different again from the first two in prenatal,  though it too shares all the same letters. The vowel sounds are, respectively, /eə/ and /e/, / ə/ and /ɜː/, and /i:/ and /eɪ/.  But not all consonants are equally resistant to variability in the sound of the vowel that precedes it.

Before a stop consonant (in English, /p/, /k/, /t/ and their voiced counterparts /b/, /d/, and /g/) the letter a can represent only a few sounds – mainly /æ/, /ə/, /eɪ/, and /ɒ/  (as in pat/pad, paternal/poppadom, pate [the tonsorial sort]/made, and swat/squad. There are a few exceptions, notably in foreign borrowings and when  preceding a t that works in  conjunction with h to represent one of the dental fricatives /θ/ (path) and /ð/ (father). In this case (th), the exception is easily dealt with by a rule. The foreign borrowings are often proper nouns, such as Dada, Lada, and Prada; and they do not necessarily have to come from very far afield – as for example Scapa Flow. When the German fleet was scuttled there in 1919, it was called /skɑ:pə fləʊ/; but in the South of England it soon became  /skæpə fləʊ/, although this pronunciation left a fossil in the Rhyming Slang scarper  (="go") – where the vowel length is preserved by the insertion of an r.

But, before a consonant such as l, an a can represent 7 different vowel sounds; and sometimes the l "gives its life so dearly" that it disappears entirely after making the change, bringing to 10 the total of different letter/phoneme combinations. As well as the predictable Big Four (/əl/, /æl/, /eɪl/, and /ɒl/), there are these sounds: /ɔ:l/ and /ɔ:/ (also and talk),  /ɑ:/(calm) [as opposed to /ɑ:l/, which matches the normal exception mentioned above, /æ/ (salmon), /ɒl/ (swallow), and /ʌl/ (in a very few foreign borrowings, such as haldi). In fact, this last exception is so rare that its use is variable: the Macmillan English Dictionary, for  example, transcribes it with /ʌ/, but demonstrates it (in the audio clip) with /æ/. (Note that this book makes frequent reference to the Macmillan English Dictionary, not because of any particular hostility or preference of mine; it is simply because that was the dictionary I happened to have [that came with a CD-ROM]. Historically, it was chosen in sympathy with an application for the Macmillan Education Award for New Talent in Writing).

Note that I have included /ɒ/ in this list of variable pronunciations of "al", despite its being matched in words such as swap. The reason for this is that the /ɒ/ in swap is always represented by an a preceded by a w or a qu – that is, by a /w/ phoneme. In contrast, words spelt "wal..." have the a often representing /ɒ/ but sometimes standing for any one of several other sounds (/ɔ:l/ and /ɔ:/ in wall/squall and walk, /ɑ:/ in qualm or /eɪl/ in swale [a word that, although not very common, appears in 23 General English dictionaries found by Onelook] and a further 8 specialist ones). This introduces a further level of possible confusion for the ESOL student trying to match spellings to sounds.

This book adds to the When Vowels Get Together stable with a selection of such consonants, so that the first book can be seen as When Vowels Get Together [with other vowels] and this new addition is When Vowels Get Together [with <TBS> consonants]. The definition of <TBS> includes the consonants , but not necessarily all of them, justifying the title Whirly-gig as a working title (with the possible inclusion of /n/, /ŋ /, and /m/ if I find them sufficiently interesting).

The UCL's SAMPA page (SAMPA being a typewriter-friendly* form of phonetic transcription, in  which "N" – for example – represents the IPA symbol /ŋ/ [the nasal consonant at the end of sing] ) defines sonorant consonants like this:

The sonorants are three nasals m n N, two liquids r l, and two sonorant glides w j

[BK: note that j is the glide often represented in English as "y"].

UCL's SAMPA page 

*The web-site says 'computer-friendly' rather than typewriter-friendly, but surely in the 21st century there is not a computer – outside a museum, that is – that can't handle Unicode.

This grouping of the sonorants may at first sight seem rather arbitrary, but a quirk of English demonstrates their inter-relatedness. Consider words that can be given a negative spin by attaching the prefix in- elegant/inelegant, for example. Students of ESOL know that there are several exceptions – for words with an initial l or m or r:  illicit, immoral, irrespective... These exception-creating letters are nearly always sonorants (the im- one applies also to bilabials, as in imprecise and imbecile...).

An example from another language relates to Japanese speakers' problem with the English phonemes /r/ and /l/ . Both [r] and [l] sounds do exist in Japanese, but as context-dependent variations (allophones) of a single phoneme. (If the idea of allophones is new to you, consider the English words leek and keel. In the first, the [l] sound is formed toward the front of the mouth [the so-called "clear l"] and the [k] is formed at the back of the hard palate. In the second, the  the [k] sound is formed toward the front of the mouth,  and the [l] is formed at the back [the so-called "dark l"]. In both cases the different [l]s and [k]s belong to the same /l/ and /k/ phonemes.

Update 2016.01.10.11:05  – Fixed a couple of typos, and made a tweak (in blue).
Update 2016.01.11.10:00  – A few tiny tweaks (so small that marking them as changes would have taken lomger than actually making them).
Update 2016.06.24.15:05  – Added last two paragraphs (in green).