RSG English

  Banana, about, waiter, similar, occur, citrus. Although all these words have different vowels, they all contain the same sound. In the International Phonetic Alphabet (as used by many dictionaries), it is depicted as ‘ ə’, and is, I believe, the only one with its own name - the ‘schwa’. When they created the symbols in the nineteenth century, the easiest way to create the extra symbols they needed was to turn the typeface upside down. It is a neutral, unstressed sound, so you could say it is a vowel that is losing its distinctiveness and in some words it disappears entirely. ‘Banana’ has two, the first and last ‘a’. It is also the sound of the -er, -ar and -ur endings ( ə r). ‘Occur’ has two schwas; as well as the ending, the ‘o’ at the beginning is one too. ‘Similar’ is interesting because the second ‘i’ is also a schwa, but is also virtually silent. Likewise, another word, ‘difference’ can certainly be reduced to two syllables, where the schwa (-er-) in the middle disappears....

 I came across this advert today and thought how well it illustrates how other cultures affect the use of English. English is not just the language of the UK, USA, Canada, Australia etc., it is also used as a lingua franca by many non-native speakers. Consequently it isn't always written in the same way, with the same cultural principles behind it. Take a look at this:    Firstly, there is nothing wrong with the English at all. However, it is produced from a different cultural basis. Despite the existence of the monarchy in Britain and a reputation for formality and ceremony, the English have always had a strong suspicion of authority: democracy can be traced back to the Witan (parliament) of the Anglo-Saxons and there is a reason why 'Kowtow' is a loan word and broadly used pejoratively. So, 'patronage' is fine, but what exactly is ' high patronage'? From an English-speaking point of view, it means the King is too important to be an ordinary patron. You als...

  This is about words such as ‘tough’, ‘brought’ (and words like ‘daughter’), ‘cough’, ‘though’, ‘thorough’, ‘plough’ (or ‘bough’ for Americans). The reason why these words have different sounds is because...they are all different. Bear with me. It is important to remember that for most of our history, most people couldn’t read, and so there was not a direct connection between written and spoken language - written language was not intended to be phonetic. The original words in Old English were therefore all different because there was no standard written format: ‘bought’ was pronounced like ‘bawhte’, ‘bough’ more like ‘bowh’, ‘thorough’ was ‘thorweh’, while ‘cough’ was ‘cohhian’. Most of these words end in ‘h’ sounds, which in time came to be reproduced as ‘gh’. In addition, -gh was a common way of representing guttural sounds common in Celtic languages (e.g. loch (lake)) in English, and so also applied to strong ‘h’ sounds like in ‘cohhian’/’cough’. Also significant is an event ca...