Armitage unflappable

Since we’re talking about the voice here, go check out Frenzy’s latest voice on The Voice.

Since nothing analytical that I felt like writing today is short, I give you another clip segment. This time, it’s Mr. Armitage saying the word “little,” another one of those words that I find particularly happy-making when I hear him say it. I have three examples here; I am sure we could find more to use for comparative purposes. Nothing here is particularly Armitageneous — that is, what fascinates me is a characteristic of speech shared by speakers of RP (which, incidentally, wikipedia says is the same thing as Queen’s English), though he does it particularly well.

In all three instances, some more noticeably than others, Mr. Armitage uses the standard English IPA transcription of the word to pronounce it: ˈlɪtəl. (Interestingly, this is also the pronunciation every American dictionary I looked at gave, although no one I know says it that way). To wit:

The linguistic concept here is the pronunciation of the double consonant “t,” or “geminate.” In English, gemination within root words is almost always unnoticeable or at best marginal (no native speaker of English says “lit-tle” — in contrast to Italian, for example, where both t’s in a double consonant would be pronounced). All native speakers pronounce one consonant despite the double “t.” The question is what the consonant will be, or how it will be pronounced. RP speakers pronounce the “t” consonant in “little,” whereas American and Australian speakers tend to engage in something called intervocalic alveolar flapping (a type of consonantal softening, or lenition), i.e., they tend to substitute something that sounds like a “d” for the “t” in this situation (it’s not actually a d — which is pronounced on the teeth as well, with a different tongue position). When I say the word “little,” I say ˈlɪɾəl”. The “ɾ” is the sign for the flap or tap — Mr. Armitage touches his tongue to the bottom of his front incisors, whereas I tap or flap my tongue onto the alveolar ridge — the ridge of my mouth just inside my incisors. (The tap also appears in some British English; for instance, as the “r” in “very”.) In some British dialects, the “t” is neither pronounced nor flapped, but instead replaced with a swallowing of the consonant or glottal stop (“li ‘el” — something that I’d think of if I saw it on tv as a “lower class” British accent).

Another “thing to watch” in the world “little” relates to the closing phoneme “l.” Many British speakers of  English velarize the “l” at the end of a word, so that it sounds more like a “w.” Armitage rarely velarizes a closing “l,” even when he’s speaking in interviews, i.e., presumably not concentrating on pronunciation as an aspect of characterization. (For example, BBC Leicester interview here; you can hear him pronounce the final phoneme “l” clearly in words like “all” or “will.” For another example of this beautiful word, he says “little” again at c. 3:33.) The only exception I can think of is when he’s trying to sound “matey,” as in Spooks 8.5, where he velarizes the final consonant in the word “call.” If you need an incentive to watch this clip, it’s also the “glove p–n” sequence from the same episode.

The velarization of “l” seems, however, to be more broadly shared about Brits. I’ve noticed that the two British ex-pats who have offices next to mine (my friend and colleague the former Cambridge professor, and another professor) both velarize their closing “l” as a matter of course. At least in the case of my friend and colleague the former Cambridge professor, the velarization is much more intense after he’s spent a month at home, and disappears gradually as the term wears on, only to reappear again after vacations.

Really, I just wanted to say I liked the way Mr. Armitage pronounces the word “little.”

~ by Servetus on March 28, 2011.