…It is precisely the reduction of function words to their weak forms that creates the unstressed “valleys” between the stressed content words — and the result is the characteristic **iambic pulse** of English: the da-DUM da-DUM pattern that underlies both everyday conversation and, not coincidentally, the blank verse of Shakespeare. When learners avoid weak forms and pronounce every word at full strength, they produce speech that sounds halting and foreign to a native ear, even if every individual sound is perfectly correct. Getting weak forms right is, in this sense, the single most impactful thing you can do for your spoken English after getting the individual phonemes in order. […]
A Retrospective into English Phonetic Transcription
Although the use of International Phonetic Alphabet gained significant momentum during recent decades, it still raises a lot of questions, especially among the learners of English as a foreign language. Most of the confusion stems from the minor differences between transcriptions found in different dictionaries. In an attempt to clear this up we want to take a quick look at the history of the International Phonetic Alphabet, […]
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