RP prosody joke

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In comments on "Affected brogue", 12/19/2024, Benjamin Orsatti and others put Bernard Mayes forward as a quintessential RP speaker, including this advice:

[I]f you'd like to listen to, say, 150 consecutive hours of Bernard Mayes (the man narrates my dreams now), you can do what I'm doing and borrow "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" audiobook, Blackstone edition from your local library.

This seemed like a good way to use one of the Audible credits that I've somehow accumulated, so I downloaded Mayes' narration of volume 3 of that work, all 39:03:05.09 of it. Listening to a few minutes of it, I was reminded of a joke that I (believe I) heard from Michael Studdert-Kennedy:

The archetypal Englishman, being forbidden by custom to wave his hands, waves his larynx instead.

I don't have time this afternoon to give this quip the rigorous evaluation it deserves, but as a wave of the hand in that direction, here's a histogram of deviations in semitones from the median F0, taken from a 2-minute sample of Mr. Mayes' narration:

So basically an octave up and and octave down from the median, for a two-octave range…

Here's the sample:

For those who have trouble decoding some of the more obscure words, as I did, here's the text:

In the revival of the empire of Rome, neither the bishop nor the people could bestow on Charlemagne or Otho the provinces which were lost, as they had been won, by the chance of arms. But the Romans were free to choose a master for themselves; and the powers which had been delegated to the patrician, were irrevocably granted to the French and Saxon emperors of the West. The broken records of the times  preserve some remembrance of their palace, their mint, their tribunal, their edicts, and the sword of justice, which, as late as the thirteenth century, was derived from Caesar to the praefect of the city. Between the arts of the popes and the violence of the people, this supremacy was crushed and annihilated. Content with the titles of emperor and Augustus, the successors of Charlemagne neglected to assert this local jurisdiction. In the hour of prosperity, their ambition was diverted by more alluring objects; and in the decay and division of the empire, they were oppressed by the defence of their hereditary provinces. Amidst the ruins of Italy, the famous Marozia invited one of the usurpers to assume the character of her third husband; and Hugh, king of Burgundy was introduced by her faction into the mole of Hadrian or Castle of St. Angelo, which commands the principal bridge and entrance of Rome. Her son by the first marriage, Alberic, was compelled to attend at the nuptial banquet; but his reluctant and ungraceful service was chastised with a blow by his new father. The blow was productive of a revolution. “Romans,” exclaimed the youth, “once you were the masters of the world, and these Burgundians the most abject of your slaves. They now reign, these voracious and brutal savages, and my injury is the commencement of your servitude.”

 



23 Comments

  1. J.W. Brewer said,

    December 20, 2024 @ 6:17 pm

    There's an old joke about RP speakers (usually but not always attributed to Dylan Thomas) that goes something like "he spoke as if he had the Elgin Marbles in his mouth." It just now strikes me that Mark Liberman is exactly the right scholar to have a good empirical sense of what a spectrogram of someone who actually had such objects in his mouth would look like and thus how valid or invalid the joke is as confirmed or disconfirmed by spectrograms of RP speech.

  2. Peter Taylor said,

    December 21, 2024 @ 12:48 am

    @J.W. Brewer, anyone who had the Elgin Marbles in their mouth would look very flat and be incapable of speech, respiration, or any other activity which depends on being alive.

  3. rosie said,

    December 21, 2024 @ 1:34 am

    Thank you for your transcript. Now please could you provide transcripts of audio samples of speakers with American accents — they are on average harder to understand than RP speakers.

  4. AntC said,

    December 21, 2024 @ 3:14 am

    I'm not an RP speaker, but was brought up listening to the lilting tones of the BBC Home Service. I didn't need myl's transcription at all.

    I am impressed with Gibbon's mastery of the prosody. The words practically fly off the page, unlike a lot of dry historians I've suffered through.

  5. Philip Taylor said,

    December 21, 2024 @ 3:40 am

    Having now listened to the start of volume 1 of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", I would certainly not disagree with the hypothesis that Bernard Mayes has an RP accent. However, and with the greatest respect, I would assert that his accent is not high RP, for exemplars of which I would propose the late Brian Sewell (art critic) and Jacob Rees-Mogg (politician).

  6. Peter Grubtal said,

    December 21, 2024 @ 4:48 am

    Mayes' sounds to my taste a bit affected.

    For me the archetype RP speaker is David Attenborough. The thought that he and his diction will one day no longer be with us brings out the Kulturpessimismus in me. But…of course thanks to AI it's now possible to clone his voice, and there are Youtube documentaries where this has been done.
    Sir David is concerned about this, as he has a right to be. There are ethical considerations and the risk of abuse, but it's a tantalising thought that diction-wise he could be with us forever.

  7. Andrew Usher said,

    December 21, 2024 @ 7:45 am

    As well as the intonation, I noted his rather weak aspiration (like mine), his odd pronunciation of 'Charlemagne' and mispronunciation of 'nuptial'. But overall, a fairly clear British accent; yes, possibly somewhat affected but I don't consider that necessarily bad.

    Is 'empire of empire' (first sentence) _really_ in the original, or was it a miscopy somewhere along the way? I don't have a print version to check right now.

  8. Jarek Weckwerth said,

    December 21, 2024 @ 8:22 am

    If we take Mayes as an archetypal example of RP, we would have to define RP in strictly phonetic terms. And we would have to say that peak RP happened in the 1950s or 1960s. There are no younger speakers who speak like this. Thus, studying this type of speech is, essentially, historical linguistics.

    If you define RP in sociolinguistic terms, as the variety spoken by the "upper classes" of England, then you need to look at, say, Prince William (who is not particularly young any more). His accent is noticeably different from Mayes's.

    (Of course the tension between the two definitions leads many people today to avoid the term RP like the plague, in favour of SSBE or General British, or the like.)

  9. languagehat said,

    December 21, 2024 @ 8:39 am

    I agree with Philip Taylor that his accent is not especially high RP, and I note with displeasure that he mispronounces Marozia as "mah-ro-ZEE-uh"; this unusual hypocoristic form of her given name, Maria, is actually [maròɀɀḭa] (ma-ROT-see-ah) (see
    https://www.dizionario.rai.it/p.aspx?nID=lemma&rID=1588746&lID=1053199), which Gibbon may well have anglicized as "ma-ROH-zhuh" but certainly not as Mayes does.

    Is 'empire of empire' (first sentence) _really_ in the original

    No, it's a typo.

  10. languagehat said,

    December 21, 2024 @ 8:40 am

    Oops — the ḭ is nonsyllabic, so change my parenthetical equivalent to ma-ROT-syah.

  11. Nathan said,

    December 21, 2024 @ 9:12 am

    I'm American, but understood this just fine. I wonder which words words need "decoding". Both Marozia and mole were new to me, but the pronunciation was quite clear. Surely Professor Liberman must have heard a lot more of this sort of accent than I have.

  12. Lynette Mayman said,

    December 21, 2024 @ 11:05 am

    Mayes doesn't sound too old-fashioned, but in addition to the intonation of exhaustion as he reads a long sentence, he has some weird pronunciations in addition to those listed above: his idiosyncratic Charlemagne and "Boorgundians". Do you think he enjoyed a glass of "Boorgundy after his recording sessions?

    As an aside: there are few readings and voice-overs where the hired/volunteer voice doesn't make glaring errors.

  13. Andrew Usher said,

    December 21, 2024 @ 2:30 pm

    Jarek Weckwerth said:

    > If we take Mayes as an archetypal example of RP, we would have to define RP in strictly phonetic terms. And we would have to say that peak RP happened in the 1950s or 1960s. There are no younger speakers who speak like this.

    An important point; though RP had a range of variation and I'd hesitate to recommend a single 'archetype', no one under 50 today falls within it (native speakers, anyway). The dialects now heard in the southeast of England may seem a continuation of RP, but that's because RP evolved in that region, which continues to be the only area (as it contains London) that can exert any standardising influence.

    So there's good reason for avoiding it. Drawing a distinction with American English is another – American never had such a break, and back to the beginning of recording there were persons that would be judged as 'General American' today, despite the inevitable minor differences.

    I noted his odd 'Charlemagne' – it's perhaps an attempt to render the name more natively, but a ludicrous one – all stages of French had /a/ in 'magne' – which presumably face the usual English one through GVS – followed by a palatal nasal., beither of which is reproduced. I assume readers of audio-books aren;t expected to themselves research the pronunciation of obscure names in them, which accounts for 'Marozia' – in the absence of authoritative guidance, he'd naturally make some not-entirely-implausible guess from the spelling.

    As for the duplicated 'the empire of': I found by Google this to appear in several other online sources, which I could assume copied the same one. Naturally I'd assume it was not your mistake, but you also copied some such source. That is why I advised it be checked against a print version. And one can assume that Mayes would read it the correctedway' even if his text had the duplication.

  14. David L said,

    December 21, 2024 @ 4:50 pm

    re: a glass of Boorgundy…

    I can remember an elderly Cambridge don memorializing an even elderlier don who had recently died, and remarking that the college had been thrown into deep mourning. For me, mourning is a straightforward homophone of morning, but this gentleman tortured the initial vowel more or less as Mayes does.

  15. AntC said,

    December 22, 2024 @ 1:18 am

    mourning is a straightforward homophone of morning,

    I'm still not an RP speaker, but I must concede I usually don't pronounce 'mourning' the same as 'morning'. (Not that I'm often called upon to pronounce it at all.) I err on the side of a spelling pronunciation — with yes a tortured first vowel, to avoid risk of being taken to be talking about something prosaic.

  16. Philip Taylor said,

    December 22, 2024 @ 4:38 am

    For me (Briton, formerly home counties, now Cornwall), "morning" and "mourning" are perfect homophones, and I make no attempt at "a tortured first vowel" (or at anything else) to differentiate the two,

  17. Andrew Usher said,

    December 22, 2024 @ 8:12 am

    The vowel you are talking about in the reading is the old CURE diphthong, which was possible in 'mourning' but is just weird in 'Burgundy'. Actually, he says (I think) only 'Burgundians' with that vowel, which may be another attempted foreignism (though actually that diphthong in almost peculiar to English).

    And of course those RP speakers with the horse/hoarse distinction would make it also in morning/mourning, creating what might he heard as intermediate between 'morning' and the 'moorning' previously mentioned. This distinction, though, would be an affectation for any Englishman living today, as much as wine/whine.

    But I also make no attempt to distinguish them, and can't easily imagine an occasion where it would be needed.

    Sorry for my horrible typing in the last, I really should always compose offline, especially if I don't have a genuine desktop keyboard before me.

  18. Philip Taylor said,

    December 22, 2024 @ 9:54 am

    "This distinction, though, would be an affectation for any Englishman living today, as much as wine/whine" — I realy must protest. I naturally aspirate all "wh-" words (including "whine") and there is nothing "affected" about this — it is simply how I speak.

  19. David Marjanović said,

    December 22, 2024 @ 11:47 am

    though actually that diphthong in almost peculiar to English

    Much of German has it as a natural consequence of non-rhoticity. But I think that's pretty much it, and northern German has largely monophthongized the -r diphthongs.

  20. Andrew Usher said,

    December 22, 2024 @ 11:50 am

    I'm not sure if that actually contradicts me, because 'as much as' = 'at least as much as'. But I meant nothing especially negative with the term 'affectation', and in that line I'd inquire if you have always made the distinction, as it is quite possible for a pronunciation to be consciously acquired yet eventually become "simply how I speak" and not feel like affectation at all – since this is so much the case with me, I could hardly say anything to anyone else's doing it. And at the time you grew up acquiring /hw/ would not have seemed so strange.

    On the topic of this thread, it's unfortunate there's no baseline – the histogram would be better compared to other speech of this nature, and I am unfamiliar with what this would show. While the Englishman varies his pitch, perhaps the American varies his volume – though in a language like English neither can be found anywhere near pure. It seems to be a stereotype of American speech among Brits that the accent of loudness is heavily used, which though often meant as negative, I find no more so than pitch, if (in either case) it remains within the tolerance of the listeners, as it surely must in general, and does in this recording.

  21. Philip Taylor said,

    December 22, 2024 @ 12:36 pm

    It is my impression (nothing more) that spoken English has become noticeably more pitch-modulated than was previously the case. On almost every BBC Radio 4 broadcast I hear speakers use what I think of as "the major-5th tic" to indicate that the word or phrase in question is (normally) one of a series of such items in a spoken list, or (less common) to indicate that it is the key word or phrase in the prose that surrounds it. Back in the days of Sax Rohmer, the Chinese (or "Chinamen", as they were termed) were always said to speak in a sing-song manner : I think that if Sax were alive today, he would be forced to agree that the English now sadly do the same.

  22. Andrew Usher said,

    December 24, 2024 @ 12:40 pm

    I could not disagree, for the kind of Standard British presented to the public anyway, and I'm sure there have been more scholarly discussions of it. But this passage hardly qualifies as modern enough for that, even though it's noticeably (though, as I said, not particularly objectionably) pitch-modulated to my ears.

  23. Benjamin E. Orsatti said,

    December 27, 2024 @ 11:30 am

    This is fascinating! And a little disheartening, too. I'd always thought of the American speech patterns as being very "dynamic", but there _does_ seem to be far much more variety in terms of intonation and pitch in Mr. Mayes speech than in your "Standard American" speech.

    Thanks for plying your craft on my whimsy, Prof. Liberman.

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