Must be a common problem with choirs.
Yesterday at rehearsals I heard the conductor admonish the choir.
'You are singing this in English, I cannot understand you, the guy in the last row of the church doesn't have a chance. Heads UP people'


Bob.

musicvid, I take it that since the heading of the thread is vowels you are commenting on the final vowel in Christmas, not the missing t. I presume you want the vowel pronounced as a schwa.

I never pronounce the t in "often" but many people do. Do you pronounce the t in Christmas? In rapid speech or singing I may not but in careful speech I would.

As an Australian I pronounce the vowels in unstressed syllables as a schwa, but Webster has led practically the whole American nation to discard this practice and pronounce words "as they are spelled (spelt?)", leading to the American drawl. I would think that non-English speakers would probably find that easier to understand than the clipped British accent that preceded it in many quarters, but it also depends on what you are used to.

On the other hand a common practice in American English is to voice an unvoiced consonant following a stressed syllable, so butter becomes budder, and so on. Should we pronounce the r in bird? I don't. Some Americans pronounce it brrrrd.

I have had choir masters insist on exaggerated pronunciations to make sounds "come out right", but they grated on me.

You won't get a country to agree on how English should be pronounced or spelt to reflect that pronunciation, let alone the whole English speaking world. Never-the-less, I think it behoves us all to be conscious of the way we speak because it is human nature to to take short cuts and as a result intelligibility suffers or pretension starts to appear.

Just don't say "particuly" in my hearing.

Peter,

You have made a higher-level inquiry into this, and it's one I spent a year of college investigating. Sorry in advance for the excess that follows.

Basically, it can be boiled down to three basic tasks:

-- Getting people with the same regional influence to sing unified vowels. It is important to the guy in the last row not just from a comprehension standpoint, but surprisingly, from a pitch standpoint too. One person singing "plant" and one singing "plaunt" together will sound out of pitch, even though their fundamental may be exactly the same. It has to do with the dreaded 3rd harmonic (4th partial), that acts only subliminally on the untrained listener.

-- Getting people with different regional or cultural influences to sing unified vowels.

-- Getting people to sing vowels correctly when the lyrics are not in their native tongue. This applies to non-English speakers in an English singing choir, or getting whole choirs enunciating correctly in for instance, German. Obviously, a unifying reference is needed in all three cases.

Phoneticists are quick to point out that there are at least five different ways to pronounce the phonetic "ah" in the Midwest American dialect. Although the differences are subtle, getting everyone on the same vowel is something over which choir directors pull their hair out, and it is their attempts to compensate, sometimes quixotically, that sometimes give us an odd-sounding experience as listeners.

My approach, using a modified IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet), is to use head resonance exercises from the start, tell the choirs to listen closely to each other's vowels, and blend in the space between them. Then once they are in agreement, It's a relatively easy task to come in and darken or lighten the timbre in spots, work a little on shortening the soft consonants, blend the sound by rearranging personnel, and the result is being able to unify both vowels and pitch in a relatively short period of time. I believe my approach is much more natural sounding, especially with dipthongs, than dictating the production of each and every vowel, as some directors do. Then, the only remaining task is to get them to keep their consonants precise, and perfectly together. BTW, I do not specifically enunciate the "t" in "Christmas", but I separate into two distinct syllables.

I have taught the English IPA, and even the first umlauts to third grade classes in only two lessons. Of course, I leave the symbolic references out, but they come away agreeing on the "cat" vowel, the "father" vowel, the "put" vowel, the "shoe" vowel, and so on, and being able to sing passably in Latin and Spanish as a result. I also quiz them (How many neutral vowel sounds (schwa) are in the statement "The monkey ate the banana." Answer: either four or five could be considered correct in different regions).

This is the "bible" of English phonetics for singers. Although it has been modernized by others, it has never been improved upon IMO.
http://www.amazon.com/Singers-Manual-English-Diction/dp/0028711009/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1292778727&sr=8-1

"It's Ride Sally Ride" not "Roide Sally Roide" ...Jimmy Rabbitte (as retold by Steamworks Audio)

{grin}

...Jerry

Yes it would have helped to have IPA symbols in all of the above but even they have to be bent slightly for different cultures. I was just rambling on about the quirks of English because some points above were lost on me, and how we all have our pet hates.

I do relate to the vowel/consonant /i/ in California though. Many years ago I was asked to sing the opening words "Ezekiel cried" in Dry Bones, and someone commented how it should be pronounced Ezeekyel. I just looked up the pronunciation in Macquarie Dictionary and it shows the first and last e as a schwa and both the second e and the i as an ee as in bee. So I was right (sort of).

And as to ride/roid or raid/ride when I say the former you might hear the latter. I remember having difficulty in Canada asking for someone called Gale and the listener thought I was saying Gile.

Well I can think of one pronunciation we all agreed on (and forgot just as quickly).

Dubya

Peter just curious if you do not pronounce the r in bird do you say, I see that bid over there? :-)

And for those familiar with American football, how do you pronounce Brett Favre ?? :-)

mikey

Umm,

D * C K ?

"Peter just curious if you do not pronounce the r in bird do you say, I see that bid over there? :-)"

Good one!

Actually, as it was explained to me in grade three, the vowel-r combination is a digraph, although the teacher didn't put it that way of course. Thus the digraphs er, ir and ur all map to the same phoneme represented by the IPA symbol that looks like a 3. For Americans, the IPA symbol has a small r appended to it to indicate that it is r-coloured (oops, r-colored). The (some?) Scots on the other hand don't see them as digraphs but pronounce the letters as though they were distinct phonemes. Thus the ur in "purple" is pronounced u as in up, followed by r as in rat but with a trill.

this all sounds like an excuse for a cereMOANy!

Earlier in the year I mixed a CD for a singer who sang "Merry Christmas" with a lisp, and a lot of sibilance - now that was tricky - she said to me "Crithto, why doeth Chrithmath thound tho funny?"

Favre? It's pronounced "faherv", the trick is that the first "r" is invisible, and the second "r" is silent.

A lot of words have invisible letters, they're just not as obvious as the silent letters.