Your Public Best - Lillian Brown [49]
Vowels require exaggerated movements of the lips and the tongue. Some are pronounced in the front of the articulators, some in the middle of the throat, and some in the back of the throat.
Diphthongs are two sounds pronounced together.
Correct articulation of the sounds requires free movement of the lips and tongue on the gum ridges, teeth, hard palate, and soft palate.
If you are interested in phonetics, many good books on the subject are available, which will include exercises for practicing the various sounds. Such books will also discuss the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which is the universally accepted norm for pronunciation worldwide.
ARTICULATION AND PRONUNCIATION
The correct, confident articulation of all of the sounds in our language is imperative for the public person. Your pronunciation of the letters of the alphabet must be clearly heard by your listeners.
Without thinking about it, try saying aloud, “That is a mighty hardy horse, full of strength.” Did you say “midy” instead of mighty”? “Hah dy” instead of “hardy,” or “harty” instead of “hardy”? “Hahs” instead of “horse”? “Strankth” instead of “strength”?
These differences could be attributed to regional accents. Think of how differently people with marked local accents from London, Brooklyn, Texas, or Vermont might pronounce the phrase “of course, I am” or a sentence such as “I refuse to leave the land of my fathers.” A friend of mine from South Carolina pronounces “beer” as something akin to “bay-r”—sort of like she’s saying “bear” with two syllables. Also, I once heard about a comedian from Texas who gives a spiel about how Texans speak. It included the comment that some Texans would pronounce the words “war,” “where,” “wire,” and even “why are” all the same, close to something like “wah-r.”
However, if you mispronounce words, it may not be regional in origin. You could have what has been called “lazy lips”; that is, you just don’t bother to enunciate particularly clearly in your daily speech. (An example from the sentence given above would be your saying “midy” instead of “mighty.”) Or you may “swallow” certain letters or sounds, such as when a Cockney-speaking person drops the letter “h” and says “ ’ardly” instead of “hardly.” Or you may slur certain sounds, such as the southerner or midwesterner who says “fishin’ ” instead of “fishing.”
Finally, you may just consistently mispronounce certain words because most other Americans seem to mispronounce them. For example, say “athlete” aloud. Did you say it with three syllables (“ath-e-lete”) or two (“ath-lete”)? It has two syllables, yet many Americans seem to say it with three. Other commonly mispronounced words—and there are dozens of them—include “adem” for “atom,” “partically” for “particularly,” “pin” when they mean “pen,” and “phodagraph” for “photograph.”
Another common mispronunciation is adding a letter to a word where it doesn’t belong. For example, some people who grew up in Pennsylvania may say, “I am going to ‘warsh’ my clothes” and “Warshington, D.C.”
Whatever problems you may be having with improper pronunciation or articulation (which means making distinct pronunciations), it is very true that when your speech is difficult to understand, the ear strains to hear what is being said. When you “swallow” the consonants or leave certain letters out, the mind tries to fill in the missing sounds.
During normal conversation, your friends can easily understand you. But when you are contending with room noise, coughing, broadcast static, and amplifying-device distortions, your articulation must be correct.
Also, when you talk too fast, you take shortcuts across the pronunciation of the consonants and vowels. The ear cannot grasp what