A
close look at voiceless fricative sound /ʃ/ – how to pronounce it, and
where it appears in English. The article also contains several ways to
tell people to ‘shut up’ and a very difficult tongue twister…
Last
September the BBC released a documentary about a Polish lady living in
the UK who felt she was suffering discrimination as a result of her
accent. In the film a voice coach is hired and, presumably mistaking the
accent for an infestation of ants, promptly claims she can “get rid of”
it. What? We looked into this bizarre use of language further….
Silent
letters are everywhere in English, largely owing to the language’s
rapid and uneven development in vocabulary and pronunciation. They cause
problems for native speakers and language learners alike, so in this
guide, we looked at silent consonants B C D G H K L N P R S W and worked
out any patterns in their origins.
Puns
are jokes that play on words for comic effect, many using similar
pronunciations of different words. In this article we chose 10 puns and
worked out why they were funny. We also explored a particularly unfunny
type of pun called a ‘dad joke’.
By
far the most popular article on this year’s blog was a fairly technical
look at how vowel length changes in pronunciation. We explored how the
often quoted distinction between ‘long’ and ‘short’ vowels really
doesn’t work in English and along the way saw how SHIP can easily be
longer than SHEEP.
