Skip to 11:18 for the actual linguistics content. The earlier part includes analogy to film/video editing styles. The ad read is also in that earlier section.
Geoff Lindsey has some damn great videos on English phonetics and phonology, I heavily recommend them; for example, this one, about the transcription of Standard Southern British vowels; to keep it short
- the diphthongs should be treated as vowel+consonant sequences, not as one vowel transitioning into another.
- /i: u:/ behave more like diphthongs than long vowels, and should be transcribed as such.
On the video shared by the OP, I think Lindsey made a great job highlighting that prosody is also a feature that a language may or may not use to convey information. English is mostly stress-timed (unless you’re Welsh, and specially if you also speak Welsh), so it uses prosodic stress a lot; in the meantime, Spanish (he compared EN and ES in his James Bond example) is mostly syllable-timed, so it barely uses this sort of reduction - if anything, quicker speech tends to attack consonants (cue to Chilean [äo] for /aðo/ -ado) way more often.
He also mentions L2 speakers; it’s worth noting prosody is a fucking pain to assimilate, so it’s no wonder that non-native speakers rarely use it. (Also, anecdotally speaking, I’ve noticed people highly proficient in a non-native language tend to let that language affect their native one’s prosody.)
One thing I would add is that this video made it seem as though English is relatively unique in being stress-timed. But there were comments under the video from speakers of a wide variety of languages, including Norwegian and German (which, combined with English, suggests perhaps this is an ancestral feature of the Germanic family?), as well as Ukranian and Russian. So it doesn’t seem to be quite as rare as the video (perhaps unintentionally) implied.
One thing I would add is that this video made it seem as though English is relatively unique in being stress-timed.
Indeed, it isn’t - it’s a really common feature across the world.
which, combined with English, suggests perhaps this is an ancestral feature of the Germanic family?
IMO it’s possible, but unlikely. Two reasons:
- PGerm had a 3-way vowel length contrast, so morae were likely a big deal in the language. Odds are that the language was either mora-timed (like Latin) or a middle ground between mora-timed and stress-timed.
- Isochrony changes really fast, diachronically speaking. Portuguese is a good example of that - all dialectal variation is ~600yo, and yet the language shows dialects all across the syllable-timed vs. stress-timed continuum.
Isochrony changes really fast, diachronically speaking
Makes sense. I suppose this very conversation is proof of that. Some people seem to be claiming some varieties of American English lack it, and certainly the video shows that the Influencer sociolect (if you can call it that) lacks it.
