A Milk Habit

aɪ ˈsliːp laɪk ə ˈbeɪbi || ˈevri ˈθriː ˈaʊəz | aɪ ˈweɪk ˈʌp ˈlʊkɪŋ fər ə ˈbɒtl̩

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Commentary

[Don't worry if you find this overwhelming. Don't let yourself be put off. The same phenomena will come up again and again in these transcriptions. There'll be plenty of opportunities for them to sink in over time. Slow and steady, a little each day, is the key to success.]

Explanation: The idiom sleep like a baby means to sleep very well. The teller contrasts this with a literal interpretation of sleeping like a baby: waking up every few hours for a bottle of milk. In the teller’s case, however, the bottle contains an alcoholic drink and he is woken up regularly by the need to drink alcohol.

aː When unstressed, as it usually is, the indefinite article a has the weak form /ə/.

baby: The symbol i represents the same vowel phoneme as the symbol iː. We use i in unstressed syllables and iː in stressed syllables. This distinction isn't very helpful for TEFL purposes and learners should simply treat the two symbols as the same. Because we are using two different symbols for one phoneme, this means our transcription isn't truly phonemic (phonemic transcription = one symbol for each phoneme).

every: When schwa /ə/ is followed by /r/ and then an unstressed syllable, the schwa /ə/ is often elided. Memory /ˈmeməri/ becomes /ˈmemri/, separate (adj.) /ˈsepərət/ becomes /ˈseprət/, etc. In the case of every, the word is so common that for most people /ˈevri/ is probably the form they have in their mental lexicon and the form /ˈevəri/, if they occasionally use it, is caused by the influence of the spelling.

hours: There is no /h/ at the beginning of the word hour, even though there is an <h> in the spelling.

When a noun ends in a voiced sound (i.e. a vowel or one of the voiced consonants /b d ɡ v ð m n ŋ l/), the regular plural is formed by adding /z/. The same pattern applies to possessive s, third person singular s and the contracted form of is.

The sequence /aʊə/ (and the sequence /aɪə/, also less frequently the sequences /eɪə ɔɪə əʊə/) is often referred to as a ‘triphthong’. This is incorrect. A triphthong is a vowel which glides from one vowel position towards a second and then towards a third, all in one syllable. The sequence /aʊə/ (and /aɪə eɪə ɔɪə əʊə) is a disyllabic sequence of a diphthong (one syllable) and schwa (another syllable).

The triphthong vs. disyllabic sequence confusion is caused by the tendency towards smoothing in this context (more so in the case of /aʊə aɪə/ than the others). Smoothing involves the loss of the gliding element of a diphthong. In the case of /aʊə/, the glide in the direction of /ʊ/ is lost, resulting in the diphthong [aə] and the loss of a syllable. This diphthong can itself be smoothed to [a:], a long open vowel. Depending on the quality used as the starting point of the /aʊ aɪ/ diphthongs, the long open [a:] vowel resulting from smoothing may or may not be identical to the speaker’s /ɑː/ vowel.

Historically, smoothing has led to the word our having the common variant pronunciation /ɑː/ (as a citation form, not merely a realisation of an underlying /aʊə/). In all other cases, however, smoothing is an optional process, some speakers doing it more or less than others or not at all. Learners need not imitate it, or even perhaps should not imitate it because extensive smoothing can be percieved as socially conspicuous or ‘posh’.

for: When unstressed, as it usually is, for has the weak form /fə/.

When a word ends in schwa /ə/ and is immediately followed (without a pause) by a word beginning with a vowel, the consonant /r/ is inserted between the vowels. This process is known as /r/-liaison and also occurs after /ɑː ɔː ɜː eə ɪə ʊə/.

for a: The sequence of weak forms /fər ə/ provides the appropriate phonetic context for the elision of schwa /ə/ described above (see every), and although it hasn’t been included in this transcription, for a frequently becomes /frə/ in this context.

bottle: Phonemically, the final syllable of bottle is /əl/. When this syllable is preceded by /t/, however, the schwa /ə/ isn't pronounced. Instead the articulators move directly from the position for /t/ to the position for /l/. This is easy to do in the case of /t/ because /t/ is articulated with tongue-tip against the alveolar ridge and the side-rims of the tongue against the upper molars, while /l/ is articulated with only the tongue-tip against the alveolar ridge. It is possible to move directly from /t/ to /l/ without an intervening vowel, therefore, merely by lowering the side-rims of the tongue from the side molars and leaving the tongue-tip in place. This is known as lateral release.

Note that in English, syllabic /l/ is not a phoneme in its own right, but merely a special way of realising the syllable /əl/. This means that when we use a special symbol [l̩] for it in transcription, it makes our transcription non-phonemic (because we are now using more than one symbol for each phoneme and introducing a special symbol to show a particular phonetic detail). It is worthwhile including this feature in transcriptions for EFL purposes, however, because it is a difficult area for learners and this draws their attention to it.

I sleep like a baby. Every three hours I wake up looking for a bottle.