Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2014 March 21

Welcome to the Wikipedia Entertainment Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

March 21

Kenneth Branagh

How is Kenneth Branagh's last name pronounced? Thank you. Please don't use those IPA symbols; I never understand them. Perhaps, a phonetic spelling – or words that the name might rhyme with – would be helpful. Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 00:49, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

BRAN-ah. Rhymes with Nana and Hannah. Or, for arhoticists: banner, canner, planner, spanner or tanner. (See how being rhotic reduces your options.) ---- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 01:01, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

I think even us Londoners can manage an "r" in "Branagh"! Alansplodge (talk) 10:03, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

?? That's not what rhoticism means. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 10:49, 23 March 2014 (UTC)

BRAN-uh. The Kenneth Branagh article has IPA then also an English pronunciation respelling right after that. To use the pronunciation respelling, the only special symbol you have to know is the upside down e -- it sounds like a weak uh (the a in about). --Bavi H (talk) 01:09, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

Where I come from, Nana and Hannah are likewise pronounced NA-nuh and HA-nuh (short A). ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:19, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

Which short "a"? As in "father" or as in "cat"? --Jayron32 05:00, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

As in cat. A better phonetic spelling would be NANN-uh or HANN-uh. Father would be FAH-ther. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:03, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

"Father" has a short a? I can't fathom that. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 05:11, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

It certainly doesn't have the same "a" as in "cake" or the same "a" as in "cat". The problem with many phonics-based reading programs in the U.S. is that many reduce all vowel sounds to two varieties of each letter as having a "short" variety and a "long" variety. That is, the difference between the "i" in bit (the "short "i") versus the "i" in "bite" (the long variety). When such systems fail to account for all varieties of vowel sounds in English, they oversimplify reality, for example missing the fact that there are more than 10 vowel sounds (a short and a long of each a-e-i-o-u) in English, and so when someone says "short-a" it can be unclear whether they mean the sound represented by the "a" in "father" or the "a" in "cat" (this is further complicated in America by words like "Aunt" where some dialects use the "father"-a and some use the "cat"-a) --Jayron32 05:32, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

One interesting thing is that BRAN-uh, NAN-uh and HAN-uh would all be pronounced the same way, except that in British/Aussie English the first A would be the way Americans say "father", and in American English the first A would be the way Americans say "cat". Regarding Phonics, it's been a long time since early elementary school days, but whatever Phonics was then, it worked for me, as it enables me to take a reasonable shot at pronouncing most any word that comes along. My wife, who was taught reading the traditional way, struggles with the pronunciations of new words. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:19, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

The phonics method is excellent when it is taught correctly. That cannot be overlooked. It isn't difficult to teach that there are 3 (rather than 2) usual varieties of "a". --Jayron32 14:20, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

So, the "a" of "father" and the "a" of "cat" are both referred to as "short a"? Is that the case? Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 17:22, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

Yes. Wikipedia actually has an article titled Phonological history of English short A which touches on this. The last section titled "Development of the /ɑː/ phoneme" --Jayron32 20:17, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

I don't recall ever being told that there was only a long or short A and nothing in between. I'll see if I can find my old Phonics book and see what it has, if anything. It seems to be hard to find on the internet. They give examples like "cat" and "hat", "bake" and "cake", but not "father", "farther", "further", etc. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:25, 22 March 2014 (UTC)

The catch is that Americans rarely use the vowel of father in words that aren't spelt with an o or, in caught-cot merger dialects, with an au/aw.

I rhyme get/fetch/catch/any/penny--cast/fast/passed/half/laugh--have/sad/dad/--father/lot/cot/bother/macho--caught/cost/bossed. I do not rhyme halve and have, and I do not rhyme can (n.) and can (v.) μηδείς (talk) 01:13, 23 March 2014 (UTC)

See, in my dialect, father and aunt have the same vowel, while bother has a different one. I don't believe this is the caught-cot merger, rather it's the slightly different "mama-comma" merger (of which my native dialect does not have). Most General American dialects have merged the vowels in mama and comma, but New England has not. See New England English: "Eastern New England maintains a distinction between the vowel [a] as in father or calm versus [ɒ] as in dog or hot, a pair that is merged in virtually all other North American accents." In New England, the "father" sound is almost always in words spelled with "a" and the "cot" sound almost always in words spelled with "o". New Englanders, for example, would pronounce the word spelled "mama" different from the one spelled "momma". --Jayron32 22:32, 23 March 2014 (UTC)

I am aware of that distinction, you hear it in depictions of speakers from Maine or the old Deep South. The choice of counter-example is bad in the article, since hot and dog are quite distinct in midland accents like Philly's without the cot aught merger, although we merge father and bother and aunt and ant. In NE you hear hawt dawg and in the south haht dahg, but in the NE it's haht dawg.μηδείς (talk) 06:39, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, all. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 18:35, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

Brown Birds Scout-girls ?

Hello Learned Ones ! In Friends (season 3, episode 10 : "The One Where Rachel Quits", December 1996) Ross accidentally pushes a little girl down the stairs while she is selling Xmas cookies to the building residents. She happens to be part of a "Brown Birds Scout-girls" team, with brown attire and a feathered beret, a nearly military salute, and a chirping whistle. I looked for that scout-team unknown to me, & found nothing, only the notion that "Brown birds" are discreet female passerines... Do they exist as a scout-team, or is it just a wise crack of Michael Curtis & G.S. Malins ? Thanks a lot beforehand for your answers Arapaima (talk) 11:22, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

Would they be Brownies ? --Xuxl (talk) 13:26, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

TV shows and movies will often use uniforms and names similar to the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts but due to copyright reasons will not use the actual names and uniforms. Some camp (pun intended) aspects will be thrown in for additional humor, e.g. the feathers on the hat and the whistle. Dismas|^(talk) 14:58, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

See also "Scout Out" at TV Tropes (which mentions the "Brown Birds" in Friends as well) and, more general, "Bland-Name Product". ---Sluzzelin talk 17:58, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

Yes, there is an ad on US TV now where a little girl in a uniform rings the doorbell and tries to tempt the woman into buying a box of donuts. This is also clearly a parody of girl scouts trying to sell cookies door-to-door. StuRat (talk) 16:30, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

As a thank to all of you, here are some pretty brown birds...Arapaima (talk) 09:04, 25 March 2014 (UTC)

I suspect that the British Scout Association and Girlguiding UK are less litigious than their American colleagues, because advertisers and comedy scriptwriters over here don't feel the need to disguise Scouts and Guides as anything else in their productions. Scout and Guide uniforms are protected here by the Chartered Associations (Protection of Names and Uniforms) Act 1926 but I imagine that using the law to stop people from taking the piss would not enhance their public image, or maybe they don't want to spend lots of money enriching the legal profession. We have quite a good article called Scouting in popular culture. Alansplodge (talk) 12:02, 22 March 2014 (UTC)

key

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Jfd62PvX4w

Hello, can you tell me that this song is in which key please ? Because it's hard to know. Fort123 (talk) 16:08, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

C♯ minor. ---Sluzzelin talk 17:43, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

I'm not sure that it's in C♯ minor. It's a Mixolydian mode, but the singing part is in G♭ major. Fort123 (talk) 18:41, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

It's a modal piece, and I guess up to a point it's up to the listeners where (and whether) they hear one or several tonal centers. I don't remember what I heard :-), Now I hear the initial and fade-out vamp as a repeated G♭ minor 7 - B 7 progression which would resolve itself in E. ---Sluzzelin talk 18:54, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

Sorry, I shouldn't have answered this, as I have no phones and only a few tiny holes of lo-fi built-in speaker plus am tired and can't even do simple transposition. My method of going by the initial and final vamp was careless, and I can't even hear the bass. There might be some friction or unexpectedness between the sung melody and the underlying chords I'm able to hear, and one of them does sound like G♭ 7 (dominant 7) which fits mixolydian, but I think I'd best butt out now, and let others help you, or else revisit when I can listen properly and use a keyboard for assistance. Sorry for all the confusion. ---Sluzzelin talk 19:49, 21 March 2014 (UTC)