Talk:Conservative Received Pronunciation

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Why do we need this article?[edit]

I would like to suggest that WP would be better off without this article. The ground is already pretty well covered in the Received pronunciation article, and this one is full of faults. It contains no references beyond a link to a rather unsatisfactory British Library page that summarizes the phonemes of RP. The writer clearly does not not understand the difference between phonological contrasts and allophonic variation (almost all of the so-called phonological features are in fact allophonic differences). The selection of individuals chosen as example speakers is quite odd. There is little or no explanation of what "conservative" actually means in this context. I am surprised that WP's rigorous vetting procedure allowed this piece to be published. I could quite easily edit the text to remove the mistakes, but in my opinion what would be left would not be worth having - better to move anything worth keeping into the 'historical' section of the Received Pronunciation article.Then remove this one. RoachPeter (talk) 09:04, 27 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Well, today's recent edits have certainly made this article a whole lot better! RoachPeter (talk) 16:38, 27 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

This article still needs a lot of work to remove unsupported or incorrect material, and even then should (in my opinion) be merged into the main RP article. There is a fundamental problem with the idea of Conservative RP, in that the article treats it as a single, identifiable accent that can be recognized in the population of RP speakers. Conservative RP is said to have "declined in favour of other, less-conservative accents", but all that is happening is that pronunciation within all accents is constantly changing, so inevitably older RP speakers will have a different pronunciation from younger ones, and people who were born in the 19th century and are now dead spoke differently from old people who are still alive. It makes no sense to refer to the pronunciation of Daniel Jones or Winston Churchill as "conservative" - they just spoke with the accent of their class at the time they were alive. The remark about "commentators of Pathé News and, prior to the 1960s, the BBC" is just anecdotal. I'm sure it's true that some people alive today speak with an accent that is closer to that of RP of past times than that of most speakers of their age (for example, Jacob Rees-Mogg sounds more old-fashioned than D. Cameron), and that could be classed as an instance of someone speaking RP in a conservative way, but that isn't what this article is talking about. Essentially, the article mixes up diachronic and synchronic description. RoachPeter (talk) 18:34, 21 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I totally agree that anything worth saving should be moved to the 'historical' section of the main RP page. Incidentally, another problem with this article is that it doesn't distinguish between what Upton (2004) and Ramsaran (1990) call "Traditional RP", referring to the accent as transcribed by Jones in later editions of the EPD and its subsequent updates by Gimson, and Wells's "U-RP"/Cuttenden's "Refined RP" which is an older and much more affected version. A notable instance is the vowel in CLOTH. Only elderly speakers from the 1910s must have retained /ɔː/ in all the examples given in this article. Jones gives /ɒ/ for 'cross', 'cloth', 'because' and 'gone' as first options in EPD 6th ed., which was published in 1944. 'Gone' and 'because' had actually already /ɒ/ in the very first edition. Only 'off' and 'often' retained /ɔː/ up to the 12th ed. and were promptly discarded by Gimson. I don't own a copy of Gimson (1980), but it seems to me that what Upton calls "Traditional RP" should be equated with Gimson's "General RP", the accent of adult speakers born in the 40s-50s or early. Meyerbeer 91 (talk) 12:04, 19 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tagged the article. I agree that we should merge it and that it is poorly sourced... with one website. Mr KEBAB (talk) 13:11, 5 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Merger complete. Klbrain (talk) 18:17, 6 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Idiosyncratic features[edit]

The statement about the -day ending of days of the week is unsourced. It's flatly contradicted by John Wells in his Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (see entry for -day for explanation). I will remove this section unless someone wants to defend it. I've already taken out the irrelevant reference to Andrew Marr. RoachPeter (talk) 09:15, 11 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I've now removed this piece RoachPeter (talk) 07:41, 18 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]