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I am a native U.K. speaker with a strong Midlands dialect, and I am very aware of other dialects and regional accents from around the world of English speakers, and I really enjoy this.

I am a data scientist, with a strong interest in natural language processing, and I have a problem with the phonetic representation of the word oranges. NOTE: Not singular orange, I am specifically referencing the plural word oranges.

So here is my problem, illustrated with references from different online resources:

  1. youtube pronunciation video | How to Pronounce Oranges
  2. forvo pronunciation audio files | How to Pronounce Oranges
  3. youdao dictionary definition | [ɔrɪndʒs]
  4. baidu dictionary | 英 ['ɒrɪndʒs] 美 ['ɒrɪndʒs]
  5. phonetic link | /'ɒrɪndʒɪz/
  6. phonetic link | ˈɑrɪndʒəz
  7. CMU pronouncing dict, ARPABET | AO R AH N JH AH Z .

I live in China, and Chinese internet resources such as 3. and 4., show that dʒ is followed straight away by s, meanwhile, other websites such as 5. and 6., show at least some phonetic "e sounding phoneme" in between dʒ and s.

From a native speaker perspective, I feel that 5., 6. and 7. are correct in the final stages of the word in order to make it plural, while 3. and 4. are incorrect. So as a native speaker, with almost 30 years of experience with the language, tend to believe my instincts in a lot of circumstances.

Now when I try to persuade colleagues that resources 3. and 4. are not correct, I fail straight away because these corporations tend to be treated as the truth. As such they do not believe me, emulate the phoneme suggestions of 3. and 4. and proceed to say the word from what I see as incorrect, which brings up more problems in the app we are building, described further below.

I know my mouth can produce the sound /s/ straight after /dʒ/, so my first theory that it is just a natural reflex of the mouth to add a slight vowel sound in between /s/ and /dʒ/, thus not needing to actually include this vowel phoneme in the phonetic representation of the word, was disproved.

My second thought that as a native speaker, have I learned this addition of a vowel from the natural evolution of language? Was it many many years ago pronounced without a final vowel sound? As such, the phonetic representation of oranges has now changed?

So with different resources providing different information, is there a more definitive way or better solution as to better accurately describe how the word is said, or in part, said by the vast majority? And I'm really not talking about accent based, like U.S.A vs UK banana, but more like the word oranges, that so far to me, is not regionally bound for the addition of a vowel near the end to make it plural.

We have a phonetic analysis tool in our app, where the user can say some words and it will try to determine whether these phonemes have been uttered, but with these different definitions and expected phonemes present in the word, this becomes even more difficult because right now I am unclear as the what phonemes should be expected to be uttered for that word, if an additional vowel is picked up, should that be treated as the correct ending, or not?

This post was fairly difficult to write, as phonetics are very much an audio-based thing, so if anything was unclear, please let me know and I'll try to re-word it better.

alexjiaoliu
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  • Does this unexpected transcription occur for any other words? I checked the Baidu dictionary, and I don't see the pattern in "boxes", "badges", "ridges", or "faces". Maybe someone just mistyped that one word. Do Baidu and Youdao use the same source? – Jetpack Nov 08 '18 at 18:35
  • It seems the real issue is social/cultural/psychological, not linguistic: how do you convince people that a source they regard as authoritative can be wrong on a specific point? One possibility is to ask your colleagues: if a Chinese source and an Anglophone source disagreed on a question of Chinese pronunciation, which would they trust more, and why? Then — in part by analogy, and in part because you’re reassuring them that you’re not dismissing Chinese sources in general — they may be more willing to accept that an Anglophone source is more reliable for English pronunciation. – PLL Nov 08 '18 at 22:27
  • Do you consider the audio file for #3 to be incorrect? Is this how they are pronouncing it? – Acccumulation Nov 08 '18 at 22:59
  • @Jetpack you are right that other similar instances are mostly phonetically correct, but over the years I've encountered this quite a few times, I just can't remember specifically the cases. – alexjiaoliu Nov 09 '18 at 01:45
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    @PLL summed it up nicely in that how do you convince people that a source they regard as authoritative can be wrong on a specific point?, sometimes they feel that anglophone sources are too vague, or complex because also explained in English, so default back to the Chinese source. – alexjiaoliu Nov 09 '18 at 01:45
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    @Acccumulation, the audio file sounds correct to me, maybe artificially generated but still sufficient to hear the final vowel, but the phonetics do not match. Now to me as a native speaker, I feel I can hear this, but I would guess for most English learners, it's not so obvious, so the using the combination of both, they would then lean towards agreeing with the written phonetics. I say this because when I started learning Chinese, I would default to the pinyin alot to know how to say the word when studying alone. Note; they pronounce it similar, but with practically no vowel sound. – alexjiaoliu Nov 09 '18 at 01:50
  • I am trying to imagine how I would even say /dʒ/ immediately followed by /z/ ... Maybe that is possible in some Chinese, which is the reason for this anomaly. – GEdgar Feb 05 '19 at 22:50

3 Answers3

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A non-negotiable phonological rule of all standard Englishes inserts a vowel (either /ə/ or /ɪ/, depending on the variety of English) between base-final sibilant consonants and the plural morpheme /z/. The /z/ morpheme remains voiced in this position after a vowel.

The sibilant consonants in English are /s, z, ʃ, ʒ, tʃ, dʒ/

Therefore for the following words:

  • bus /bʌs/
  • quiz /kwɪz/
  • rush /rʌʃ/
  • beige /beɪʒ/
  • hutch /hutʃ/
  • judge /dʒʌdʒ/

We see the following plurals:

  • buses /bʌsɪz/
  • quizzes /kwɪzɪz/
  • rushes /rʌʃɪz/
  • beiges /beɪʒɪz/
  • hutches /hutʃɪz/
  • judges /dʒʌdʒɪz/

And the word oranges is therefore /'ɒrɪndʒɪz/ in so-called Standard British or /'ɔːrɪndʒəz/ in General American. In General American there may be some variation in the initial vowel or in terms of whether speakers use /ɪ/ or /ə/ in the final syllable. However, there is NO exception to the insertion of a final vowel before the plural morpheme in either British or American standard Englishes.

Notice that both the youdau and baidu entries are completely and utterly incorrect giving an /s/ variant of the plural morpheme after a voiced consonant. This is a phonological impossibility in English.

For a beginner-level introduction to English plurals, the Original Poster's colleagues could be directed here: Rachel's English.

Why are some internet dictionaries unreliable? Well, they are not published by reputable publishers or based on research.

Araucaria - Him
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    This is a very informative answer and provided me with the information I was seeking, thank you! – alexjiaoliu Nov 08 '18 at 11:42
  • @jupiar Thankyou. (You might want to wait before selecting an answer though. You mght get a better one!) – Araucaria - Him Nov 08 '18 at 11:43
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    Often Asian bilingual materials are obviously compiled with less input from native English speakers than the Asian language and have strange-sounding English examples; that's at least in part what I'd blame for some erroneous phonetic transcription. e.g., http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_q_ANsJvo3Ho/Sjxn4xn6uQI/AAAAAAAAAAw/1MedaQayXTo/s1600/chestnut.png – Casey Nov 08 '18 at 16:19
  • @Casey, I too have found this out over the years after living in numerous different countries where English is non-native, but it is hard for many people or small businesses to be able/afford to consult with native speakers, it would be great if there was a platform/app for easy access linking English consulting with the populations of native English speakers, I think a lot of people would help out, just for the case of helping out... – alexjiaoliu Nov 09 '18 at 02:00
  • I would have had both a double s in busses and double z in quizzes, but Google ngrams only seems to support me on the latter: https://goo.gl/yVDoFA – nohat Nov 09 '18 at 02:47
  • @nohat: There is an older question about the spelling of plural forms like quizzes and bus(s)es: Why is the plural of “quiz” spelled with double Z? As I say in my answer there, there doesn't seem to be any completely straightforward pattern to the use of consonant doubling before -es. – herisson Nov 09 '18 at 03:16
  • It can be hard, but surely it's not too much to ask if you're compiling a bilingual dictionary! – Casey Nov 11 '18 at 04:35
  • If the Chinese transcriptions are morphophonemic enough, they can be considered correct. Whether the plural morpheme should be considered an /s/ or a /z/ phoneme is debatable – the only reason it’s usually considered /s/ is the assumption that /z/ must be the underlying form because it’s the one that appears in most contexts, i.e., Occam’s razor. And since the epenthetic vowel is automatic and exception-free, it can be safely left out of morphophonemic transcription. It’s more likely Youdao and Baidu are just wrong here, but they can be defended. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Feb 05 '19 at 23:46
  • @JanusBahsJacquet: The reasons for supposing that the plural morpheme is underlyingly /z/ are more complicated than just "/z/ appears in more contexts". A process turning underlying word-final /z/ to /s/ after a voiceless consonant can be explained as a way of avoiding invalid consonant clusters in English; a process turning underlying /s/ to /z/ after voiced sounds cannot be explained in that way, because either /s/ or /z/ is phonotactically valid in English after a voiced sound. – herisson Feb 06 '19 at 05:46
  • @JanusBahsJacquet: Although it's not particularly dispositive evidence, there are also creative spellings like "Flipz®" that indicate that English speakers consider the letter "z" as a plausible representation of the sound [s] in this context, which supports the idea that the plural morpheme might be underlyingly /z/. – herisson Feb 06 '19 at 05:50
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    @JanusBahsJacquet Well, that would be a defence of sorts, if they didn´t use a /z/ for their other plurals! ;) – Araucaria - Him Feb 06 '19 at 10:57
  • Orange ya gonna mention that in narrow transcriptions, regressive assimilation from the nasal consonant can color its preceding vowel, perhaps even to [ẽʒ] in some speakers with [nd] deletion? There’s also a lot of variation in the vowel at the start of the word, depending on regional dialect, from the close almost monophthongal vowel of owe in the American Midwest to that of the more open but still rounded awe on the Eastern seaboard or the Deep South, and notoriously even to that of father in certain New York City who go pronouncing horrible quite harribly. :) – tchrist Apr 06 '19 at 14:34
  • @tchrist I didn't think it was particularly pertinent for this question about dictionary transcriptions. However, I thougt your comments were very interesting (especially for someone like me, whose knowledge of American English is very limited). And so I have asked a question with a view to you (or someone else) answering ... – Araucaria - Him Apr 07 '19 at 22:16
  • @tchrist Orange you going to give an answer to this question here? – Araucaria - Him Apr 08 '19 at 08:34
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One of the questions you ask is:

Was it many many years ago pronounced without a final vowel sound? As such, the phonetic representation of oranges has now changed?

Actually, it was the other way around.

In Old English, many nouns were pluralized by adding /as/, for example, stan (stone) became stanas.

In Middle English, this rule started being applied to nearly all nouns (a few kept their old plurals, like mouse/mice), but we also started dropping the vowel except after /s/, /ʃ/, /tʃ/, /z/, /ʒ/, and /dʒ/, so stone pluralizes as stones.

Peter Shor
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The Youdao and Baidu dictionary entries are incorrect according to the typical conventions for transcribing English. The Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology (2013) says "The allomorph /ɪz/ follows base-final sibilant consonants (/s, z, ʃ, ʒ, ʧ, ʤ/)" (§7.2.2.2).

Strictly speaking, /dʒɪz/ is a phonemic, rather than a phonetic transcription. Phonetic realizations vary between speakers, but I can't think of circumstances where it would be useful to transcribe a native English speaker's pronunciation of "oranges" with [dʒs].

herisson
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