comfortable

I have previously discussed (eg 20 Feb 09) the work of Jennifer Jenkins, and her insistence that speakers of English in places such as Brunei do not need to mimic the accent of people from Inner-Circle places such as Britain. In her book English as a Lingua Franca: Attitude and Identity (OUP, 2007), she proposes a Lingua Franca Core (LFC) of just those features of pronunciation that are essential for international communication, and she suggests that speakers should be free to choose how to pronounce sounds that are outside the LFC according to the locally prevailing accent.

This seems to make a lot of sense, as slavishly mimicking a British or American accent does not seem to be appropriate for most learners of English in the modern world. The problem lies with which sounds are included within the LFC and which are not.

Jenkins suggests that vowel quality (eg the distinction between send and sand) should be excluded, but vowel length (eg the distinction between the long vowel in pool and the short vowel in pull) be included; but many teachers are likely to disagree with this, if only because there are far more words that are differentiated by means of the /e/~/æ/ distinction than the /u:/~/ʊ/ one. In reality, it seems that agreeing on any set of sounds that can be excluded from the LFC is always going to be tough.

Recently in the Philippines, I heard someone pronounce comfortable as [kʌmfətəbəl], ie with four syllables rather than the three that are usually suggested in dictionaries; and it occurred to me that this pronunciation could never be misunderstood by anyone, so why should anyone worry about it? Furthermore, if comfortable is pronounced as three syllables (as I tend to say it), it contains the consonant cluster [mft] in the middle, which is really quite tough. (In fact, ending a syllable with [mf] only occurs very rarely in English, for example in the medical term lymph and the colloquial word bumpf.)

So, if comfortable with four syllables is easier to say and can be understood by everyone, why not encourage it? I suspect that it will become the international norm one day, regardless of what Inner-Circle speakers from places such as Britain think.