Tendencies in particular words.

Apart from the aforementioned tendencies in British pronunciation, there are changes in the pronunciation of some particular words. Such words acquire an additional variant of pronunciation which may subse­quently become the first one. Probably the best known examples are poor and sure. The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English by A. S. Hornby and A. P. Cowie, published in 1982, gives their pronun­ciation as [ргю(г)] and [ [t>e(r)] respectively. Ensure and insure, the de­rivatives of sure, are both recommended to pronounce [in' fuo(r)]. How­ever, dictionaries published twenty years later, such as the Modern Eng­lish-Russian Dictionary by V. K. Mtiller and the Macmillan English Dic­tionary, both published in 2004, give different pronunciations, not the same one, for these words, viz. [pn] for poor and [ [ >•] for sure (the Macmillan English Dictionary also gives [ f гю] as the second variant of pronunciation). In one of English textbooks, shore and sure were given as homophones. As for the words ensure and insure, these dictionaries give different pronunciations for them - [т^л \Щ for ensure and [m [иэ] for insure. Another example of the change of pronunciation is the word seamstress. The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current Eng­lish of 1982 gives the pronunciation f si:mstns], while the two aforemen­tioned dictionaries of 2004 give the pronunciation f semstns]. The 7^th edi-

tion of the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of 2005 shows both pronunciations for each of these words, the traditional variant and the new one.

Such quick changes in pronunciation are possible in English due to the fact that the pronunciation of words is not directly connected with the spelling (i.e. each letter in a particular position does not always represent the same sound), and the way English words are read is ambiguous in many cases. For example, poor might have begun to be pronounced as [p»i] by analogy with door, and seamstress probably got another variant of pronunciation due to the ambiguity of the letter combination ea, which can be read both as [i:] and as [e] in the same position (cf. read [ri:d] -read [red]).

The recent modifications of the Received Pronunciation are ac­cepted and have become well-established nowadays, but they are not equally widespread among all the RP speakers. On this account A. Gim-son distinguishes three varieties of RP today:

1) the conservative RP used mainly by the older RP speakers;

2) the general RP heard on radio and TV, that is less conservative
and has received all the changes mentioned above;

3) the advanced RP mainly used by the younger RP speakers,
which as often as not has received many more changes, even the
use of the glottal stop, which is characteristic of dialects such as
Cockney (e.g. / hope so [ai "heu? 'set>], back door f bae? M«],
thirty ГЭз:р1]).

RP has accepted so many features of the Southern English regional accents that many linguists use the term "Southern English" of "Southern English type of pronunciation" for RP. However, we should understand that the changes we are currently witnessing in the sphere of Received Pronunciation are quite a normal process. The pronunciations of words which are now generally accepted were once new and radical, but later superseded the ones which had previously been prevalent. For example, clothes fkleudz] was formerly pronounced [^xklouz], which now sounds old-fashioned and is no more current among educated speakers. Also, in the early twentieth century chemist ['kemist] and chemistry f kemistri] were pronounced f kimist] and fkimistn], but by now these variants of pronunciation have fallen out of use. This is one of the ways the constant, slow but sure change of the language manifests itself.