In a Manner of Speaking

Mem Fox For the May 2021 podcast, Paul talks to Mem Fox, Australia’s bestselling writer, about reading to children. Mem Fox was born in Melbourne, grew up in Africa, went to drama school in England (where she and Paul met), and came back to Australia in 1970, at the age of 23. In 1983, she became Australia’s bestselling writer and has remained the pre-eminent author for children for an entire generation. Her more than 40 books include Possum Magic, Time for Bed, Where Is the Green Sheep?, and Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes. Mem’s latest book, Early One Morning, illustrated by Catherine Davenier, is aimed at very young children. It’s a mere 90 words but took her eight years to write. For more about Mem, visit her website at https://memfox.com/about/. (Bach’s Cello Suite #1 in G Major BMV 1007 Prelude (by Ivan Dolgunov) courtesy of Jamendo Licensing.)The post Episode 40 (Reading to Children, with Mem Fox) first appeared on Paul Meier Dialect Services.

Joanna Cazden For the April 2021 edition of the podcast, Paul discusses speech and voice disorders with Joanna Cazden, a speech pathologist specializing in voice rehabilitation for actors and singers, and an advocate for preventive vocal health education. She served for 18 years as the senior voice clinician at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, and her 2010 book, Everyday Voice Care: The Lifestyle Guide for Singers and Talkers, is a widely used text in performing arts programs in the United States and the United Kingdom. She has also published in Journal of Voice, Voice and Speech Review, and numerous music magazine and guest blogs. As a lifelong singer and musician, with an MFA in theater arts, she brings to her clinical work a deep knowledge and lifelong affection for performing arts, and attributes her fascination with the voice to an experience at age 11 while auditioning for a children’s Shakespeare program. She has released six solo albums, performed with Pete Seeger and Amanda McBroom, and she maintains active music projects alongside her clinical and scholarly activities. Click here to hear some of her music. She was the founder of the special IDEA collection, Speech and Voice Disorders, which we created so actors might have real-life sources to draw on when their character has such a disorder. (Bach’s Cello Suite #1 in G Major BMV 1007 Prelude (by Ivan Dolgunov) courtesy of Jamendo Licensing.)The post Episode 39 (Speech and Voice Disorders) first appeared on Paul Meier Dialect Services.

For the March 2021 episode, Paul discusses the phonetic phenomena known as the glottal stop and the schwa. The glottal stop is that little explosion you feel in your throat when you say phrases such as  “uh-huh,” “huh-uh,” and “uh-oh,” while the schwa is the most common vowel in the English language that is not formally a vowel. Instead, it’s a vowel substitute that sounds like “uh.” The clip from Roar by Katy Perry, Maria Callas singing Summertime, and the Filipino beatboxer Rhelzedeck are used under fair use. Glossonomia links: The schwa episode The t/d episode (which touches on glottals) Find Glossonomia via Google Podcasts here. And find Glossonomia via Apple Podcasts here. (Bach’s Cello Suite #1 in G Major BMV 1007 Prelude (by Ivan Dolgunov) courtesy of Jamendo Licensing.)The post Episode 38 (The Curious Affair of the Glottal Stop and the Schwa) first appeared on Paul Meier Dialect Services.

Paul Baker For this month’s podcast, Paul discusses Polari, the secret language used predominantly by gay men in the United Kingdom in the 19th and 20th centuries. Paul’s guest is Paul Baker, professor of English Language at Lancaster University. Baker has written 18 books, including Fabulosa: The Story of Polari (2019), Sexed Texts (2008), and, with Jo Stanley, Hello Sailor! (2003). He regularly gives talks and workshops about Polari and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. The clip from Around the Horne is copyright 1966 British Broadcasting Corporation, used under fair use. (Bach’s Cello Suite #1 in G Major BMV 1007 Prelude (by Ivan Dolgunov) courtesy of Jamendo Licensing.)The post Episode 37 (Polari: the Secret Language of Gay Men) first appeared on Paul Meier Dialect Services.

Jan Gist The topic for the January 2021 podcast is what Paul’s guest, Jan Gist, calls “Shakespeare’s Shapely Language.” Shapes is her term for literary or rhetorical tropes; she and Paul broaden the discussion to reflect on how such ancient devices figure in advertising, political oratory, and other forms of the spoken word today. Jan Gist has been the voice, speech, and dialect coach for Old Globe productions on 89 shows and for 50 USD/Shiley MFA productions. She has coached at theatres around the country including Ahmanson Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, The Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., The American Shakespeare Center, Utah Shakespearean Festival, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Arena Stage, San Diego Repertory, North Coast Repertory, Milwaukee Repertory, PlayMakers’ Repertory, Indiana Repertory, American Players Theatre, and Mo’olelo Performing Arts Company. She coached dialects for the film The Rosa Parks Story and recorded dozens of Books To Listen To. She is an original member of the Voice and Speech Trainers Association (VASTA) and has presented at its conferences, as well as to Voice Foundation’s conferences. Gist has taught workshops at London’s Central School of Speech and Drama and the International Voice Teachers Exchange at the Moscow Art Theatre in Russia. She has been published in numerous VASTA journals. Chapters in books include an interview in Voice and Speech Training in the New Millennium: Conversations with Master Teachers, exercises in The Complete Voice And Speech Workout, and Yiddish, in Jerry Blunt’s More Stage Dialects. Most recently, her article “Voicing Poems”, including some of her own poems, was published in Voice and Speech Review. She is a professor in The Old Globe/USD Shiley Graduate Theatre Program. For more information on Jan, visit her website: http://jangistspeaking.com. And for a related discussion, listen to episode 58 of this podcast. (Bach’s Cello Suite #1 in G Major BMV 1007 Prelude (by Ivan Dolgunov) courtesy of Jamendo Licensing.)The post Episode 36 (Shakespeare’s Shapely Language) first appeared on Paul Meier Dialect Services.

Patrick Feaster December’s podcast focuses on the earliest sound recordings: the experiments of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville (and his phonautograph from the 1850s and 1860s) and Thomas Edison (and his phonograph from the 1870s and 1880s). Paul Meier’s guest is Patrick Feaster, principal of First Sounds.org (along with David Giavannoni) and creator of Phonozoic.net (a website devoted to the history of the phonograph and related media) and Griffonage (a site that explores historical media). This podcast marks the debut of one of Scott de Martinville’s earliest recordings, from 1857. Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville Feaster is media preservation specialist for the Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative at Indiana University Bloomington, where he received his Ph.D in Folklore and Ethnomusicology in 2007. A co-founder of the First Sounds Initiative and three-time Grammy nominee, he has played a central role in identifying, playing back, and contextualizing many of the world’s oldest surviving sound recordings. He is the author of Pictures of Sound: One Thousand Years of Educed Audio, 980-1980, as well as numerous album notes and articles on media history and theory. Cameron Meier (film critic and historian, executive editor of IDEA, and vice president of Paul Meier Dialect Services) joins the conversation.The post Episode 35 (The First Sound Recordings) first appeared on Paul Meier Dialect Services.

Rush Rehm The topic for the November 2020 podcast is the Ancient Greek language. Paul’s guest is Rush Rehm, professor of Theater and Classics at Stanford University, and their discussion tackles many aspects of Ancient Greek, including the sound of the language and theatrical performances in Ancient Greece. Rehm publishes on Greek tragedy, including Euripides’ Electra, Understanding Greek Tragic Theatre, Marriage to Death, The Play of Space, Radical Theatre: Greek Tragedy and the Modern World, and Aeschylus’ Oresteia: A Theatre Version. Founder and Artistic Director of Stanford Repertory Theater, he has worked as an actor or director at the several regional theaters in the United States and abroad, including Magic Theater, TheatreWorks, the Alliance Theater, Seven Stages, the Guthrie Theater, Center Theater Group/Getty Museum, Arena Stage, and the McCarter Theater. (Bach’s Cello Suite #1 in G Major BMV 1007 Prelude (by Ivan Dolgunov) courtesy of Jamendo Licensing.)The post Episode 34 (“It’s All Greek to Me”) first appeared on Paul Meier Dialect Services.

Dr. Joyce Dlamini-Sukumane Paul’s guest for October 2020 is the distinguished South African linguist Dr. Joyce Dlamini-Sukumane. Paul and Joyce discuss various topics related to African languages, voices, dialects, and language policy. Dr. Sukumane’s working career has been predominantly in higher education. She began teaching in 1976, having completed her teacher training in English Literature and African Languages. From the early years of her career and consistent with her training in languages and linguistics, she was privileged to enter the domain of language practice in terminology development, lexicography, translation, editing, orthography reviews, the writing of grammars, and literature development. Her teaching career spanned 27 years before she joined the Public Service as Deputy Director in the Language Planning and Development Unit at the Department of Arts and Culture in 2005. For three years in the position, she managed the development and implementation of national language policies and legislation. In 2008, she was promoted to head the Language Planning and Development Unit as director. Her various professional roles have been teaching linguistics, languages, and literature in English and African Languages at different institutions of higher learning, which include Parkland State College (Illinois), and the universities of Swaziland, Zululand, Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Limpopo, and South Africa. While in public service, she valued her invigorating experience as a member of the Basic Education Minister’s Curriculum Management Team for the development of South African Sign Language (SASL). Similarly, serving on the Higher Education Minister’s Advisory Panel on Language Policy and African Languages was exciting, and, most importantly, her constant awareness of the pressing need for the development of African languages was heightened. Having lived in various countries, she was able to experience firsthand their education systems, particularly in relation to her interest in languages and education. Her greatest achievements have been the final mainstreaming of multilingualism in the promulgation of the Use of Official Languages, Act No. 12 of 2012 and the South African Language Practitioners’ Council Act No. 8 of 2012. (Bach’s Cello Suite #1 in G Major BMV 1007 Prelude (by Ivan Dolgunov) courtesy of Jamendo Licensing.)  The post Episode 33 (Voices of Africa) first appeared on Paul Meier Dialect Services.

Jerome Butler September’s guest is renowned dialect coach Jerome Butler. Paul and Jerome discuss many topics related to dialect coaching but pay particular attention to accent modification (often called accent reduction), for those wishing to alter their native accent or dialect. Jerome has been a dialect coach for film, TV, and theatre for more than 20 years. His many film and TV credits include For Life, The Loudest Voice, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, Infinite, LUCE, When They See Us, This is Us, The Undoing, Just Mercy, The Plot Against America, The Deuce, LBJ, Blade Runner 2049, Zero Dark Thirty, and How Stella Got Her Groove Back, among many others. (Visit his IMDB page for a full list.) He is also the founder of DialectCoachesCorner.com, an innovative resource for accent modification and dialect work. (Bach’s Cello Suite #1 in G Major BMV 1007 Prelude (by Ivan Dolgunov) courtesy of Jamendo Licensing.)The post Episode 32 (So You Wanna Change Your Accent?) first appeared on Paul Meier Dialect Services.

In the August 2020 edition of the podcast, Paul discusses foreign-language accents both in the context of acting and everyday comprehension. He addresses issues related to English as a Second Language (ESL) speakers in addition to English-language speakers’ attempts to master languages that are foreign to them, specifically French, German, Russian, etc. Paul also talks about phonetics, the difference between an accent and a dialect, “accent reduction,” and “reverse mistakes” when attempting to either speak a new language or, in the case of an English-language actor, master an accent for the screen or stage. For The Click Song, visit YouTube, copyright Miriam Makeba. And for The Syringa Tree audio file Paul references in the podcast, visit IDEA. (Bach’s Cello Suite #1 in G Major BMV 1007 Prelude (by Ivan Dolgunov) courtesy of Jamendo Licensing.)The post Episode 31 (Foreign-Language Accents) first appeared on Paul Meier Dialect Services.