Pennsylvania 5

Listen to Pennsylvania 5, a 50-year-old man from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 50

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 1950

PLACE OF BIRTH: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

GENDER: male

ETHNICITY: Caucasian

OCCUPATION: N/A

EDUCATION: N/A

AREA(S) OF RESIDENCE OUTSIDE REPRESENTATIVE REGION FOR LONGER THAN SIX MONTHS: N/A

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

The subject attended private boarding schools.

The text used in our recordings of scripted speech can be found by clicking here.

RECORDED BY: Lynn Watson

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 25/11/2000

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

Many years ago, on the Fourth of July, I saw Jimi Hendrix play.  It was about five or six months before he died, and what a night.  The Second Atlanta Georgia Pop Festival had about 300,000 people there.  Jimi Hendrix played on Saturday night, real late.  And I was with a whole buncha people, and when we heard him play; it just didn’t seem real.  He was barely moving about the stage.  I thought it had to be backed up by tape machines.  I just couldn’t believe ’t one person could be making all that noise.  So I hiked all the way up to the stage, couple hundred yards, climbing over bodies and people, to see with my own eyes if this was really true, an’ I couldn’t believe it, but he was doing it, the whole thing.  He played the “Star-Spangled Banner.”  Fireworks were going off over top of the stage.  It was amazing.  Few years later, I was at another big concert up in New York; and, uh, heading back out of the concert area, I was trying to get out.  I had hitchhiked in.  Don’t I get picked up by a great big bread van, which is holding the Rolling Stones inside, heading to the airport, and they gave me a ride in the back of the air- … back of the van.  All the way to the airport, I rode with the Rolling Stones.  The traffic was so busy ’t people would’ve stopped the limousines, ’se there’s too many people on the street.  You couldn’t get through in a limousine.  They came to … like the Beatles used to do, arrive an’ leave in bread trucks and armored cars.  [Laughs]  Lots and lots of fun.  Keith Richards is a tremendous bore.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Jacqueline Baker

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 02/07/2008

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY:

Although the interviewer was not informed until the recording was over, the story about the Rolling Stones was concocted on the spot. Regarding the subject’s dialect, /r/ and /l/ tend to be labialized, while /r/ also tends to be retroflex and /l/ also tends to be rhotacized. There is an occasional diphthongization on mid back rounded vowel /O/ (off-glide), as in “dog,” and an occasional diphthongization by adding slight /I/ before /u/ (on-glide), as in “goose.”

COMMENTARY BY: Lynn Watson

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): 25/11/2000

The archive provides:

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• Text of the speakers’ biographical details.
• Scholarly commentary and analysis in some cases.
• In most cases, an orthographic transcription of the speakers’ unscripted speech.  In a small number of cases, you will also find a narrow phonetic transcription of the sample (see Phonetic Transcriptions for a complete list).  The recordings average four minutes in length and feature both the reading of one of two standard passages, and some unscripted speech. The two passages are Comma Gets a Cure (currently our standard passage) and The Rainbow Passage (used in our earliest recordings).

 

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