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Pronunciation of can’t
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Northernlights
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Message 49 of 68

10 February 2012 at 11:03pm | IP Logged

@ rapp

You're right, I wouldn't add an R to "He saw water everywhere". I hadn't thought you might actually pronounce the letter that was spelled in the word, duh!! Saying it out loud to myself it sounds odd, "Hee sahwah kahr". I bet I'm overdoing the W lol.

@ PillowRock

The "ken" must be different to what I was imagining then.

PillowRock wrote:

I had never consciously realized that the ware any accents or dialects of English where the 5 words on the right hand side of that all rhymed with each other.

It's like that in the most traditionally standard British English i.e. RP and SE England, there'll be areas in the country where not all those words rhyme though.

Quote:

However, "pore" and "pour" do rhyme with "sore" and "soar"

For me too.

Quote:

Relative to the US, that particular thing seems like a mixture of a couple different American accents. Dropping the R to change "car" into "kaah" sounds like a Boston / New England thing. Adding an R to turn "saw" into "sor" (or, as I recall seeing in one stand-up comedy routine: "wash" into "warsh") is more of a Texas thing.

I'd heard about that in Boston :-) In the UK we only add the R to "saw" if it's followed by a vowel in the next word, like this:

"Ay-saw-Rit" for "I saw it"
"Ay-saw-Run-appul" for "I saw an apple"

but

"Ay-saw-the-khah" for "I saw the car"
"Ay-saw-faive-appulz" for "I saw five apples"

"Wash" we say like "wosh" rhyming with slosh, never with an R

@ rapp

rapp wrote:

And I had a friend tell me once that, when growing up in NYC, she was taught in school that "saw" and "sore" were pronounced the same.

I didn't know New Yorkers pronounced those the same, so that's like in Brit Eng except the vowel's probably different I suppose. How would they say "law" and "more"?
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Northernlights
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Message 50 of 68

10 February 2012 at 11:10pm | IP Logged

IronFist wrote:

PillowRock, do you pronounce "roof" as rüf? (like the "u" in "put". I know it's not really a ü but I don't know how else to write it)?

I remember when I was in first grade, in art class we were making houses out of clay, and the teacher was showing us how to make the roof, but she was pronouncing it with the "u" in "put," and me being 6 or 7 or however old you are in first grade, didn't know what word she was saying. So I raised my hand and asked "what part of the house is the rüf?" She looked at me like I was silly and said the top of the house. I was like "oh... you mean the roof!"

I don't remember if she thought it was funny or if she got pissed off, but looking back on it, it was definitely funny. I'd never heard anyone say rüf before in my life so how was I supposed to know what it meant! I was like 7 years old.

LMAO this is such a laugh :-) There are so many versions and what's odd about that roof thing is that it sounds just like the difference between English from England versus Scotland. We say "roof" with a long ooooh but the Scots say "Rruf" with a rolled R then a really short U.

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PillowRock
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Message 51 of 68

11 February 2012 at 12:43am | IP Logged

IronFist wrote:

PillowRock wrote:

"Poor" doesn't rhyme with any of them. However, "pore" and "pour" do rhyme with "sore" and "soar". The "oo" in "poor" is closer to the one in "woo".

That accent! Michigan? Do you pronounce "sorry" as "sah-ree" or "sore-ee"? I can't remember if that's the same accent or not.

It's definitely closer to "sah-ree", almost all the way to "sar-ee".

Just to be clear about what I said before: My "oo" in "poor" is *closer* to the one in "woo"; it's not all the way there.

To prevent any overbroad assumptions, accents aren't homogenous across the entire state of Michigan (even ignoring the more "Ebonics" influenced sections of cities such as Detroit and Flint). The Upper Peninsula still has more Scandinavian influence, like much of Minnesota and northern Wisconsin (which can be perceived by some as being a bit "sing-songy"); also some similarities to some Canadian accents (Western Ontario obviously being the closest). I grew up in the East Side suburbs of Detroit and then lived in Ann Arbor (30 or 40 miles west of downtown Detroit) for 30 years.

IronFist wrote:

PillowRock, do you pronounce "roof" as rüf? (like the "u" in "put". I know it's not really a ü but I don't know how else to write it)?

Northernlights wrote:

Well, so far as I've noticed, none of the American accents have the rolled R of a Scot.
Do you mean a "long ooooh" like in "whole" or "goal"? From what I've noticed about "roof" the continuum of pronunciations in the US is more or less from almost a long U to a short "uh"; basically the "oo" in "roof" slides (according to region, mostly) along the axis from "tool" to "wood". I say "roof" with a more "wood"-or-"put"-ish pronunciation.

There's a folk singer-songwriter named John Latini in Southeastern Michigan who is originally from New York. He actually wrote (and periodically performs) a song entirely about the idea that "Marry, Merry, and Mary Are Three Different Words". In Michigan they all sound identical.

PS: I wonder what the poor Mandarin speaker who asked this original question must be thinking about all of this.

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IronFist
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Message 52 of 68

11 February 2012 at 2:16am | IP Logged

PillowRock wrote:

He actually wrote (and periodically performs) a song entirely about the idea that "Marry, Merry, and Mary Are Three Different Words". In Michigan they all sound identical.

I would pronounce all 3 of those words the same way, too.

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fiziwig
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Message 53 of 68

11 February 2012 at 2:36am | IP Logged

Here is an excellent map of American English dialects along with a lot of information on the specific words that can be used to "diagnose" particular dialects:

http://aschmann.net/AmEng/

He even breaks the San Fransisco Bay area into the "on=Don" region vs the "on=dawn" region. Likewise, New Orleans is broken into sub-regions depending on whether or not "pin"="pen". Even the "New England" accent is divided into 8 or 9 different regions. It's a fascinating map to explore.
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Camundonguinho
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Message 54 of 68

11 February 2012 at 5:18am | IP Logged

You can't break SF bay area into ''regions'' because the accents depend on the age of a speaker: all younger people (<40) are Cot/Caught merged and they can use either vowel because of the Californian Vowel Shift (present in girls < 25), or because of ''conditioning'', so they pronounce DOLLAR to rhyme with TALLER, but the vowel in question can be either rounded (as in Back East ALL) or unrounded (as in NYC SOLVE).

Alicia Silverstone is from SF, but she sounds as if she were from San Fernando Valley.
Clint Eastwood is from SF, but he sounds as if he were from Indianapolis or Columbus.

Most people on the West Coast don't have / ɒ / as a phoneme, but it can appear as an allophone of other vowels before L, M, N so you can sometimes hear
''all mom strong wolf pulse culture'' with [ ɒ ] instead of [ɑ] (all, dollar, mom, strong), [ɐ] (culture, pulse) or [ ʊ ] (wolf).

This is known as ''conditioning''. When you ask a person, do you use the same vowel in ALL, DOLL and LOT; or WOLF or GOOD. He/she will answer you: YES, even though because of the dark L or nasal influence there may be some rounding of varying degree (and they might sound as two completely different vowels to outsiders). Conditioning is very inconsistent, so most people use both the rounded and the unrounded vowel in words like ALL, MOM, STRONG, DOLLAR , PULSE or WOLF, it seems that they use either pronunciation at random.

Conditioning made Gillian Anderson's pronunciation of MULDER (with [ ɒ ] instead of [ɐ]) sound like MOULDER to the British audience. ;)

Pronunciation of a single, isolated, word does not tell you anything about a person's accent.
Girls from Chicago pronounce WALL as [wɑl], but they're not Cot/Caught merged, they have a Northern Cities Vowel Shift.
Girls from Vancouver, Pittsburgh or Boston pronounce ALL with a rounded vowel [ɒl], but they are Cot-Caught merged because they pronounce DOLL , DOLLAR , COLLEGE, SOLVE, POLITICIAN with the same rounded vowel. ;)

So, in many regions, equations like ON = DON, ON = DAWN
don't make any sense, because DAWN = DON,
as well as COLLAR = CALLER.

Instead of focusing on the rhymes or mergers, we should give the exact pronunciation instead (with IPA symbols) because statements like ''I pronounce COLLAR as CALLER'' don't tell you anything about the exact pronunciation, and leave you an open question: is the vowel in your collar/caller rounded or unrounded? ;)

In many parts of England's North, BATH is pronounced with the MAN vowel,
but that vowel is [a].

So, phonetically there is no British accent in which DANCE is pronounced as in American English, because /æ / in the North is pronounced as [a].

On the other hand, 50 % of Australians pronounce DANCE like Americans ;)

Edited by Camundonguinho on 11 February 2012 at 6:21am
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IronFist
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Message 55 of 68

11 February 2012 at 8:26am | IP Logged

^ I didn't understand all of that but I felt really smart reading it :)
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Northernlights
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Message 56 of 68

11 February 2012 at 11:51am | IP Logged

@ Camundonguinho

Thanks so much for that brilliant explanation.

IronFist wrote:

^ I didn't understand all of that but I felt really smart reading it :)

rofl

Edited by Northernlights on 11 February 2012 at 11:54am

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