mirandashell
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Does swore rhyme with war?
- Thread starter jaus tail
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It depends on how vowels have evolved where you are.
See the horse-hoarse merger.
Originally in English, they would not have rhymed. For many people in the US, they do rhyme now.
In several non-US Englishes, they do not rhyme.
I try to pronounce them differently, since they have different phonemes. I don't always succeed.
See the horse-hoarse merger.
Originally in English, they would not have rhymed. For many people in the US, they do rhyme now.
In several non-US Englishes, they do not rhyme.
I try to pronounce them differently, since they have different phonemes. I don't always succeed.
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We use different vowels. You probably call Barbed wire "boubwor" (or something like that.
I...
I'm not sure what dialect rhymes "war" with "paw." One ends in an or (store, core, bore, door, lore, chore, more) , and the other ends with a soft aw, like you saw something cute (law, caw, raw).
I speak the common and ordinary speech of New England.
Do you pronounce "merry", "Mary", and "marry" the same?
mirandashell
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mirandashell
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"Supposed to be"!? I hate to tell you but there is no "supposed to be" in pronunciation; there is only what people actually say.
mirandashell
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Scuse me?Boubwor?
The Southern U.S. dialect shifts its vowels so that "i" becomes and "o"; an "ar" becomes an "ou", and so on. I was rather shocked when I noticed the details of how it worked, but I was working with a Deep Southerner, and I eventually figured out what was going on.
mirandashell
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If you want words to rhyme, and you're looking at readers from more than just your own dialectic area, then yes, there are "proper" pronunciations to use - in the dictionary. It's like grammar - if you want to communicate clearly to a diverse group of people, you use the tools that will accomplish that. Using "what people actually say" will lead to a Tower of Babel situation - as evidenced by the questions in this thread.
mirandashell
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It takes time to figure that out for many people, but that deep South accent is dying out.
mirandashell
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People in the Midwest and some parts of the South might "merry merry Merry", while nearly everyone from New England or the West Coast would "marry merry Mary".
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The fewer accents the better, but the UK had enough for fifty times the population. That was partly because the subtle difference between two villages a mile apart was called separate accents, even though no one except an expert noticed the difference. Here in the U.S. I think that the lower limit has been reached and new accents have erupted. The North Central one has expanded from a few cities to a large section of the upper Midwest, but it may have eliminated a couple of other sets of variations, as one example.
mirandashell
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Ermmmm..... no. The people living there could tell the difference. And so could a lot of others.
And I disagree with the first sentence too. The more accents the better.
They could tell the difference only because they knew everyone in either village.
I have mixed feelings about that. There's a lot to be said for uniformity in speech, but there is also a lot to be said for local variation.
In some areas. The link even has a map of where.
The war/wore pair is mentioned as part of this merger.
Where "wore" can stand in for "swore".
According to the map on the linked page I am not of any of those areas where people still know that horse and hoarse are not homophones.
mirandashell
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