A poll on pronunciation

[pne]

In cases where you answer "something else", feel free to leave a comment explaining your pronunciation.

[Poll #245210]

Comments

Re:

[nik-w.livejournal.com]

I fail to understand how "Mary", "marry", and "merry" can all be pronounced the same. I've never met anyone that does so. Very odd. I wasn't sure what you meant by the last question (The vowel sounds in "father" and "bother" are) - a and o are different, but the two e sounds are the same.

[pne.livejournal.com]

I fail to understand how "Mary", "marry", and "merry" can all be pronounced the same.

*nods* It's what I thought as well upon learning that many merge all three sounds into one. (Similarly with cot/caught and father/bother -- the last one especially seems fairly dissimilar.)

I wasn't sure what you meant by the last question (The vowel sounds in "father" and "bother" are)

I meant the vowel in the first syllable.

Sorry for being unclear.

Re:

[nik-w.livejournal.com]

> I meant the vowel in the first syllable.

How can father sound like bother? That's crazier than the previous one! *baffled*

Re:

[isabeau.livejournal.com]

Speaking as one who does father/bother the same and mary/merry/marry the same/

They can.

Trust me.

(...I can hear the difference when someone else talks, and-- for the Mary/merry/marry one, at least-- can force myself to pronounce them differently, but in my normal speech, they just merge.)

One thing is that in some dialects (both age-related and location-related), there's a vowel that doesn't really exist in most contexts. I'm not sure which of the father/bother pair it is, but there's a cot/caught pair that I pronounce the same, and... I think it's that the vowel in caught is the higher one (that in IPA looks like a backwards c). But in my dialect, that vowel's mostly been merged into the vowel of cot. And the father/bother thing is the same vowel set, I think.

It's a matter of the dialect you're used to, and the dialects you've been exposed to. For me, the things you find crazy are perfectly /normal/. *grin*

Re:

[whimemsz.livejournal.com]

How can they be pronounced differently? ;)

I pronounce merry, marry, and Mary all as ['mej.r\ij]. Cot and caught are both [k_hat], and father is ['faD.r\=] and bother is ['baD.r\=].

EDIT

[whimemsz.livejournal.com]

Oh, and Murray is ['mr\=.ij].

Re:

[marikochan.livejournal.com]

I pronounce them all the same -- phonetically [meri:] with the 'e' colored by the 'r'.

And yep, it's the vowel sounds represented by the 'a' in "father" and the 'o' in "bother"...