4 ms·
What's going here is that most Americans have what's known as the marry-merry-Mary merger[1]. Virtually all English speakers outside of North America, as well a
by telotortium 10y ago
What's going here is that most Americans have what's known as the marry-merry-Mary merger[1]. Virtually all English speakers outside of North America, as well as some Americans, mostly on the East Coast, pronounce the vowels in these three words differently -- marry is pronounced /mæri/ (/æ/ is the vowel in "cat"), merry is /mɛri/ (/ɛ/ is the vowel in "pet"), and Mary is /meri/ (/e/ is the vowel in "bait"). In those dialects, any vowel can proceed an /r/ that's intervocalic (i.e., both preceded and followed by another vowel), so /r/ acts like any other consonant in that sense.
However, in most American dialects, marry-merry-Mary are all merged and pronounced identically (IPA: /mɛɹi/, though the exact vowel isn't important here, and all three vowels generally sound the same to merged speakers). Furthermore, the first syllable of all these words is usually pronounced the same as the vowel in mare (/mɛɹ/).
So let's put this together. The word "care" is pronounced /kɛr/ in both merged and unmerged dialects (or /kɛː/ if you don't pronounce the /r/ there). In unmerged dialects, the word "character" is pronounced /kærəktər/, so it doesn't make sense that you'd truncate it to /kær/, because /ær/ (or /æː/) at the end of a syllable doesn't occur in any English dialect[2]. In merged dialects, however, "character" is pronounced /kɛrəktər/, so it makes sense to truncate it to /kɛr/, which is a homophone of "care".
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_vowel_changes_before_historic_/r/#Mary.E2.80.93marry.E2.80.93merry_merger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_vowel_changes...
[2]: Except Irish English, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11673067 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11673067.
[3]: I speak a merged dialect, and pronounce "char" as /kɛr/ when I'm reading C code.
- robert_tweed 10y agoThat was a surprisingly detailed and well-informed reply. I wish there was some kind of super-upvote for comments like this.
- dave2000 10y agoYour post looks interesting and might well be 100% correct but I don't know - nor do I know anyone who knows - what the various little pronunciation guides or whatever they're called mean. It's why people tend to say "car as in carpet".
- chris_wot 10y agoTry this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alpha...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- cbd1984 10y agoIt's IPA. It's the closest thing we have to an actual way to write down how people pronounce things which has any chance at all of being useful. This "'foo' as in 'bar'" stuff is worse than useless most of the time, as you've just been shown.
- dave2000 10y agoNo, "car as in character" is still. Car as in carpet, char as in chart - simple and doesn't require a course in IPA, which may I remind you precisely nobody understands.
- cbd1984 10y ago> a course in IPA, which may I remind you precisely nobody understands. Plenty of people understand IPA. > No, "car as in character" is still. It's still completely incomprehensible unless you know which vowel sound is meant, which is the whole point of this sub-thread.
- dave2000 10y agoI don't know what happened to my post but i meant "car as in character is stupid/ambiguous". But it's perfectly possible to understand "car as in carpet" and it's generally possible to find a similar pronunciation of a sound. "Plenty of people" is misleading. Plenty as in thousands, millions of people worldwide, possibly, not not plenty as a percentage of the english people world. I'd be surprised if more than 5% of english speakers look at an IPA description of a sound and do anything other than go "what the fuck does that mean?".