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> Just think how you pronounce the syllable ham when referring to a piece of meat and when talking about a fury animal—a long ham and a short ham-ster. Hang on

• koolba 2y ago
  > Y'all … thinning … Kind of gave it away there.
  • smeej 2y ago
    I edited the 2nd one because it was an actual typo, but ironically the American south is not one of the regions where I've lived. I just find "y'all" clearer than any of its alternatives!
• EgregiousCube 2y ago
  Author is in England.
  • IanCal 2y ago
    I'm in England and I don't get what they're saying. Edit - ah I see reading the context now, it's not the pronunciation but the speed. Hamster has a very fast ham sound
    • Sharlin 2y ago
      Speed (or more accurately, length) is a part of pronunciation. English speakers don't often think about vowel length because it has no semantic significance like in some other languages, but there's still some phonemic variation, depending on one's dialect.
• wk_end 2y ago
  Canadian (Toronto) English speaker, although I’ve lived in the US (NYC and Seattle) for a while and it probably rubbed off on me. To me they sound pretty much same if you’re very consciously saying the words as units, in isolation, “trying to pronounce them”. If I say them a little more casually, though, the sounds that come out of my mouth are a little bit closer to “haam” and “hmster” - the vowel sound definitely gets emphasized in the former case and clipped almost entirely in the latter case. It’s really easy to trick yourself into thinking you’re saying a word “properly” unless you’re very very conscious of the sounds you’re producing. As a Canadian, I know this - the stereotype Americans have of the Canadian accent is exaggerated, and it’s much stronger in rural areas, to the extent that I didn’t really think I sounded any different to the Americans in TV or movies. But Americans could still pretty quickly tell I was Canadian when I moved down there. The word “about” is one of the canonical tells, and although I don’t say “aboot” or anything, I learned that I do really say it in an accented way. It wouldn’t be apparent if you just asked me to pronounce the word, but in a sentence my mouth would gloss over the vowels, saying something more like “abut”.
  • Dylan16807 2y ago
    It's hard to really evaluate in isolation, but if I put them in sentences I slur them about the same.
  • smeej 2y ago
    I tested them out loud in the context of sentences: "Can I get some ham on that sandwich?" and "Did you get your kid a hamster?" and the "ham" part still sounds exactly the same to me. It could definitely be an accent or something that I just happen not to have heard much. It just surprised me that I couldn't think of what difference the author was thinking there might be.
    • chefandy 2y ago
      I pronounce the vowels in Mary, marry, and merry differently— like mail, marathon, and merit– but apparently that's not true in many places in the US. My regional accent is pretty mild, but I did grow up in a famously heavily accented area.
• thaumasiotes 2y ago
  Australian English is supposed to have phonemic vowel length, such that "can" (the container) and "can" (the auxiliary verb) are pronounced differently.
  • troad 2y ago
    Australian English indeed has phonemic vowel length. For the average speaker, the only distinction between 'but' and 'Bart' is length.
• o11c 2y ago
  Hm, is it saying "hamster" is /æ/ whereas "ham" is /æː/? I can't actually find a source that uses IPA yet bothers with vowel length right now ... Even in dialects where it is not traditionally transcribed (such as American - partly because long vowels are most common in place of a disappearing /r/), usually there is in fact an audible difference when you aren't thinking about it. This is part of why computer speech always used to sound so terrible. The most blatant example is when comparing vowels before /t/ vs before /d/, which means that "matter" (short) and "madder" (long) are distinguishable even in accents where /t/ is pronounced like /d/ in this context. Note that this is orthogonal to stress (since both syllables are stressed in this example), and also orthogonal to the badly-named "long vowel, short vowel" taught in school (which is actually for completely different vowel sounds and which omits several other vowel sounds).
  • smeej 2y ago
    Now you're making me wonder if I just don't make enough distinctions in my speech or something, at least when it comes to the short A sound. If I speak these sentences out loud, the words sound exactly the same to me: "That doesn't matter at all." "He was madder than hell." Incidentally I'd say both A's here also sound just like my A's in ham and hamster! It's a very pinched sound, almost nasally. My choir director has had to train it out of us by exaggerating it and making it sound even more ridiculous because it has no place in singing.
    • o11c 2y ago
      I mean, everything is dialect-specific, and there is a lot of variation between dialects around /æ/ in particular (trap-bath, bad-lad, Mary-marry-merry, and the whole mess of /æ/-raising/tensing - is ban-back an example that's always split?). But I'd still say it'd be interesting to record your voice and check the actual timings even if you can't consciously hear the length. Assuming you can actually practice running speech while thinking about it, of course.
    • skeledrew 2y ago
      Sign of the quintessential American. For me, a Jamaican, "madder" and "matter" are very distinct. And I don't think I'll ever get how a "t" becomes a "d".
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• Anotheroneagain 2y ago
  I'm an ESL, mind you but I think the vowel gets pretty cramped with similar short vowels (hem-ham-hum) so the tendency is to make it more different. It drifted away in general in American English, but the vowel in "air" stands in the way in non-rhotic accents, so the change is much more random and word specific.