Err

How embarrassing to make a redundancy gaffe on this branch! "...always did it consistently." Sorry.

<blockquote>Quote
<hr>pronounce it to rhyme with "hair" (i.e., with the first syllable of "error"<hr></blockquote> For the merry = Mary people, right? I don't think my "error" and "air" have the same vowel. (Error has the vowel of "get" and that's not the same as "air".) Is that wrong?

I think that's right, shilgia. I distinguish merry, marry, and Mary. Merry and error have the vowel of get, marry has the vowel of hat, Mary has something between the vowel of hat and the vowel of hate (and the vowel of hate isn't possible for me immediately before r -- so another way of putting it would be that Mary has the vowel of hate, modified -- in the direction of marry -- by the following r).

I think I do the same, albeit with an accent. (And "Mary" would come closer to "air" than to "hate", I think, but maybe not for you. ) But I can't think of a word that would have the vowel of hate before an "r", except a contraction like "they're". There are people who pronounce "their/there" that way also, kind of Southern US I think, but you don't, do you, Vinny? What word would have "a" as in "hate" followed by an "r"?

Bad description, because there are also people who give "they're" the vowel of "air", so as to make "they're" equal to "their" but the other way around. This is complicated.

Mary is the same as air (for me) but that doesn't get us far because air has the r also.

My "they're" and "their" (and "there") are homophones, all with the Mary/air vowel. I thought they were homophones everywhere. Maybe I haven't been paying attention.

I can't give you a word with the vowel of hate before r because my dialect doesn't have that. You could say that that phoneme is realized in my dialect before r with a sound between that vowel and the vowel of hat.

Except in words like A-Rod, the nickname of the baseball player Alex Rodriguez, or A-rab, the Baltimorese for a man who sell vegetables off a horse-drawn cart, but that doesn't count because the syllable boundary intervenes and so it's a different type of r (initial r).

Many people in Boston would say "thay-yuh" for there. I do not.

Sorry, I misread #32. I thought you said the vowel of hate is possible before an "r". Now that I read it again and see that it isn't, it makes more sense. I was wondering how.

But now I'll have to pay more attention to the way, if any, in which people distinguish between "there" and "they're". Both can be pronounced in two ways (at least -- who knows how many other dialects there are), but I don't know if everyone who uses a certain pronunciation for "there" will always use the same pronunciation for "they're".

#36 was simulposted with #35.

New question to the general audience here: when you say "they are" and "they're", does you vowel in "they" change?

#37, yes. 'They're' sounds like 'there'.

for me, 'err' rhymes with 'fur'.

Welcome back, LaGrande! I'm glad to see that you don't mind sitting around nattering with a bunch of colonials, after all. ;-)

I say these things the same as anolazima, #28,<blockquote>Quote
<hr>I say 'err' that same way as 'air', and I don't make the Mary/merry distinction.
I do make the wine/whine distinction, but I am a bit old-fashioned.<hr></blockquote>except that I don't consider myself old-fashioned...just old. I also pronounce Mary/merry/marry the same and their/they're/there the same; all with the 'air' phoneme.

I learned English from my parents (and cousins) in southwestern Kansas and grew up in New Mexico. I 'think' that everyone I know from that part of the U.S. pronounces those words as I do.