I always thought it had the "marry" vowel for you MINMINMs. Anyway, I accent the "rib". Your pronunciation is an effete English and anglophilic one, like "HARass". So there. Would contemporary pirates (AArrr!) have

I don't think there's a word that's pronounced (ha:d) in standard American English. By Ray Wise's definition of standard AmE there is. (ha:d) is "hide"in Southern-accented AmE, "hard" in non-rhotic Eastern New

Perhaps we have an accent issue. To me, Titleist has no way of containing "liced." I am confused by the ... my lack of exposure to any foreign language but Spanish, which has since lost most of its effect on me. Perhaps it is an

The trouble is that "ah" is generally taken to represent ... of English is distinct from the phoneme found in "hat", Most but not all, mon! Are there actually any accents in which /A/ and /&/ (or, alternately, /A/ and /a/)

Incidentally, I was a little startled to read earlier in this thread that someone (Raymond Wise?) thinks of ad hoc "ah" as the sound of "a" in "hat". Specifically, he described a pronunciation of "cafe" as

Is that vowel ("thet") ever used nowadays? In some dialects, I suppose, but in RP? In place of (&), I mean. FB, I sense very strongly that you have an "I want to sound 'posh'" agenda. But do you realize what

I've been watching some old English films and listening to some recordings of John Gielgud reading short stories. I noticed ... and this doesn't seem to me the case. And what would be a correct transcription in IPA of that sound? Dunno

English spelling is much less phonetic than other European languages such as Italian, German and Spanish. Why is this the case? It began as a phonetically spelled language, but the pronunciation of English changed rather dramatically (the Great

Not that I know from. RonE, of course. Try listening to the sound files of (a) and (&) (the ones labelled "4" and "5", which are meant to be the reference IPA sounds) at http://www.alt-usage-english.org/ipa/ascii ipa

In Northern England they do say (a) for (&), or anyway they do in Sheffield, if I'm not mistaken. (a) for /&/ is how I'd think it should be expressed. Unless you use the Oxford phoneme symbols, of course (which I did in my reply to