A.u.e: Does anyone else have these two different "-ire"s? Consciously or unconsciously? With the same distribution as mine or different? When I come to think about it, it appears that words in your first list are slightly shorter sounds.

I'm confused by your "help" reference. What I intended to ... AmE dictionary that I have seen. Thanks for the help. To a Southerner, (hEj@lp) is exactly the pronunciation that an AmE dictionay indicates. And it's not necessarily

You have a dialect where, say, "bird" is (bV"Id) and ... they say (oIst@) or (V"Ist@), they replace it with (V"rst@). I see. I saw it differently. Using (V) for the vowel in "but," (@) for the vowel in

This I don't understand. What rule do you have in mind which might, when misapplied, lead to "erster" from "oyster"? You have a dialect where, say, "bird" is (bV"Id) and it starts to get ridiculed

(snip) I see it as a pronunciation spelling for those who pronounce the word as (drO:) and that includes rhotic AmE speakers in my experience (it may be a Midland phenomenon). MWCD11 includes (drO) as a dialectal pronunciation of

I have no luck in vowel discussions. All I can ... put in such a word. I'd call theirs a diphthong, Chances are yours is also a diphthong, though it may be a different diphthong from that which most BrE speakers ... seems to me to be

A spelling tip: words like table and noble have what the Americans call a long vowel (tay, noh). Isn't it diphtongs? Spelling tip number two... Diphthongs has more Hs than you'd expect. Maybe you could visualize some "different

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This is a non-sequitur argument. That the French word "lingerie" is pronounced in English with the "ay" of "hay," How strange. I would have thought the main oddity about the English pronunciation of lingerie was the