Wow! Thank you very much, CalifJim! I know scarcely anything about phonetics, and I mean not only theory, but also speaking or understanding spoken English, but by reading your explanation while listening to the pronunciation of the words cited as

Tallulah Tam wrote: I feel that Alan Jay Lerner was not so concerned about his own grammar when he wrote the song, he insults the intelligence of the audience by using the word "hung" incorrectly, especially when putting the words into the mouth

I'd like to know whether there is a way to know how to divide a word into syllables, other than by practice, by seeing them divided once and again. None of my two dictionaries show these divisions, and in almost every book I read the text is

The appropriate pronunciation of the plural ending depends on how the word ends, phonemically. The rules are as follows: * For words ending with a vowel sound or a voiced consonant sound, the correct pronunciation of the plural ending is /z/

Su Cheng Zhong wrote: During the long linguistic history, I can only find three models of language. These do not seem to be models of language to me, but instead models of writing systems. Do you really believe that Semitic languages do

Yes, but John Hall implied that he heard this in ... (using SAMPA notation) but I've never noticed this. (SAMPA: http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/english.htm) SAMPA is itself quite confusing since it offers two different symbols (V and U)

There are a number of variations within the British accent. Here are some suggestions on how to improve your accent: 1. If you have any close British friends or acquaintences, speak with them as often as possible while imitating their

I wrote: So, judgin from the sound samples on I think I still have troubles recognizing the /\-sound on stressed and unstressed syllables as the same sound (the reduced one is a schwa and certainly different from the others). Well,

Anonymous wrote: An interesting tidbit here, I think, is that the short " i" vowel in "bird" has no phonetic purpose: A "silent" vowel. Take the vowel out of "bird" or any of those "vowel-r" examples and you can still correctly pronounce

Hi Anonimous, I'm afraid I don't agree with you. As I said before I'm not a native English speaker but I've always been taught that B IR D is pronounced with a long vowel sound, the same sound you pronounce in nurse, girl, etc. If you look it up