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.

Since 'Juan' is often pronounced as 'one', this is getting confusing. The standard AmE Anglicized pronunciation of "Juan" has the 'father' vowel (rhyming with "John" in most AmE dialects); the standard

Since 'Juan' is often pronounced as 'one', this is getting confusing. The standard AmE Anglicized pronunciation of "Juan" has the 'father' vowel (rhyming with "John" in most AmE dialects); the standard

My "um" rhymes with "gum", except the vowel can be extended. Ah, that's what I expected. MWCD11 has two pronunciations, " a prolonged m sound, @m." This makes me suspect that it is a word like "ahem,"

At the AUE site, there's a page headed "Pronunciation of newsgroup contributors' names". The URL is http://www.alt-usage-english.org/audio gallery/index.html When you ... the pronunciation that's given to the spelling

Restore pertinent discussion about the meaning of "aw": If "the sound of 'aw'" has any useful meaning, it must refer to the pronunciation that's given to the spelling "aw" in dictionaries, which is the

A certain AUE contributor has deluded himself into thinking there's a substantial difference between my vowels in "call" and "Bob" in that remark. In general I agree; I think all of your cot/caught vowels sound like

If I want you to use the vowel of your ... order to accomplish that? What would you suggest I write? Before I made a suggestion, I would want to be persuaded that there was some good reason for you to want me to use a vowel when you don't know

In my kind of talk, in the sense you mention, ... clearly, a schwa replaces the vowel. "I k'n gowith you". Do you have the "pin"/"pen" merger? (If so, where are you from?) If youdo, your "kin"

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