In Phonetics^x, Tenses^x

As a native English speaker (well perhaps not entirely native, I was born in Russia and immigrated to the U.S. at the tender age of 7) I would have to say that apart from the obviously difficult aspects of the English language such as tenses, an unorthodox phonetic system employed in the language...

Hi Avangi,it's pretty complicated, I'll try to explain it better. I'll use an equivalent phonetic transcription to avoid IPA, because I heard not everyone can see the symbols.MW breaks the words into syllables in phonetic transcriptions according to how the words would be pronounced syllable by...

A lot of your phonetic symbols for vowels come out as question marks on my computer, so that's not telling me a lot. It looks to me like M-W has the pronunciations that I, personally, use most, so that's the one I would trust most. bay-zul (the herb) bazz-ul (the British...

CalifJim wrote:Rhyming friend to stand sounds peculiar to me, and somewhat Texan, perhaps. It's definitely not standard. Thanks.Well, I'm not an expert on accents... but did you listen to the audio clip? Would you say pronouncing "again" that way sounds southern? I think I've heard that...

... I noticed that all reduced sounds are not reduced to a fixed and definite sound, but they can take infinite kinds of schwas (schwas that tend e as in in bed, or that tend to i like in bid, or tend to u like in put...). Yup. Infinite sounds about right. ... This means that the set of...

It seems to me that you are wrestling with the "Second-Letter Rule", which says that a single vowel letter (i.e., not combined with another vowel letter in a digraph) is pronounced tense if the second letter after it is another vowel letter, lax otherwise. (lady, caddie, hope, hop, hoping,...

I'm so confused. I mainly studied phonetics, syntax never interested me much until now. Anyway, as a native speaker, this sentence is fine. What would you have said verbals are if you had been allowed to say only one sentence and this sentence didn't have to contain the words: participle,...

As more people use Englsh, the language will change more quickly, and I don't see how we can "freeze" the language at one point in time so we can conduct this little experiment. The moment you come up with a system, somebody would have borrowed more words and "messed up" your system again. ...

If you don't like to use another explanation, then I try to explain it and you may correct it for me. The sentence of: "I like him more than she gives the impression of I like him more than she likes him." means: She expressed an idea that I like him more than she likes him. But in fact I like...

If you need a detailed description for American English, here's something I came across in some old notes of mine. It's got some exercises at the end too! The phonetic transcriptions aren't really anything standard, but I think you can figure them out. Past tense of Regular Verbs Phonetic...