Anonymous wrote: It really bugs me the way Americans say a 'British' accent because more than one country makes up Britain, there is England, Scotland, and Wales, all of which have very different accents. Then of course all three countries have

Anonymous wrote: yo guys! i've read all your comments...and i gotta say i've lost any hope to learn english...reading or hearing how others talk kinda depresses me cos i realize that i'm very bad at it, that i can't speak at all. nobody can

Mjcbrown wrote : Unlike as in Germany, regional accents have been retained by the working classes and now are still distinctive of the working class and as such bear a "working class" stigma . Presumably this means "retained only by the working

You serious? Most people in the western US, including, I ... pronunciation. It might be harder to hear than PIP, though. Serious! That sounds to my ear more like a Boston thing, eg, "I caht a fish". Portland (Oregon) was within a coin

Interesting. I cannot understand how "pen" and "pin" couldpossibly be ... pawn/porn, Shaw/shore - homophones Is it this rhotic business again? Yes, I'd say the pawn/porn thing is "rhotic business." For those ofus

accent circonflexe) % is that diacritic I have never known the name ... smiley - so %u means a smiley over the u. That diacritic is called a "breve" in English. Thanks for that. I always wondered. - prince. There may well be people for

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

Yes, but why do American dictionaries choose *my* pronunciation over someone from Alabama, or Massachusetts, or Wisconsin? There are glaring and drastic differences in pronunciation from region to region. There are, certainly. But, as I said

I don't necessarily agree with this. "Dictionaries describe the most *usual* pronunciation"?? What does "most usual" mean? The densest and ... There are a great many people in the South that pronounce "help" as

It seems pretty clear to me that Richard means that ... would prefer to spell as "aw" rather than as "ah". Why he would want to spell it "aw" passes understanding, since he has also implied that "aw" may be