By Vowels, Dialects

Ah, I didn't know you used British English... Since you mentioned Merriam-Webster, I thought you wanted to use American English.No, I don't think so, and it's what I've tried to explain so far. Just because a certain symbol is used, doesn't mean it has to sound exactly the...

Hi,the American Pronunciation you found is ok, and Merriam-Webster is the best (in my opinion) to check American pronunciations. The thing is you have to learn how to read phonetic transcriptions in the dictionaries you use, because often every dictionary uses its own conventions. Also,...

There is no /h/ and /w/ in the words "shah" and "shaw". There are the letters <h> and <w>, but it's a mistake to think that these letters are somehow determining which vowels you have in these words.

I agree with you. Where I am from we have /əʊ/ and LAW sounds to me as /ɔ/ though.From what I heard from Austrailians, they sound sort of like a mix of British accents. I don't know. Maybe it is me.

Is was wondering if there is any difference between 'better' and 'bed or...' in American English. At least previously I thought that the vowel preceding the letter 'd' is longer in 'bed or', since it is followed by a voiced consonant in any English dialect. After these replies to the original...

CalifJim wrote:You may be "digging too deep".I sure am, LOL. Well, the fact is that when I say "wong more", that NG is actually so difficult to hear that it's actually "wom more". In other words, I say a "wom more" that tends to "wong more". The problem is that these kinds of reductions are...

Well, you are supposed to write about the *new* trends in Canadian English. Not the history of CE. I think that the Canadian Shift would probably be your best bet--it is a very recent innovation, and thus is one of the few features of CE that could be considered new. It also has many...

CalifJim wrote: You realize, I'm sure, that the g in final ng is silent. It is only a marker to change the usual sound of 'n' to a velar nasal sound instead. It's farther back than your Italian gn but in the same general family of sounds. I know, it thought it was like the N in "anche"...

According to John Wells at University College London: "I do not understand the proposed distinction between Mainstream RP and Contemporary RP (unless the writer thinks, wrongly, that ‘contemporary’ means ‘young’)." You can read more of what he says about it at:...

>> Now the question is: does this happen with "e" sounds like in "bed"? I always hear millions of different ways of pronouncing vowels, but I wonder if this is typical of a certain dialect. -0194