Phonemically weird words

[Travis B.]

For me squirrel rhymes with pearl and girl and all of these are monosyllables.

[Raphael]

*is properly weirded out*

[Linguoboy]

For me squirrel rhymes with pearl and girl and all of these are monosyllables.

Same. I remember being surprised to hear Brits pronouncing squirrel in two syllables with stressed /ɪ/.

[Raphael]

For me squirrel rhymes with pearl and girl and all of these are monosyllables.

Same. I remember being surprised to hear Brits pronouncing squirrel in two syllables with stressed /ɪ/.

I don't think the movie Up was made by Brits.

[KathTheDragon]

What's Up got to do with it? I'm a Brit and I say /ˈskwɪ.rl̩/

[Travis B.]

For me squirrel rhymes with pearl and girl and all of these are monosyllables.

Same. I remember being surprised to hear Brits pronouncing squirrel in two syllables with stressed /ɪ/.

Disyllabic pronunciations of words ending in /rl/ for me are are not weird to me, but pronouncing squirrel with /ɪ/ is - I did not even know that anyone pronounced it that way until today.

[Raphael]

What's Up got to do with it?

It has dogs say "squirrel" a couple of times, and it sounds like it has two syllables to me there.

[Travis B.]

What's Up got to do with it?

It has dogs say "squirrel" a couple of times, and it sounds like it has two syllables to me there.

Linguoboy and I are both Americans and both pronounce it monosyllabically, yet that does not mean that there are not Americans who pronounce it disyllabically. Conversely, though, I don't think I've ever heard an American pronounce squirrel with an /ɪ/.

[quinterbeck]

What's the motivation for ɚ in AmE squirrel (whether one syllable or two)? In BrE, squirrel patterns with other words containing ambisyllabic r between ɪ and ə, e.g. mirror, syrup, chirrup, stirrup.

[Pabappa]

I think theyre all like that .... the words you listed all have stressed /ɚ/ for me except mirror, and that may be just because itd otherwise be /mɚ.ɚ/. Ive heard /ɪ / in syrup and probably even said it myself, but the most common pronunciation in America is, I think, /ɚ/. (Hence "Sir Rupp" etc.) So basically all stressed //ɪr// in American English in a word with that CVCVC shape is /ɚ/ unless the consonant is a syllabic /r/. It doesnt seem to apply to trisyllabic words like "virulent" however. And there may be some other exceptions besides mirror but I cant think of any right now.

[Linguoboy]

What's the motivation for ɚ in AmE squirrel (whether one syllable or two)? In BrE, squirrel patterns with other words containing ambisyllabic r between ɪ and ə, e.g. mirror, syrup, chirrup, stirrup.

You mean "meer", "surp", "churp", and "sturp"?

[Travis B.]

What's the motivation for ɚ in AmE squirrel (whether one syllable or two)? In BrE, squirrel patterns with other words containing ambisyllabic r between ɪ and ə, e.g. mirror, syrup, chirrup, stirrup.

You mean "meer", "surp", "churp", and "sturp"?

Not all dialects reduce quite that much, like I've got "surrup", "churrup", "sturrup" - but I do have "meer".

[Linguoboy]

I was half-joking. Although there are dialects with "surp" (Texas native Roger Miller once memorably rhymed "Roses are red and violets are purple / Sugar is sweet and so's maple surple"), I natively have /ˈsirəp/. Essentially, /ɪr/ doesn't exist in my speech. It was one of the challenges of learning German: I used to say Birne with /i/ and would still if not for an acting teacher I had who disabused me of that.

[aporaporimos]

I'm a bit confused to discover the vowel of NEAR is conventionally transcribed /ɪr/—it sounds like /ir/ to me, while the sequence /ɪr/ just doesn't occur in my version of AmE, regardless of syllabification. Maybe I'm being influenced by writing, but I looked up a sound clip of the British pronunciation of squirrel and it had a very distinct /ɪ.r/ that definitely doesn't occur anywhere in my speech.

I would transcribe:
mirror: /ˈmir.ɚ/ or /mir/
syrup: /ˈsir.əp/ or /ˈsɚ.əp/
chirrup: don't know this word but my guess is /ˈtʃɚ.əp/
stirrup: /ˈstɚ.əp/

[Travis B.]

To me the high front vowel (I do not have the serious-Sirius distinction) before /r/ is something I would identify with FLEECE rather than with KIT because my KIT vowel is central and close-mid, whereas my FLEECE before /r/ is either front and near-close or, often when the /r/ falls in a coda position, front and close with the /r/ being syllabified.

[Pabappa]

serious and Sirius are homophones for me too, but maybe I jsut repeat what other people are saying. The word virulent has a true lax /ɪ/ for me, not /i/ like in FLEECE. mirror also does, so i have a hypothetical minimal pair with merer, and mirror does not rhyme with smearer.

[Raphael]

It was one of the challenges of learning German: I used to say Birne with /i/ and would still if not for an acting teacher I had who disabused me of that.

Forgive my relative-IPA-newbie-question, but what is the IPA for the sound in German Birne?

[Ares Land]

Forgive my relative-IPA-newbie-question, but what is the IPA for the sound in German Birne?

[ɪ]

Though I guess Birne is pronounced [bɪɐnə] (never heard anything but [ɐ] for German r in that position).

Ah the challenges of learning German... I had to wait until I started regularly travelling to Germany to figure out that German has long and short vowels, and that no one will understand what you say if you mix those up. I took 8 years of German classes, you'd thing one of my teachers would have mentioned that at some point.

I also figured out the ʁ ~ ɐ allophony the hard way (Just as annoying, at least for a French native speaker: people won't notice you're getting it wrong, but you won't understand a thing...)

(On a positive note, it was conlanging that helped me figure out what was going on.)

[Travis B.]

I used to merge StG /iː/ and /ɪ/ because both vowels are much closer to my FLEECE vowel than my KIT vowel, to the point that I natively really have only one high front vowel, so I both had problems hearing the two as apart and realizing the two distinctly.

[Raphael]

Forgive my relative-IPA-newbie-question, but what is the IPA for the sound in German Birne?

[ɪ]

Thank you!

Ah the challenges of learning German... I had to wait until I started regularly travelling to Germany to figure out that German has long and short vowels, and that no one will understand what you say if you mix those up. I took 8 years of German classes, you'd thing one of my teachers would have mentioned that at some point.

Ugh. I can understand it if the form of a language taught to speakers of other languages is more formal than the spoken version, but written, formal German has long and short vowels, too!