The "How Do You Pronounce X" Thread

[Imralu]

I can imagine my mum saying experiment with the NEAR vowel instead of the DRESS vowel because she does that with stereo. Then again, she probably has a different pronunciation for stereo mainly because of a generational thing, like how my parents use the DRESS vowel and secondary stress in the second syllable of "modem" instead of just a schwa like us young'uns. I can't imagine the word experiment has suddenly risen in use so much, and Google Ngram Viewer (/ŋræːm/?) confirms.

[mèþru]

My pronunciation varies: [ɛn ɡɹæm], [ɛŋ ɡɹæm], [ŋ̩ᶢ.ɹæm], [ɪŋᶢ ɡɹæm]

[Travis B.]

[ˈɜ̃ːŋɡʁɛ̃ːə̯̃m]

[elemtilas]

Depends on how you spell it:

engram: [ɛn gɹæm]
n-gram: [ɛn gɹæm]
ngram: [ŋɹäm]

[Travis B.]

You don't have POA assimilation of /n/ across word boundaries?

[Pabappa]

I do, but I think when the N is highly important it can preserve its full articulation.

[Travis B.]

I am reminded of the Hoan Bridge in Milwaukee - as a kid I thought it was the Home Bridge because the dialect here is so consistent in assimilating final /n/ to following labials, and people always call it the Hoan Bridge, so I never heard it pronounced with [n].

[anteallach]

[ˈɛngɹam]

So, yes, I don't necessarily have POA assimilation of nasals. See also words like unclear and ungrateful, both of which I pronounce with [n] in careful speech.

[jal]

(...) of "modem" instead of just a schwa like us young'uns.

If you know what a modem is, you're not a young'un anymore :))).


JAL

[alynnidalar]

Eh, if you've ever had to deal with the internet in your house or get it installed, you've probably encountered the term modem. Maybe it's just because I work in IT anyway, but I don't think it's all that obscure of a word.

[Travis B.]

I am used to referring to the box that attaches your WiFi or Ethernet in your house to your DSL or cable outside as a DSL modem or cable modem depending on what it interfaces with.

[Salmoneus]

I would think of 'modem' as being jargon these days, not something most customers are exposed to. In ye olden days, when we got our internet through a box-top frog, we called it a modem. But the box these days, that connects wifi to internet, is just called a router in my experience. Some companies find 'router' too technical and try to make us call it a 'hub' or something, but there's no consensus yet so far as I can see. Partly because 'home hub' belongs to BT.

[Travis B.]

That is because in this day and age, modems and routers are very, very commonly combined in the same unit, so your DSL modem is also, say, a wireless router at the same time.

[Space60]

Does anyone here pronounce "ate" as "et"? I've read that some dialects traditionally pronounced it like such. The people who do probably had a harder time understanding the "Why was six afraid of seven? Because seven ate nine." joke when they were a kid.

[Nortaneous]

There's an old riddle like "I eat what I can and I can what I can't" that never worked for me, since IMD can and can aren't homophones -- the can that you open with a can opener has TRAP, but modal can has DRESS. (also catch, am, and probably a few other words that I'm forgetting)

(I've probably said this in this thread before but I forget)

[Salmoneus]

Does anyone here pronounce "ate" as "et"? I've read that some dialects traditionally pronounced it like such. The people who do probably had a harder time understanding the "Why was six afraid of seven? Because seven ate nine." joke when they were a kid.

I have both. I think for me 'et' is native, and 'ate' is a spelling pronunciation that I didn't at first realise was meant to be the same word - I distinctly remember being puzzled why 'eat' had two different past tenses. I think I now use 'ate' more, but I'm not sure.

[Travis B.]

Does anyone else have frequent intervocalic flap (and in some words /b v ð/) elision? I ask because, as you probably already know, these elisions are very frequent in my speech, and they cannot be idiosyncratic to myself since people here have no trouble understanding speech with them (whereas non-native speakers are often confused by them), and I hear other people here with such elisions in their speech, albeit usually less frequently than myself. Other people here have alluded to that flap elisions at least are pretty normal in NAE, but I have not found any real mention of them outside forum posts.

[Linguoboy]

A phonologist I knew on sci.lang stated that [ɾ] could be elided almost anywhere it occurs. I find that's generally true of my speech; even if I'm not conscious of making the elision myself, if I pronounce a word with the [ɾ] elided, it still sounds acceptable.

[Travis B.]

I misspoke when I said intervocalic, because flap elision can also occur in /rt rd rn/ where the following syllable is unstressed (and I would not consider the dialect here as having rhotic vowels, where the vowel itself is rhotic, aside from the syllabic rhotic but rather rhotic-colored vowels followed by normal rhotic consonants, and a single syllabic rhotic I would analyze as a combination of a schwa and /r/).

[Znex]

A phonologist I knew on sci.lang stated that [ɾ] could be elided almost anywhere it occurs. I find that's generally true of my speech; even if I'm not conscious of making the elision myself, if I pronounce a word with the [ɾ] elided, it still sounds acceptable.

Same; I don't know that me or anyone else around Sydney would elide the flap, but I still recognise any such word as being "the same" without the flap. I guess because /t d?/ does in other dialects become [ʔ], it's not that much further of a step.

I wonder if because of that, one could consider English [ɾ] a sort of glide? It'd be interesting to see to what extent [ɾ]-deletion affects intelligibility between dialects.