[highlight]WoT Warning[/highlight] (beware the Wall of Text. TY
I would say, I pronounce water like "
wart'her" where they pronounce "
wahder". Gerodies' would pronounce "
wor'er". Wei aei man.
When I first moved to the midlands, I asked where I might purchase a "vase"...("
vayze") everyone looked blank, as if I where from another planet.
I was asked
"What is the green stuff in gardens?" so I replied
"You mean plants?" ("
plarnts")
"I was thinking of grass, but plants will do." ("
gra'ss" and "
pla'nts") I was told. They realised I meant a "
vazz".
What always made me laugh, is how U.S. English speakers can make fun of Canadians for their pronunciation of the word "about" (U.S. Americans seem to think Canadians pronounce it "
aboot", but I think it's more like "
aboat") and yet they can't pronounce a single "o" sound, as in "cot", "sod", "bottle", "off", "shot" etc. They pronounce "
caht", "
sahd", "
bahdle", "
ahff", "
shaht". And by their pronunciation there is no way to get this short "o" sound. There is no phonetic equivalent. So I can't make and American English voice synthesiser pronounce it "correctly" even if I manually program the phonemes for such words. XD
My friends Fiancée is Northern Irish. (I don't know her religion) I told her I could not "hear" the difference in the words "her", "here", and "hair" on her voice, and had to rely on the "context" in which she said these words. She pronounced them, "
hurr", "
hurr" and "
hurr" and claimed it was quite simple to tell the difference even without context. Much polite smiling was had around the table as we could all see that nobody who was not from Northern Ireland could, in fact, tell the difference. We where too polite to say any more as she was clearly adamant on the subject.
So pronunciation is clearly as much to do with the ear of the listener as the tongue of the announcer. (or... maybe "annunciator" is more apt)
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This next guy makes the argument for the similarities between Canadian and British. All those pronunciations he says are "how you can tell if someone's Canadian" are (to my ear) the correct, normal pronunciation.
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Some more? Is it "
Lin'ex" or "
Lynux"? ("Linux") Is it "
Root" or "
Rowt" ("Rout") Is it "
Beeta" or "
Bay'ta"? ("Beta") And finally, is it "
Datah" or "
Dayta"? ("Data")
I've mixed those up, so you can have fun working out which is the British and which the "American" pronunciation.
:
--- EDIT ---
I've found a TAG, on YouTube that shows a lot of different English accents, which is cool. It pointed out to me that there are a lot of U.S. and also who Australians say "
Darta" as well.
:
I've not found the fantastic South African English accents, (there's actually at least two distinct different versions of that) or any Jamaican / Caribbean ones. But there are some French and Eastern European English speakers. ^_^ (good show)
May be cool to start spreading that TAG around here. Probably a SoundCloud version would be fine, if people don't have a camera / webcam they could post their accent / pronunciations up.