Re: north american pronunciation

On Sun, 30 Apr 2006 22:51:16 GMT, Bob Cunningham
<exw6sxq@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:



On Sun, 30 Apr 2006 16:08:58 +0000 (UTC), Salvatore Volatile
<me@xxxxxxxxxxx> said:

good_man wrote:
Is it possible for someone to learn North American pronunciation when
they are 25? If the answer is yes, what advise would you give? I have
bought several books and CDs to help me but I am not sure if I can and
should learn it. Also I found it confusing to distinguish between the
sounds 'e'(as in beg) and 'a'(as in bag). When I was listening to the
CD, they sounded same to me.

It's possible. The key is to ignore the usual advice and try to emulate
the pronunciation of a Western United States Speaker (WUSS), because they
have far fewer vowels than everyone else. "Cot" and "caught" sound the
same; "merry", "marry" and "Mary" are pronounced alike.

That's seriously misleading information. It isn't right to
infer from my "cot" and "caught" sounding the same, or from
my "Mary", "merry", and "marry" sounding the same, that the
vowels some people use to distinguish them don't exist in my
speech. I have all of them in my speech in other words.

For example, a common pronunciation of "marry" uses my value
of "cat", and a common pronunciation of "caught", my vowel
in "fort". It Isn't that I don't have those vowels that
keeps me from pronouncing those words those ways. It's just
that I don't want to pronounce them that way because my
speech would sound strange to the people I live among. I
don't want people to think I sound like I'm from New York.
The only vowel I know of that I lack is [A.], the low, back,
rounded vowel that English English has in "cot". And I will
continue to believe that no American English speaker uses
that vowel until I *hear* evidence to the contrary.

As someone posted yonks ago, [A.] seems to represent the *pity sound*.
I also believe I use it in "on."

--
Al in St. Lou
.

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