Re: Aspirated voiced consonants in English?

On Thu, 7 Sep 2006, Tony Cooper wrote:
On Thu, 7 Sep 2006 07:53:49 +0000 (UTC), Salvatore Volatile
<me@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

That's not how Americans pronounce "Maryland".

Some get quite close to that.

No they don't. No American pronounces the "-land" like "land".

Dunno about others, but I say "Mare-Uh-Lund". No divisions in the
spoken version, though. A little rise at the "Uh", but one continuous
sound.

So the "land" is as in BrE (and I assume AmE as well) "Finland", "Iceland"
etc?

I quite agree that a BrE speaker faced with "Maryland" and not having heard
it pronounced would pronounce it as "Mary Land", and I can see this is
analogous to an AmE speaker faced with "Nottingham" and, not having heard
it pronounced, coming out with "Notting Ham". There seems to be a rule here
that faced with an unfamiliar name, our guess of the pronunciation will
tend to equalise the stress on the syllables, particularly if they
are recognisable words, even though our tendency with placenames we are
familiar with is not to stress the final syllable to the point where
the vowel slips to a schwa. Some placenames in Sussex are an exception
to this rule - Portslade, Rottingdean and Moulsecoomb, all suburbs of Brighton,
are properly pronounced with the stress on the last syllable.

Matthew Huntbach
.

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