Quote:
Originally Posted by GraceKrispy
I actually don't dislike it at all (although a few online Australian friends and I get on each other about spelling things "wrong"). Now I am trying to think of that sound difference of which you speak. Can you provide some example words? I know there are a few differences in pronunciation of the short "o" sound in American English that not everyone can hear. I just remember graduate school, working on research on phonics with a professor who could not hear the difference between the |o| sounds in dog and bottle. One was a more open sound and one more closed. To her (Boston born and raised) they were one and the same. Some Southerners pronounce pin and pen the exact same way, to give another example. I'm guessing there are examples like that in all languages, as dialects alter, however minutely, the sounds of some letters.
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Differences in vowel sounds are what principally differentiate one "accent" from another, of course. Eg, in Britain, people in the south of England pronounce "grass", "bath", "path", etc, with a long "ar" sound, while people in the north use a short "a" with no trace of an "r".
What I was referring to in the "-our" spellings is that, at least in British English, they represent an "-er" sound. eg, "favour" and "baker" have the same final sound, and it's a different sound to that found in words like "prior", in which the "o" is pronounced as a short "o".
The first man who attempted to do a systematic survey of American accents in the early 20th century categorised them on the basis of how people pronounced the three words "marry", "Mary", and "merry". In British English those three words have distinctly different vowel sounds, but in most American accents two of the three - or even all three! - use the same vowel.