Timeline for How to pronounce -est endings
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
8 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| May 1, 2022 at 13:01 | comment | added | Peter Shor | @Nardog: The American Heritage dictionary represents pronunciations without the weak vowel merger, as can be seen from their entries for ferret and parrot. So presumably, they don't think it's widespread enough yet to change their pronunciation (and they do follow changes in American pronunciation; in their fifth edition—2011—they dropped the distinction between the vowels in force and north). | |
| May 1, 2022 at 12:46 | comment | added | Nardog | @PeterShor Flemming & Johnson say the "distinction is not made in the American accents that we are familiar with" (p. 95), and I'm not familiar with one either. Can you name one? | |
| May 1, 2022 at 12:37 | comment | added | Peter Shor | A speaker has the contrast between /ə/ and /ɪ/ in unstressed syllables exactly when they don't have the weak vowel merger. The Wikipedia article on this merger says that it is widespread in Australia, it is common in America, and is not present in RP. This means that there are a lot of Americans who don't have it. You are making the common mistake of assuming that all Americans speak the same. | |
| May 1, 2022 at 11:35 | comment | added | NN2 | Thank you very much for your answer! | |
| May 1, 2022 at 11:30 | comment | added | Nardog | The pronunciation of -est in the video sounds like [ɪ] to me. That doesn't necessarily mean it should be identified phonemically as /ɪ/ rather than as /ə/, since younger speakers of British English might lack the contrast, but no, it doesn't sound like /ɛ/. | |
| May 1, 2022 at 11:08 | comment | added | NN2 | Thank you very much for your answer. It's very clear. I have a question, in the second Youtube video of my question ( youtube.com/watch?v=VXoiOzQCqxg&t=430s , Fatima's house is the biggest ), the teacher read many times (for example, at 7 minutes 10 seconds) /-ɛst/. Perhaps she has a different accent that is used somewhere in the world? Or perhaps indeed she said / ɪst/ or / əst/ but my ears cannot capture the sound yes and so I thought she said / ɛst/? | |
| May 1, 2022 at 11:04 | vote | accept | NN2 | ||
| May 1, 2022 at 14:44 | |||||
| May 1, 2022 at 10:39 | history | answered | Nardog | CC BY-SA 4.0 |