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"Caramel", which (clearly) has an "a" in the middle, has only this spelling world wide.
But in my experience, North Americans (Canadians too) don't pronounce the middle "a". They pronounce it exactly like the girl's name Carmel. From my experience, all Americans pronounce it without the "a" and all other places pronounce it with the middle "a" voiced.
Why is that?
Can this difference in pronunciation be traced to a root cause?
Do you say car-a-mel or car-mel? Is your “fire” closer to fah-yer or fayr?
{Arika Okrent _ Mentalfloss.com _ 3 reasons for syllabically ambiguous words}
- There is a group of words in English that can be pronounced with two different syllable structures, depending on dialect, personal preference, or context of use. While many will insist that one or the other is incontrovertibly correct, there is usually no real basis for pronouncements on the one true syllable structure. Sometimes two things can both be correct. If you need a better authority than me on that, lots of dictionaries accept both pronunciations for all the words discussed below (e.g., Merriam-Webster). What’s more interesting than fighting about who’s right is understanding why these differences arise. There are three processes that result in syllabically ambiguous words.
Two or Three Syllables: caramel, mayonnaise, family, chocolate, camera, different, separate, favorite:
- These words all have a syllable which is often left out of the pronunciation. When we cut a sound out of the middle of a word, it’s called syncope (a three syllable word, sin-ko-pee). O-range becomes ornge, car-a-mel becomes car-mel, in-ter-es-ting becomes in-tres-ting. This pruning of syllables doesn’t happen in some random, haphazard fashion. If a vowel gets chucked, it will be before an r or l (those guys again!) or in some cases a nasal (m or n). It will also be from an unstressed syllable. So the American LA-buh-ra-to-ry becomes lab-ra-to-ry, while the British la-BO-ra-to-ry become la-bo-ra-try.
(mentalfloss.com)
Caramel appears have different pronunciations in different English dialects, the AmE one is just a variant which has been in place for a long time:
- The word caramel can acceptably be pronounced in several accepted ways, including KARR-uh-mel, KARR-uh-muhl, and, in North American English, KAR-muhl. The disappearance of that second syllable -uh- in the final pronunciation seems to have been in the works for a long time. The word has been in English since the 18th century, which it came via French from the Spanish caramel. Order that caramel ice cream sundae however you like!
(blog.oxforddictionaries.com)
From (www.listenandlearnusa.com/blog)
Americans don't all use "carmel". Many of them think it's more correct to say "carr-a-mel", so you can find a number of examples of this pronunciation being used, especially in formal contexts. Go through some of the Youglish US pronunciations of "caramel".
There is a word where a similar syncopated pronunciation is, as far as I know, universal for American English speakers: squirrel.
Phonetically, squirrel may actually be one syllable or two, probably in part due to uncertain syllabification of word-final /l/ after /r/. But the identity of the rhotic vowel (/ɜr/ as in "fur" rather than /ɪr/ as in "mirror") suggests that this word may have been underlyingly compressed to one syllable in the historical ancestor of the pronunciation that modern American English speakers use. (I'm not certain that the change in vowel quality is related to syllable structure, since "syrup" also shows a variant pronunciation with /ɜr/ in American English.)
I don't know of any other examples besides these two, though. (Unless you count iron = iern, which occurs also in British English, and the less common irony = ierny.)
I don't know what caused these pronunciations to be established only in North America. It seems possible that the presence of rhotic vowels somehow contributed; in most British accents it would be impossible to have "r" in disyllabic /kɑrməl/ or monosyllabic /sqɜrl/, since "r" at the end of syllables has been converted to mere alteration of the length or quality of the preceding vowel (the pronunciations would instead be /kɑːməl/ and /sqɜːl/; compare Mount Carmel /maʊnt kɑːməl/ and pearl /pɜːl/).
