I've noticed that in MW words "now" and "man" have the same middle sound (ˈnau̇ vs ˈman), but in Oxford dictionary these two words have two different sounds (naʊ vs mæn). So which dictionary is more accurately represents an "American" accent?
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5Merriam Webster phonetic transcription is a comedy of errors. Ignore it. The real stuff is an online book giving only the phonemic pronunciation of American English, by Kenyon and Knott.– John LawlerCommented Aug 27, 2023 at 17:34
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2Presumably, the Oxford isn't even attempting an American accent. It's actually RP, which is a minority accent in the UK [& makes much IPA pronunciation completely useless. One of the problems with IPA is people all pronounce it influenced by their own accent, so if you use the Oxford and an American IPA reader it sounds American, in an English reader it sounds English.] MW I don't know, but I don't know anyone, English or American who would say ˈman … Jamaican English maybe ;) Try copy paste those into ipa-reader.xyz & see what it makes of them. Test US & UK accents.– TetsujinCommented Aug 27, 2023 at 17:38
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Your profile doesn't say where you are, so perhaps you don't know that the Oxford dictionaries are published by Oxford University Press in the UK?– Kate BuntingCommented Aug 27, 2023 at 18:33
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2Cambridge gives both UK and US pronunciations. I think the OP doesn't understand the difference between a diphthong (as in now) and a monophthong/pure vowel (as in man), so some education in linguistics is probably necessary before returning to this question.– Stuart FCommented Aug 27, 2023 at 18:58
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@StuartF oh thanks for pointing out that it's a diphthong. I started learning English pronunciation just a few days ago, so I forgot about diphthongs and that the phonetic symbol "a" in the word "man" not equal to the "a" in the word "now", cause basically the word "now" despite having 3 phonetic symbols (n | a | u̇), has only two sounds ("n" and "au̇"). And sound "au̇" in MW is equivalent of "aʊ" in OD– ExPCommented Aug 27, 2023 at 20:11
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2 Answers
Merriam-Webster and Oxford (or at least the Learner's Dictionary that's free online) have different systems for transcribing pronunciations; OxfordLD's is IPA-based whereas Merriam-Webster's is rather idiosyncratic. See their respective pronunciation guides for more details.
Merriam-Webster's guide, you'll note, defines /au̇/ as a single unit, representing the vowel (usually a diphthong) present in words like now. Likewise, OxfordLD's guide defines /aʊ/ as a single unit, representing the same vowel phoneme. These can't be broken into pieces; in other words, you shouldn't read either Merriam-Webster's /au̇/ symbol or Cambridge's /aʊ/ symbol as "starting with" a separable /a/ symbol having meaning on its own. So Merriam-Webster is not, in fact, saying that "'now' and 'man' have the same middle sound."
Since these are phonemic rather than phonetic transcriptions, neither really represents an American accent particularly well; OxfordLD, for instance, will tell you that ramp and rap have the same vowel /æ/ in American English, but even in their own recordings (for American English) you can hear that these vowels are different due to /æ/-raising (see Wiki).
In English, /aɪ/ and /aʊ/ are, by most measures, distinct phonemes. They derive from Middle English /iː/ and /uː/ respectively and continue to change (over time) and vary (across regions) independently of any other vowel. Merriam-Webster does not use IPA, and its Guide to Pronunciation in fact gives [æ] and [aʊ, au] as equivalents for \a\ and \au̇\ in IPA.
