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The "f" sound is still used in "laughter", and was acknowledged in an 1875 book "Report and Transactions - The Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Science, Literature and Art, Volume 7" as a Somerset, Devon and Cornwall pronunciation. This was in the section on "Verbal Provincialisms in South-West Devonshire"
The entry starts by saying that "Oft" ...
4
In some dialects of American English, if there's an /l/ at the end of a syllable after particular vowels, the /l/ turns into /əl/. This means that pairs of words like bowled and bold will get pronounced differently. Listening to a few pronunciations on the internet, this doesn't generally seem to happen in British English (there are also lots of Americans ...
4
The setting of this comic-book story is Chicago, so three very different readings of the slangy statement "Sixty trey. All day" seem more or less plausible, while a fourth reading seems highly implausible.
Reading 1: "63rd Street. [Someone or something] will be there all day."
Michael Lyman, Gangland: Drug Trafficking by Organized Criminals (1989) [snippet ...
2
The sound change in hierarchy is consistent with the Great Vowel Shift (c. 1400 - 1700), which lifted /i/ to /aɪ/.
Before the Great Vowel Shift, a series of vowel changes in English that occurred gradually between 1400 and 1700, vowel spelling was relatively consistent with pronunciation. (See the Wikipedia article for a general overview.)
According to ...
2
Some British dialects glottalize word-final or syllable-final oral stops. That is, a glottal stop is articulated simultaneously with the stop. I suspect this is what you're hearing.
Some American dialects also do this, for example my own Midwestern dialect. When the oral closure is lost for some reason, what is left is just a glottal stop. Oral closure ...
2
Sixty Tray was a character from a Weird War Tales by Vertigo (I think #11) which featured the same character. It was a bit of an Easter egg, in WWT “Sixty Tray, all day” was the character’s catch phrase.
2
J. C. Wells, the phonetician, in his Pronunciation Dictionary (Longman, 3rd edition 2008) gives three possibilities for British English.
ˈpɑ:t ɪs ɪp l, the most common pronunciation (spaces make the syllabification of the word clear)
ˈpɑ:ts ɪp l, less common with only three syllables
pɑ: ˈtɪs ɪp l, also less common than the first one with the stress on the ...
1
Is "participle" pronounced with stress on the first syllable or the second syllable?
From Wiktionary:
participle
Pronunciation
(Received Pronunciation) IPA: /pɑːˈtɪsɪpəl/
(US) IPA: /ˈpɑɹtɪˌsɪpəl/
So some people stress the first syllable and some people stress the second syllable. According to Wiktionary, people in the US are more ...
1
In a comment, John Lawler wrote:
/k/ after /ŋ/ is often omitted, especially before another consonant, like /s/. The velar quality of /k/ is audible in the velarization of the preceding nasal, and its voiceless quality merges with the following voiceless fricative /s/. It is normal for stops in the middle of consonant clusters to be elided or reduced, ...
1
Words like bot and bought originally had different vowel sounds, but for some North American speakers, these vowels are now merged to a single vowel phoneme. This merger is called the "cot-caught merger"; there is a previous question about it: Why are many TV personalities beginning to pronounce "daughter" as "dotter"?
For speakers with ...
1
In comments, John Lawler first wrote:
No, not really. English spelling is so awful at recording pronunciation that there are too many ways to represent the pronounced letter names, and no ways that are unambiguous. So you see ee, ie, e, i, for instance for E, o, oh, ow, ou for O, etc. Use phonemic symbols if you need accurate rendition of English sounds.
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