pronunciation

[Geoff Bannister]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)" <catlady at ...> 
wrote:
>
> Carole wrote in
> <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPFGU-OTChatter/message/33134>:
> 
> << "Jillous" and "jillatin" and "Milissa"? Or is "silly" "selly" in
> your pronunciation? Reminds me of Potioncat and her ballpoint "pin."
> <Gren. Erm, grin> I'm not trying to be sneppy, erm, snippy, just
> noting that for me, a short "i" and a short "e" are distinct sounds. >>

> I can tell pin from pen, grin from gren, and snip from snep. But not
> silly from selly or jilly from jelly or bilious from belious. Having
> thought about it, I realised this is personal rather than a dialect,
> because my late mother used to get on my case about it all the time,
> insisting that I pronounce some words differently except her
> demonstration of how to say them sounded exactly like the way I
> already said them ...

Geoff:
I noticed this particularly with the LOTR DVDs. New Zealanders 
appear to turn 'e' into 'i'. I noticed this often with Peter Jackson 
and one occasion comes to mind when he used 'vigitebbles' for 
'vegetables' sevgeral times.

Catlady: 
> Continuing on the subject of people frustrating me: I am certain that
> when I say 'thin', the TH sounds a little bit like an F and when I say
> 'think', the TH sounds a little bit like an S. I could say words
> starting with TH all day and all the 'unvoiced' (is that right?) ones
> would sound like one of those two examples. My in-person friends are
> driving me mad by insisting that they can't hear any difference in my
> two different THs.


Geoff:
To a UK speaker, talking about 'fings', 'finking' and 'fahsends' -
meaning 'things', 'thinking' and 'thousands' immediately links 
with what my eldest son jokingly calls 'Sarf Lunnon'. It's very 
much a part of the London accents.

It is partly a question of a bad tongue position. I taught in South 
London for 32 years and one of my regular joking responses to 
pupils speaking like this was 'this is one time when you are 
allowed to  stick out your tongue at sir'!