OT: Re: pronunciation

[Simon Biber]

No: HPFGUIDX 9040

> To hear an approximate of the way an American might pronounce 'aw'
> scroll down to the vowel sounds and click on the word 'ought' - (from
> there you can listen to the words 'caught' & 'ought' & and one other
> word - I forget now what it is) although, there are slight (and
> sometimes not so slight) regional differences in the pronunciation
> of 'aw'.  Anyway, it's the closest thing I could find to explain
> without scouring the internet for hours.  ;)

The pronunciation of 'caught' on that site sounds like 'cart' but it should
sound like 'court'.
Similarly 'ought' on the site sounds like 'art' but to me should rhyme with
the others.
In my dialect, all these words rhyme -- 'court' and 'caught', 'sort' and
'sought', 'fort' and 'fought'.
On the other hand their rendition of 'sought' sounds somewhere between 'sut'
and 'sart'.

I think the problem is that you Americans open your mouth too widely. All
the "or" sounds get corrupted into "ar".

> As for forks... I guess it might sort of sound like 'foreks' to you
> if you heard it... You could scroll to the consonant pronunciations,
> click on 'rid' and from there click on 'body-bard' to hear the way we
> Americans tend to pronounce r's not followed by vowels.

Ok the 'body' sounds like 'buddy' with some r colourisation (note, not
colorization -- funny to have two spelling changes in the same word <g>).
It's almost like 'bardy'.

I can see what you mean by the voiced 'r'... when an 'r' is followed by a
consonant you still pronounce it. In Australia we generally make them
silent. So, the words 'bard' and 'barred' are homophones in my dialect, as
are 'bored' and 'board'. None of these four have a voiced 'r'.

Simon.