Over in this thread about accents, Inner Sticker requests another thread where we can compare our accents. And here it is!
In the other thread, Zsofia mentions that she pronounces the p-syllable in ‘pin’, ‘pen’, ‘peeing’ and ‘piano’ the same. This startled me, but I remembered going to the Cincinnati area on work and meeting someone who pronoiunced ‘pin’ and ‘pen’ the same. Given that we were dealing with electronics, where pins are a common feature of connectors, and taking notes in pen, it got a little confusing.
Indistinguishable suggested,
Monty suggested,
From these, I think we can come up with the start of a list of words to pronounce:
Pen, pin, peeing, piano.
Mary, marry, merry.
Cot, caught.
Don, dawn.
Furry, hurry.
On, gone, Don, Dawn.
Feel, fill.
Wine, whine.
Mirror, nearer.
Floor, flower, flour
As before, PM me or check my email in my profile, and send me files. I’ll slap them up on my webserver and link to them. The first few may take some time; I’m going to be quite busy for the next couple of days.
Ummm, a little more detail on how this is supposed to work?
Wow. After going through that list in my head, it seems I’m on a vowel austerity program.
Sunspace, you got poor old Don & Dawn in there twice.
You know, we have two pronunciations of Mary here.
Here’s the original thread. Participants recorded themselves saying things and sent the resulting files to me. I loaded them onto my webserver and provided links in my posts.
Two pronunciations of the name? When do you use one and when the other?
:: head explodes ::
Heck, I can find three different pronunciations of Mary within my extended family:
- The “standard” pronunciation
- “MAY-ree” (a common pronunciation among Southerners of the upper classes or pretentions thereto)
- “Murry” the mumbling Appalachian pronunciation. More of a lower-class phenomenon.
In my experience, Southern accents vary more along class lines than along geographic lines.
There, there. (picks up pieces of Sunspace’s head and all the rocks that go in there).
I had a similar reaction when I realized you were talking about a car’s trunk when you said boot in the other thread. I was thinking *“how do you put a suitcase inside a shoe ???” * 
Ah, but the first pair were the nouns ‘don’ and ‘dawn’; the second pair were the names ‘Don’ and ‘Dawn’. [sub]Yeah, that’s it…[/sub]
Perhaps I’ll try this again, since last time was pretty interesting.
Who, me?
Actually, that was probably one of the Brits. We say ‘trunk’ in Canada.
So the list in post #2 is the final one?
Dear Og, no! More words are welcome! I was also hoping that people would suggest some nice sentences or short paragraphs to read as well. Apparently peoples’ accents show through much more in extended speech, as opposed to one word.
Well, then, let’s address that.
I was trying my crappy cheap microphone with Sound Recorder tonight without much success. So I downloaded Audacity, which looks like it is flexible enough to do what is needed, but it has a lot of options. Sampling rate? Mono/Stereo? Somebody help me out here.
I used Audacity with the default settings, and it seemed to work fine. I’ll have to find it, though, to know what those were–I’m on a different computer now.
I used Audacity for the samples in the other thread, and made everything mono. This makes the files half the size for emailing.
The default sampling rate in Audacity is CD-quality (44,100 samples per second, 16 bits per sample). You can cut the sampling rate down quite a bit and still be understandable.
Note that in Audacity, if you want to export a file as an MP3, you have to install the “LAME Encoder”, which is available separately. This is because of the licensing of the MP3 standard, or something.
How’s this for a sample [del]sentence[/del] paragraph:
[sub]Okay, I got carried away…[/sub]
Heavens. You should’ve submitted that to the Bulwer-Lytton contest.
I’ve been thinking - it takes a paragraph or two to get the speaker into a relaxed, normal mode of speaking. I think that the longer the phrase, the better. I wish some linguist(s) would pop in to suggest more phrases (nothing against yours, Sunspace).