I stand by my first post in this thread about two years ago that there should be an official SD column on this topic just to clear up the fact that it’s an intrusive r between vowel sounds, not an r randomly added to the ends of words ending in vowels.
Ascenray’s right that, in most American accents I’ve heard, they simply go from one vowel to the other without any gap. I listen to them closely a lot in my work. Occasionally this makes things harder for me to understand, because I’m not used to it. British RP seems to me to be a bit more staccato overall than most American accents.
It’s standard British RP and standard in most other British dialects.
a) Why would they do that? Many Americans think British accents are cool, and teenage girls especially do. I’m no expert in music history, but it seemed like being British helped record sales at that time.
b) “Till There Was You” wasn’t their song, it was from an American musical, so they knew how Americans sang it.
Yeah, except cot and caught are supposed to be two very different sounding words. Same as logger and lager.
I suffer from the cot/caught merger too, and it took me a really long time to even learn how to pronounce cot correctly without really overemphasizing it. It sounds silly to me, but I do recognize it’s the correct pronunciation.
Go to an online dictionary and listen to cot and caught, back to back, and have yourself a laugh
I would have thought it was “caught” that took you time to distinguish from “cot.” My accent does not merge “cot” and “caught,” but when I hear accents that do, it’s that both words sound like “cot” to my ears, so it’s “caught” that needs to be differentiated.
Einstein’s little-known Law of R’s stipulates that there are a set number of R’s in the universe. For example, the ones that disappear in Boston in phrases like “Pahk your cah in Hahvahd Yahd” reappear down in Texas in phrases like “Struck me an earl well.”
I’m not a cot/caught merger at all - they’re two totally different vowels, “caht” and “cawt.” Ditto logger (“lawgger”) and lager (“lahgger” - I didn’t spend quite enough time in Scotland to pick up their pronunciation of “lagger”).
Something I read - I think in Readers Digest - many years ago: A chap who said something along the lines of “Back home in Minnesota my name was Earl and I was in the oil business, but since I moved to New Jersey my name is Oil and I sell erl…”
Yes, I can understand that some who are not used to it will perceive it as a rhotic R, but we don’t perceive it as an added “R”.
The “R” is in the ears of the beholder, it’s all about who is doing the perceiving!
On the “cot/caught” pronunciation, while I understand that in some parts of the USA, they are pronounced in a similar fashion, there would be no such confusion in Australian English.
“Caught” would be pronounced by us very similar to how we pronounce “Court”, but since we pronounce “court” very differently to the rhotic accents, that phonetic comparison is invalid outside Australian English.
I guess it’s another example of the type of situation which occurred with the singer Sade’s name when the the UK phonetic spelling “Shar-Day” was pronounced as the rhotic oriented Americans would say it.
Except it’s not the vowel in “all”, it’s the vowel in “arm”. In British English, that vowel is most commonly followed by an “r”, so the “shar-day” spelling pronunciation looks perfectly natural. She could have written it as “shah-day”. In RP Br Eng, that would yield an identical pronunciation to “shar-day”, but for rhotic Am Eng speakers, it would yield a different (and correct) pronunciation than the incorrect “shaR-day”.
Would you pronounce “tuna oil” the same as “tuner oil”? If so, it’s fairly undeniable that you are adding an r sound to the former, even if you don’t perceive it as such. And that’s why it’s called an intrusive r.
So how does this line up with what you seem to be implying, that in my accent, there must be some kind of break, glottal stop or intrusive R between vowels?
I’m not sure what you mean by this. Are we supposed to discuss the subject as if particular British accents are the only accents of English in the world? When people start implying that a particular feature of a certain accent is “needed” then it’s relevant to talk about how other accents don’t “need” that feature.
None of these words have any linguistic significance, as far as I can tell. It doesn’t matter whether an intrusive R is perceived as being deliberate. All that matters is that it’s there.
I think this discussion would go smoother if you used different terms. When you say that this “is difficult to pronounce” it looks like an obviously false statement of fact, since I do it without difficulty. Can you rephrase it without making false statements of fact?
I don’t know what you mean by a variable similarity to an R sound. R sounds are already highly variable by themselves. There are a wide range of tongue positions that make what are recognizable as R sounds in English. That’s why in IPA, there are numerous symbols for various kinds of R sounds. Pretty much anything in that range is an R sound to an English speaker.
“Laziness” is not a term usually considered useful when describing linguistic traits.
[quote=“JohnB_Melb, post:196, topic:571223”]
Yes, I can understand that some who are not used to it will perceive it as a rhotic R, but we don’t perceive it as an added “R”.
And, again, I’m not sure what the significance is of emphasizing the question of whether those who use an intrusive R perceive it as an intrusive R. It is one whether they perceive it that way or not.
The Beatles emulated American accents in some of their work, particularly their earlier work. By the time John Lennon recorded “A Day in the Life,” I don’t think he was emulating an American accent. And his use of the intrusive R in “I sawra film today” is not what one would expect from someone trying to sound like an American blues or rockabilly singer.
I’ve heard that kind of pronunciation in the Virginia Tidewater area.
The intrusive intrusive R is not generally a conscious decision on the part of the speaker beyond a desire to compensate for a known non-rhotic accent.
