I was reading the Dr. Seuss book “Hop on Pop” to my son and on one page it’s apparent that he intends the words “song” and “long” to rhyme. But for me, they don’t. “Song” rhymes with “gong” and “long” rhymes with “wrong”. Is this generally true or is it just my accent?
But “gong” and “wrong” also rhyme.
It might be an accent thing. They sound like they rhyme to me.
(I also think “gong” and “wrong” rhyme.)
Song, long and wrong rhyme. Gong doesn’t.
It might help clear things up if we knew more about Suranyi’s accent.
I think most people would disagree with that. How do you say “gong” such that it doesn’t rhyme with the others?
All of those words rhyme!
For me, and for most English speakers, all four of those words rhyme, but there are some accents where one or more of them are differentiated. For instance:
I’m also curious to know about suranyi’s accent, and Alessan’s. My guesses: suranyi says “song” and “gong” with a more front, unrounded vowel, closer to “ah”, and “long” and “wrong” with a more back, rounded vowel, closer to “aw”. For Alessan’s, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the three rhyming words are all somewhere between “ah” and “aw”, while “gong” is actually more of an “oh” sound, like “bone”. Did I win anything?
Also, apparently this kind of thing comes up a lot with “Hop on Pop”!
Closer to “Gahng”, I think.
Ah, damn. Gambled and lost.
What I was going to say.
Hey, for all I know it’s just an idiosyncrasy. It’s not as if I use the word “gong” on a daily basis.
They all rhyme.
Yep, they all rhyme to me (British).
They all rhyme to me (midwest US).
Nah, that makes sense - it was actually my first thought. I figured my guess was still possible, but a lot less likely, which would have made it more impressive if I’d been right (if guessing pronunciations were impressive at all).
I’m fairly sure that, over the internet at least, this question can only be answered if the interrogator can spell the words in question in terms of the International Phonetic Alphabet or some other phonemic system.
Ditto.
Well, that depends on what the question is. If it’s “Do these words rhyme as I pronounce them?” then yes, you need a phonemic system. If it’s “Do these words rhyme as you pronounce them?” (which is what I think the OP is really getting at) then everyone can judge for themselves. It doesn’t matter what phonemes they use, they just have to determine whether those phonemes match or not.
I had a friend whose habit was to pronounce all words in the same word-ending-sound group the same way, especially if one of the group could be pointed out as not belonging with the rest. We would pick that odd word and force all the others to rhyme with it. Best example was “dog” which he pronounced as if it were spelled “dawg” and therefore cog, fog, hog, log, tog, and others ending in -og were changed to be whatever-awg. It pissed most people off but I just laughed at the ingenuity and stubbornness.