Well, guess that makes most Midwesterners hicks and fools then.
^ Yeah, that’s gotta be some kind of joke.
I don’t care much for affectation, especially when Americans shift into (their version of) a British accent or pronunciation because they want to sound more formal, knowledgeable, elegant, etc.
IME, some people from the East Coast do this (Melvin Van Horne, anyone?) and it sometimes seems more of a mannerism than an affectation (=unintentional). When it’s a defense mechanism to deal with insecurity, it can be overlooked, to an extent. I remember a coworker who insisted on pronouncing superb as “supuuuhb.” In our first exchange, he said he loved fine wine and opera, which aren’t my thing nor do they have to be, but after hearing him use that word a few times, I had to pretend to be late for an appointment.
Only 17% of US speakers pronounce “Mary/merry/marry” differently. 57% pronounce them all the same. The rest usually pronounce “Mary” and “marry” the same, and “merry” differently.
My dialect (Great Lakes/Inland North) pronounces all three the same.
Dialect snobs are ignorant fools.
This must be the hundredth thread where the Mary /Marry/Merry thing has come up and I still don’t understand how "Mary"and "marry’ could differ. Merry I get, but of all things I hate about peoples’ speech idiosyncracies, that ain’t one of 'em. In fact, my name is Shari, meant to rhyme with “mary”, which is how I pronounce it. If you pronounce it to rhyme with “merry” I don’t mind at all, but do not, upon learning the spelling, say “oh, it’s pronounce SHAAAARY”. Is that how some folks think that’s how “marry” is supposed to be said? To my ears that’s a completely East Coast thing.
UK RP speaker:
I see it as
Mary = Mare, (like a horse)-ree
Marry = Mar[del]ion[/del], (like the first part of Maid Marion)-ree
Merry = meh (like a grunt of disinterest)-ree
Very clear differences when spoken.
The three vowels in “Mary,” “merry,” and “marry” are the vowels in “bate,” “bet,” and “bat” ([beɪt] [bɛt] [bæt]) or “mate,” “met,” and “mat” ([meɪt] [mɛt] [mæt]).
In your (our?) dialect, the R-coloring sort of pulls at the vowels to erase the distinction.
Here’s an example, but because your brain has been trained to consider them merged, it might take you many listens to start to hear the distinction – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py0gxuv48iU
This is not going to help someone with the merger. We pronounce “Mare,” “Mary,” and “Marion” with the same vowel.
To my ears the woman in the video pronounces them all the same.
It’s interesting to me, as while those do sound different to me in that recording, the “a” in “Mary” doesn’t really sound like a diphthong to me, and different from the vowel in “bate” which is a clear /eɪ/. To my ears, it closer to just an /e/ (not an /ɛ/), but perhaps not quite that either. I’ve always read the “Mary” to be transcribed with an /eɪ/ for the vowel, but, try as I might, I just don’t quite hear it that way. I understand that my accent treats all those as basically the same phoneme in that context, so I may not be primed to hear it, but the /eɪ/ phoneme does exist in my dialect, of course. If I say “may-ree,” it doesn’t sound the same as the “Mary” in that example.
There is nothing irrational about wanting to throat-punch people who pronounce ‘Sale’ like ‘sell’, or ‘Whale’ like ‘well’.
Which is what I said would happen. Just as you spent your childhood learning to hear and pronounce the phonemes in your own dialect, you often have to learn how to hear phonemic distinctions in other dialects.
You could start by paying attention to how your mouth (lips, tongue, jaw) moves and positions to make the “mate, met, mat” vowels, and then start pronouncing them in isolation and then trying to insert them into “Mary, merry, marry.” When you start training your mouth to make the sounds, you will start training your brain to hear the sounds.
Also I have heard them pronounced differently, but I sure can’t do it. On a different message board someone was complaining about how her name, Erin, is not pronounced Aaron. I was like “yeah it is”.
Yeah, “Erin” and “Aaron” are homophones in my dialect. I can make them sound different, but it’s a bit awkward. All you do is instead of the “short-a” /ae/ sound at the beginning of “Aaron,” you say start with an “eh” sound, /ɛ/. It’s awkward, because it doesn’t seem my dialect really puts an /ɛ/ immediately behind an “r” sound. But that’s all the difference is. If you can get yourself to say “eh-rin” instead of “ae-rin,” that’s it.
Or just pronounce “Aaron” like Key & Peele do.
Thanks, Ascenray; I should have just asked you directly 
It seems I did understand my IPA cheat sheet, just couldn’t imagine the sound in my mind’s ears. That seems a clunky pronunciation of “Mary” but I realize it’s subtle when actually voiced.
What’s fascinating about this thread is that it’s made me realize that not only do people speak differently, they literally HEAR differently (if I were to marry Merry Mary, I’d hear no difference).
My MIL is an elderly Japanese woman who once asked my toddlers “Jew like flutes?” (Deer in headlights stare from both kids) "So, jew like flutes?" Luckily her daughter stepped in and said “Oh, sure, mom, they’d love some fruit.”
But what I’ve learned is that she doesn’t hear any difference between an R sound and an L. Never has. So that “hilarious” cliché* is true, but it’s not just an artifact of their accent. It’s how brains are wired.
*I heard it a lot in '50s cartoons (asian character in coolie hat to Bugs Bunny: “Honolable labbit ees collect!”)
I once worked with someone named Aaron. Once a woman asked me to go get Erin, and I was *so *confused, I was like “There is no woman here by that name?
” Which made her confused, “No, your co-worker? The guy in the back room, Erin?” :smack:
She must have been from the mid-west because here in NY, those names are *very *different.
If the person’s name that they were asking for was “Dawn” and you heard it as “Don” would you also not understand who they were asking for?
My stepdaughter Erin has a cousin named Aaron. This was no problem when we all lived in New York. Aaron moved to Tennessee and when Erin went to visit, hilarity and confusion ensued.
Erin started being referred to as “the girl Erin”. I don’t see how midwesterners cannot discern eh from ah. As in “I met a cat”.
If I worked with a Dawn and someone asked me where Don was, that may momentarily confuse me, though the difference between those two is not as strong with as Aaron/Erin. Maybe it’s because the difference is at the beginning of the name?