“Food-ah.” Probably because I first learned the term/name in Hebrew, which simply has no “wood” vowel sound.
Quite, to me there is no difference between “inner” and “in a”. Nor in most cases, between an “ah” and “er” ending.
But I guess even when learning the phonetic symbols you would have to, at some point, actually hear the unambiguous sound and then be given the relevant symbol?
Yes, it would be advisable to listen to samples. Some of the phonetic symbol guides do have links to sound files. I’ll try to dig up some examples.
Rhotic - Here’s U.S. public television news anchor Jim Lehrer pronouncing “Boehner” and “Barbour” in the introduction to this news clip – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrbMJDCPprE&feature=mpt%3Atop_stories&playnext=1&videos=vlvzM7MNZGc.
Non-rhotic - And here – the BBC’s Paul Adams pronounces “Boehner” at about 20 seconds into the audio clip of “Listen to Paul Adams” – http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/news/2010/11/101103_midterms_sl.shtml
Rhotic - [beɪ nɚ]
Non-rhotic - [beɪ nə]
Thanks acsenray, a little ignorance fought.
I voted the first one, “food-uh.” Can’t say I’ve ever heard it pronounced any other way. By English speakers, that is, as the Thais call him “Phoot.” (Hard P, rhymes with “toot” but a shorter vowel duration and a high tone.)
Just try the Wikipedia article. You’ll have to follow the links to the actual pages form the chart (which you’ll have to scroll down to see) but then you’ll see play button that will play the audio file.
It’s closer to the other “th” sound, like in "breath" or “death”, but not exactly.
It’s not *quite *the “th” sound, as it comes off the “d” (is that ellision? I don’t know. According to Wiki, the Hindi “dh” just doesn’t occur in English.
Correctly. 
It’s really difficult to transliterate Devanagari script into Hindi, but the “male from Nepal” on this page gets the closest to the Sanskrit बुद्ध, which has since had a long vowel sound tacked on at the end.
If you’re talking about the sound as used in Hindi, then it has nothing to do with the two sounds represented as “the” in English orthography.
It’s the sound I mentioned in post No. 5, the geminated, aspirated dental plosive.