As it happens I am going to Bury St. Edmunds next week. But I don’t know whether it’s pronounced “berry” or “burrry”.
You would think they’d have got the job done by now. How long does it take to bury one saint?
I don’t think most Americans hear the difference between /ɜr/ and /ər/. All the attempts I’ve seen to spell those sounds (other than the IPA) spell them out the same way (e.g. “urr”). And I know I don’t really hear the difference. I’m still not entirely sure I do say them differently, other than, yes, length.
I actually don’t know anyone who considers something to be a different vowel due to length. But nearly everyone I talk to has a rhotic accent. I understand that, in non-rhotic accents, vowel length can help indicate historic /r/, and thus may occasionally be phonemic. (In other words, two words may differ only in the length of the vowel.) It makes sense then that non-rhotic speakers may put greater importance on vowel length.
Which is incorrect. You may not hear it that way, but others do. And the way you hear speech is no more correct than the way other people speech. They are no more mishearing than you are. If you can accept this fact, then it would seem to me that there would be no reason to get offended when someone hears your accent differently than you do.
We all do that. None of us hears exactly what sounds we say. That’s not how speech recognition in the human brain works. We hear phonemes, not sounds. It’s all about how our mind categorizes it, not the exact frequencies being spoken.
I definitely think that the way some British people say strawberry can sound like “strawburry.” The “burr” is short, but it’s there. It doesn’t sound like “strawb’ry,” which is probably how you hear it. It’s ambiguous, and, due to our different accents, our brains categorize it differently.
I’m sorry, but that’s just not true. If I can’t hear the difference when a Czech speaker says ř (because it doesn’t exist in English), that doesn’t mean they’re not saying it. An audio recording would be able to objectively identify the sounds. It would be wrong, and offensive, for me to claim that my understanding of what they’re saying is as valid as their own. I can say it’s what I hear, but I can’t claim it’s what they say.
FWIW, long and short vowels make a phonemic difference in US English too - like I mentioned, ship and sheep.
I think you’re misunderstanding what BigT is saying, who is talking about what is heard, not what is said. When a Czech speaker says /ř/, I hear /ɹ/, because that’s the closest phoneme my brain is familiar with. The speaking and the hearing are distinct.
I’m not joking though - I really am going to Bury on Wednesday and I would appreciate someone letting me know the correct pronunciation.
But the i in “ship” is a slightly different sound than the “ee” in “sheep.” It’s not /i/ vs /i:/. It’s /ɪ/ vs /i:/. I had a great difficult time in Hungarian distinguishing /i/ vs /i:/ in speech, which are represented as i and í, because they are exactly the same sound, only their length is different. I only heard what I would describe in American English as “ee.” Whereas in at least my dialect of English, the difference between “ship” and “sheep” is also a difference of the actual sound of the vowel. If I heard someone say /ʃip/, it sounds like “sheep” to me, not “ship.” I find /i/ closer to /i:/ than /ɪ/. Once again, that’s how I hear it. I can totally understand hearing it the other way around. One has the wrong length, but the right sound; the other has the right length, but not quite the right sound.
(Further confusing things to the lay reader, what we call “long” and “short” vowels in at least American phonics pedagogy is quite different than what is meant by it linguistically and how it is taught in much of the rest of the world. For us, “long” vowels are mostly diphthongs – “A long vowel says its name” is how many of us here were taught.)
But I’m not. Admittedly I got sidetracked into a discussion where I am genuinely surprised that some people apparently can’t hear the difference between long and short vowels, because it’s a major element of many English phonemes. (I’m not expecting anything more nuanced than that - the audible difference between a schwa and ɜ: is really hard to detect and I certainly couldn’t detect it in casual speech). But my original assertion was that British people don’t say strawburry.
If you read my post, I was entirely talking about what we say, not what other people hear. The misunderstanding was on the part of two other posters who decided that I was telling someone what they were hearing. And I wasn’t.
Like laurel/yanni thing was an actual recording of someone saying the word laurel, and that’s a fact. Many listeners heard it as yanni, many heard it as laurel (mainly depending on their sensitivity to different sound frequencies - for me it flipped between the two). And that they heard it as laurel or yanni is a fact, and they were not wrong about what they heard, but it doesn’t change the fact that original word recorded was definitely laurel.
Yes, I know they are different sounds. But they are similar enough that people - even native speakers - don’t always hear the difference in casual speech. /ɪ/ is always used for short vowels, and /i/ is almost always used for long vowels, so we don’t tend to notice the difference between the actual articulation unless it’s used in a way we’re unaccustomed to, and draws our attention to it.
Like I’m not saying that I’d expect people to be totally aware of the difference between the schwa and /ɜ/. It was just the length.
The long vowels meaning a dipthong thing is really unhelpful, but I don’t think that’s the source of the confusion for once!
And it was a sidetrack, as I explained in between.
You have to be careful of all the arrows sticking out of him. Don’t want to break any.
Bur-ee-el for me. I often hear berry-el, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard barry-el.
What do you mean? If your “barry-el” is supposed to be “bar-ee-el,” then I haven’t heard that either. But the name Barry (as in “Barry White” (which they have to do now that she’s dead)) I hear pronounced the same as “berry” or as many of us in this thread pronounce “bury.”
Thanks for the clarification. I do appreciate your posts here.
And that assertion must inherently be based on what you hear. There is no other way for you to determine what other people say other than by listening to them. And, when you listen, you will inherently filter the sounds through the phonemes you personally know.
I will refer back to my first post, the one you didn’t argue with. I have heard examples where people in the UK hold out the /r/ a bit longer, and that can be perceived as an extra syllable. And some people may write that out as “strawburry.”
There is no objective determination of what is and is not an extra syllable.
barry and berry are pronounced different to me. Not sure where I picked it up, we moved a lot. Probably upstate New York. It’s like the merry/marry thing. Those are also distinct words to me.
Well no, audio equipment can quite easily distinguish between a long and a short vowel sound. So there is an objective answer. But I don’t think you’re going to be persuaded, so I give up.
Audio equipment can only record what is said. It cannot determine what is heard. That is, the phonemes heard are entirely subjective to the person doing the hearing.
Agreed, but I was only talking about what is said, not what listeners perceive. For length of sounds it’s very reliable, and is an objective way of determining whether there was an extra syllable. Dipthongs would complicate that, but if anyone starts saying this sound is a dipthong then I’m gonna scream. 
Thank you for your other post, BTW - it was nice to read, and right back atcha.
A couple of questions about that (cool) painting:
- Is the King wearing spurs?
- What is the significance of the wolf?
- Crows on banners, was that a thing?
Raven, not crows.
Although I doubt the depiction of all the bowmen: they seem to be wearing chainmail and helmets more associated with the Normans, not the Vikings.
- Yes, those are spurs.
- Supposedly, after he was shot full of arrows, the Vikings cut off his head and threw it into the woods. When his men went looking for his head, it was found being guarded by a wolf. But wait! There’s more! They put the head by his body and it reattached itself and miracles ensued.
- Northern_Piper covered that.