For me, it’s absolutely exactly the same as “rye.” I’m guessing you probably round your lips a bit in anticipation of the “w” that doesn’t come? I just say those words exactly the same.
Like Cool-Whip?
Where are you from, may I ask?
PIE meaning Pain In Esophagus?
Hey, we’re talking about German. It’s a reasonable question.
Don’t be silly, he’s talking about that weird east Canadian dialect.
While reconstruction of roots is hypothetical in nature at best these words are typically attributed to the PIE root *wer-
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/wer-
As American dialects are typically more representative or at least often retain traces of earlier English pronunciations many of them do retain a different pronunciation for /wr/
I personally do not pronounce “wrap” as /rap/ but I am also unsure if that is a hyper-correction. I grew up in the US West and have lived on the West Coast most of my life and “Wrist” is not /rist/
This is the best representation I share, but cannot comment if this is typical in English or due to my dialect.
I am not sure if this digraph is only suppose to be used for "twisting words" or how it is used in other dialects but some like wrap seem to have examples with that sound for American but not English.Other examples do not pronounce it as a digraph although I personally do.
Perhaps the still non-universal choice of the labialized ⟨wr⟩ sound or the non-labialized ⟨r⟩ without ⟨w⟩ was not as absent in England when the spelling was standardized.
Here is what the OED claims.
While “wrap” and “rap” are not homophones in my speech, I don’t know how common this is or once again if this is a hyper-correction.
Wouldn’t that be PEI, not PIE?
MMMMM pie
I guess [r[sup]w[/sup]] is another way of writing it.
A good way to see if you use lip rounding to say these words is to say the word while smiling to see if it sounds the same to you.
Try it and see if words like wrist and wrap sound the same the way you say them.
While I can’t hear much difference in the sound of my pronunciation, I can feel that my mouth moves a bit differently when saying “awry” compared with “a rye”. A bit like the difference between the two long "R"s pronounced by the actor at the beginning of this clip.
When you get two different words involved, you introduce the possibility of different pronunciation like the difference between “night rate” and “nitrate”.
Same here. But a quick reading of all the posts leaves me uncertain now whether I’m expected to or not.
So you’re saying right right, but you’re worried that you might be saying wrong wrong.
I grew up in northern Minnesota, but haven’t lived there in a long time - I don’t think it’s a regional pronunciation. Spent time in Los Angeles and Portland, OR.
I’m also somewhat of a pedant when it comes to pronunciation - I pronounce all the letters in words like “Wednesday” and “clothes” as well, although not in an awkward way. (This post makes it sound like I talk like a robot, which I don’t think is true. Nobody has ever commented on my pronunciation of anything.)
Not that I want to discourage whimsy, but if you pronounce words in such an idiosyncratic manner, why would you describe that as pedantry? Pedantry means strict insistence on rules that are (in some sense, at least) technically correct. Are you claiming that there is a current dialect in which it’s actually correct to pronounce all the letters in Wednesday?
I guess I’d say that I’m a pedant when it comes to pronunciation, but not a pedant when it comes to the definition of “pedantry.”
Although:
-
I’m surprised that none of the “official” dictionary pronunciations of “Wednesday” acknowledge the “d” at all, and
-
I really don’t think I pronounce it in THAT odd or idiosyncratic of a manner - I think if you heard me say it in casual conversation, you perhaps wouldn’t even notice that I’d pronounced it in a different way.
Thanks for not discouraging whimsy, though!
Ah, ok - actually the dictionaries do recognize the existence of a faint d in some dialects as what I think is a glottal /wɛ(ʔə)nzde/
If that’s what you mean, that’s not so surprising. I was envisioning you pronouncing the second e as well, like wed-nez-day.
Many Northern Brits and most Scottish people do pronounce the d in Wednesday, but it is not in the RP thus not indicated in those dictionaries.
Most people know the RP but few in the UK actually speak it and there has been a bit of a push back in recent decades where people actually choosing to accent regional differences. As RP is the accent on which phonemic entries dictionaries are base on it is not unexpected that the sounding of the letter wouldn’t be found there.
Perscription isn’t a prescription 
Yes, but from what I can recall (I grew up in London) I’ve never heard any Scot or Northerner say it with what you’d call a clear recognizable “d” sound. I think the glottal in /wɛ(ʔə)nzde/ is probably about right.
If anyone can find a recording of a Scot saying Wednesday, please post it, I can’t find one.
Would this be an example of phonesthesia (phonaesthesia) ? Etymonline also mentions
“sm- … words having to do with creeping or pressing close”
Googling just now, it appears linguists may be less skeptical of phonesthesia than they were a few decades ago — is that correct? Here’s a pdf paper, “Athematic Metaphors”, which has a much broader and perhaps much more interesting topic, but touches on phonesthesia. It shows
- wr- ‘around’
It doesn’t mention ‘sm-’ but shows two relationships for ‘sn-’ — ‘nose’ and ‘quick.’
Historical note: John Wallis, famous as one of the pre-Newton inventors of calculus, may have been among the very first to propose such phonaesthemes, in his Grammatica linguae Anglicanae.
Anecdotes aren’t data, but it does seem that everyone so far who pronounces “right” and “write” differently (or claims to – I bet some of these supposed distinctions wouldn’t pass an objective test, but are perceived in the speaker as “real”) is from a British commonwealth country, or very close to one (e.g., northern Minnesota).
Also, note that the history of “wren” might be rather different – like “bird” (originally “brid”), it may have been “wern,” but after the e/r switch (metathesis), it lost the “w-” pronunciation (in standard American and RP) by analogy with all those words that had been “wr-” all along.