Not the way I pronounce them. With fire, the “aye” sound just glides into the r sound. However, there is a pause between the 2 with flyer. Do you think oil has 2 syllables? The “oy” in that just glides into the l sound.
I *spose * next you’ll be telling meh that **sup-pose ** has 2 syllables?
Maybe we’ve just been saying it wrong.
The people in the olden days could’ve pronounced it differently.
Actually, now that you’ve got me muttering in the middle of my office, I spose that you could say it as a single syllable word.
It is indeed, and if it were an “n” sound, rather than an “r” sound, after the “i”, it would not be controversial. But sounds such as “r” and “l” have short leading sounds to them. “Fire” and “File” both suffer the same dilemma — one syllable or two?
Note that in English, the leading sound is an “uh”, but in German it is an “ee” (closer to the “i” in bit, but I’m exaggerating for effect). One dead giveaway for an American speaking German is if he has not mastered this leading sound. If he thinks the English “vial” and the German “weil” are homonyms, he will sound foreign. The English is “vi-uhl”, and the German is “vi-eel”.
Radio announcer here. I pronounce it with one syllable. If I didn’t, I’m sure somebody would have corrected me a long time ago. Our aim is to sound as close to the other announcers you hear all day as we can, so we are bound to a kind of pronunciation standard. And we have to pronounce it to distinguish it from “far”. For broadcasting, I believe “fire” with two syllables would be considered improper form.
Yeah, but the schwa always precedes the “r”. There is also a schwa after the diphthong in “file”, preceding the “l”. This is pretty much what I was talking about in my post above.
Yep. But what Liberal states is right that if the word were were “fine”, there would be no controversy. And as fishbicycle says, some do pronounce it with one syllable. I am one who pronounces it with one syllable.
As for the Texans here, isn’t there a slight difference between how “far” and “fire” are pronounced? The way I have always heard it with a southern pronunciation, the “a” sound in the middle with “fire” is drawn out, while with “far” it is short. In the sentence “I was far from the fire”, there is a noticeable difference between the 2 words.
