And my point was that, if the conversation did happen the way she said it, then she didn’t pronounce the two words identically. He just failed to hear the distinction, because it’s not a distinction that features in his variety of English.
http://io9.com/5919805/the-science-of-accents
Emphasis mine.
Just because your ears cannot hear the distinction, doesn’t mean Carrie’s ears cannot hear it.
Although people lose that ability after childhood, a competent linguist—particularly a phonetician—can regain it with study+practice.
This interests me. Do you have a cite? Preferably one that discusses the kinds of study and practice you must do to learn to distinguish the sounds?
You mean,if two people say “cuber”, one of them is cutting meat into squares and the other one is having a missile crisis?
My Danish lingustics instructor demonstrated it this way. Hold a feather an inch in from of your lips and say the two words “spin” and “pin”. Notice how only the second one blows a gust of air at the feather. “Spin” contains a Danish /p/, which is pronounced without the gust of air, even if there is no /s/ before it. But an English speaker cannot hear the difference.
The part of cerebrum which learns to distinguish phonemes is plastic only at a very early age. For example, English has two related phonemes D and T (which linguists sometimes write “th”); these are respectively voiced and aspirated. Thai has a third related phoneme (which linguists write “t”) which is neither voiced nor aspirated. Although I’ve trained myself to pronounce Tor Tow, when I hear it, it usually seems to map (depending on speaker) to Dor or Thor. I sometimes have to inquire to be sure which consonant is being spoken! (Thai also has an unvoiced unaspirated Por Pla midway between English B and P.)
Many Westerners learn Thai on their own: I’ve spoken to some who are very conversant in the language, yet are still unaware of the existence of that third phoneme!
Thus “Kiri” probably distinguishes “Carrie” and “Kiri” but her threshold separating the two vowels is different from OP’s.
I had something similar happen for me. I met a guy, Len, who came from the part of U.S. that seems to pronounce pen as pin. Because he called himself “Lin” I started thinking of him that way, and even added him to my phonebook as “Lin.” :smack: Sometimes I’d call him “Lin.” – “Goddamn it,” he’d say, “my name’s not Lin it’s Lin!” 
In phonetics, that’s the distinction between “unaspirated” and “aspirated” consonants.
I pronounce Carrie like marry and Kerry like merry. (Kiri would be like bleary.) My friend doesn’t hear the difference in the two vowels sounds (or Mary for that matter), even when I show him exaggeratedly how my mouth is making a different shape.* So there just must be a block.
*Picture “Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?!” from that movie that time.
There’s a little bit of a misperception here that’s worth clearing up. The differences between sounds don’t have to be subtle for someone not to be able to pick up on them. I had a conversation with a Chinese friend one day where I was trying to explain the difference in pronunciation between “lunch” and “launch”. She can’t hear the difference because it’s not important in her native language, even though no English speaker would confuse those two without significant background noise.
I’m not thrilled with the word “block,” but I’m very much like your friend. I cannot hear–and indeed, cannot even imagine–a difference in pronunciation of those words. Not even when people are (they assure me) exaggerating the pronunciation to illustrate the differences. This is what I hear:
“The girl’s name? That’s Mary. And what happens at a wedding? That’s Mary. And when you’re happy? That’s Mary. See? They’re completely different!” I can only shake my head.
I sentence you to ten years exile in New Jersey. You’ll recognize the difference by the end of the first month.
Your example is only “not subtle” to you… well, and me, and quite a lot of other people, but my point is that just as with the subtle differences mentioned by the post you reply to, it depends on who’s doing the defining. The OPs “Kiri” may consider the differences as substantial as those between “lunch” and “launch”.
Yeah, the difference, to me, between Mary and merry is easily as stark as the difference between lunch and launch. I actually have no idea which of the three vowel sounds (Mary/merry/marry) people without the accent use to represent all three of those sounds, because when I try to replicate it, I’m choosing between one of three distinct ways of saying it, whereas I think people without the accent have some fourth way of doing it that is sort of in the middle.
A big part of it is that not only are we used to using the different sounds, we’ve experienced the difference in the way our mouths move when we use them. Telling me (a Philadelphian) that it’s hard to imagine a difference between Mary and merry (or lunch/launch) is like telling me that there’s no difference between smiling and frowning - I’ve done these things thousands of times and I can feel what happens when I do.
I’m from New England so I pronounce ‘Marry’, “Mary” and “Merry” all very differently, but outside the northeast, most people don’t.
Understood, but I’m talking about someone who doesn’t hear the difference even when they are pronounced differently.
“Not The Craw . . . the CRAW”!
As I believe someone already said, if they have different accents they aren’t pronouncing it the same exact way.
My own name rhymes with “marry” as pronounced by a West coaster. I’ve had more than one East coast native imply I pronounce it incorrectly.
“Oh, it’s not Terry, it’s TAAARY”. Not in SoCal it isn’t :rolleyes:
And is one of the things that distinguishes a fluent speaker of many languages from one who is not. A native Spanish speaker would not say “tah-ko” like a native English speaker, but more like “t’ahko”.
Yes, English aspirates unvoiced consonants at the start of words but not in the middle. Many other languages either don’t aspirate at all, or they have distinct sets of aspirated and unaspirated consonants. Some Indian languages, for example, distinguish the two so that ‘k’ and ‘kh’, ‘g’ and ‘gh’, ‘b’ and ‘bh’, ‘ch’ and ‘chh’, ‘j’ and ‘jh’, etc. are distinct sounds. This is why ‘Ghandi’ is a bad misspelling of ‘Gandhi’- in Hindi, the two sets of phonemes are entirely different and the two words aren’t homophones.
There is kind of a big difference between “Kiri” and “bleary”. The guttural (“K”) lends a glide to the attack of the vowel in many dialects of English, which would not be present in “bleary”. That is probably what Carrie was hearing: the “ar” part is not supposed to be pronounced that way, to her “Kiri” sounded like “Kyiri”, where the vowel attack was actually suppose to be flat (lacking the “y” glide).
Zathras understands problem. Also his brother Zathras. And his brother Zathras. And his baby brother Zathras. Zathras understand problem very well. Very sad when someone addresses Zathras as one of his brothers. But Zathras is used to it.