The notion that English pronounciation has some universal rightness or wrongness to it is simply absurd; it defies reality. English pronounciation has never been consistent across time, populations, countries or even from town to town. It’s ridiculous, and egocentric to an almost psychotic extent, to pretend that the way YOU pronounce words must be the only correct way that there has ever been among the hundred of millions of people who have spoken modern English.
It’s also reminiscent of people who say “Well, I don’t have an accent!” The only way you can not have an accent is if you don’t speak.
Shakespeare’s pronounciation would have been such that you would have had trouble understanding him. Was he a dolt?
We’re talking nuances here. It goes without saying that people as individuals pronounce words differently from one another. But there’s an enourmous gulf between OUR and ARE, in my opinion, that can’t be so easily dismissed as relating to one’s accent.
I hear all the time people deriding president Bush on his inability to pronounce “nuclear,” and yet while THAT is a much tougher word than the two at the center of this discussion, I’ve yet to hear anyone come to his defense and say, “It’s just his accent, cut him some slack.”
I don’t wish to go around in circles anymore on the matter. Thanks.
It seems I’m a bit late to this particular discussion, but I would submit for your consideration that it’s just as valid for me to ask you why you’re using the word “hour” instead of “our” when speaking.
That’s not an issue anymore than to wonder if one who’s speaking is saying there or their … .
Words, as I understand them, are vessels. If you were at a restaurant and asked for water, and the food server brought you water in a bowl instead of a table glass, you’d likely think it was rather odd. And yet, you never-the-less got your water. Soooo to my way of thinking, people that argue that “our” can be passed off as “are” are doing a similar thing – saying that rules and common sense aren’t such a big deal because “English is so fluid” and thus they feel I should drink from a bowl rather than a glass, because that’s how they and a few others do it.
I think you misunderstand BayleDomon. Do you pronounce “metal” and “medal” the same way? “Caught and cot”? “Marry” and “merry”? “Wales” and “whales”? Making any of those pairs homophonous would make you sound odd to some speakers, but you would (correctly) respond “Oh, they’re just pronounced the same in my accent, it’s not like I don’t realize they’re different words.”
Pretty much. GuyNblueJeans, I just think it’s a little silly to look down your nose at people who pronounce “our” like “are” when immediately after you compare “our” to “hour”. Why is one wrong and the other right?
o/ I say are, you say hour, let's call the whole thing off o/
Um…oh yeah, I should probably be on topic with the OP, shouldn’t I? I kind of think it’s telling that despite the best efforts of adults when we were little, I don’t believe I’ve ever run across anyone who adamantly hews to the may/can distinction. Oh, sure, everyone knows what the two words mean and know the technical difference between them, but in everyday speech most people I talk to just don’t give a darn.
And of course the important thing in this context is to pronounce “May I go to the bathroom?” in accordance with its true meaning, which is “Ah. Did you by some chance mistake my use of a universally-understood colloquialism for an expression of ignorance about my own eliminatory functions, you pedantic microcephaloid? :rolleyes:”
Eh. There is a difference between teaching children what they communicate when they speak and simply speaking. I see nothing wrong with teaching children that different words mean different things and that precision in language is desireable in some contexts.
“May” is a word used precisely to ask permission; “can” is used either to ask precisely about ability or colloquially to ask permission. The use of “may” is more formal and can therefore also be received as stilted or overly formal.
But one of the purposes of language is to convey what it is you want to say to a particular audience. So what is wrong with making clear to children that this is so?
The use of “y’all” as the second person plural is also validated by the American Heritage Dictionary after all, but this does not mean that I expect teachers to start encouraging its use in grammar lessons.
You know, “may” is not used merely to express permission, any more than “can” is. I may have a sandwich tomorrow, I may not. I may flip out and beat a man up tomorrow. I wouldn’t have permission to do so, of course, but I may do it all the same, since “may” is also used to express mere possibility. So even the very premise of the argument from ambiguity is flawed.
(My, my, perhaps I am merely bringing to people’s attention all sorts of new ways to be a jerk. Just imagine the following scenario:
“Teacher, may I go to the bathroom?”
“I dunno, may you? Tell me, is that a possibility?”
“Er, well, I was sort of hoping to. I guess I may or may not, depending on whether you let me go. You may or may not give me permission… can I have permission? Oh, shit, I mean… Do I have your permission? Hm, no, perhaps I don’t already have it until I ask for it, very zen… I know how you love that ‘exacting precision’ in language. Uh, hm… this is a pickle. Ah! Teacher, I seek your permission to go to the bathroom, please.”
“Oh, yes? Very well, you may walk to the bathroom and back, but cannot use the facilities within.”
“What? Argh… Ok, ok… Teacher, I seek your permission to both arrive at and use the bathroom facilities in order to relieve my … ah, you know what, nevermind, I don’t even have to go anymore.”)
That’s why I said Northern California. Specifially, the San Francisco Bay Area. We actually have some excellent teachers here, which is how I learned about our unique speech patterns. I had a choir teacher who struggled mightily to get us to enunciate properly, while carefully explaining that our accents were making some of our words sound wrong when sung.
One more example of the famous Northern California “r” problem has been discussed on this board before: a drinking song apparently sung at U.C. Berkeley:
Oh they had to carry Harry to the ferry
Oh they had to carry Harry to the shore
Oh they had to carry Harry to the ferry
'Cause Harry couldn’t carry anymore
In Berkeley and surrounding parts, the words carry, harry, and ferry all rhyme perfectly, although I have been told that that is not necessarily the case elsewhere.
[sub]Confidential to Indistinguishable: I am female.[/sub]
Equating the may v. can debate with incorrect usage of “me” is not accurate IMO. “Can I go to the bathroom?” is technically correct, because the student is not asking me if he is capable of the physical act of urination or defecation. Of course he can. What he is asking for is if he can exit the classroom to go to the bathroom.
to be able to; have the ability, power, or skill to: She can solve the problem easily, I’m sure.
to know how to: He can play chess, although he’s not particularly good at it.
to have the power or means to: A dictator can impose his will on the people.
to have the right or qualifications to: He can change whatever he wishes in the script.
may; have permission to:
All of these definitions support the idea that “Can I go to the bathroom?” is correct except 2, which seems to be the usage everyone is assuming people are using when they ask. Thus, this hair-splitting about can v. may seems kind of petty to me. The student is asking if he has the right/ power/ permission to walk across the school to the bathroom. I tell him he can, in fact, go. What he does there is his business, and we try not to specify. I don’t actually believe in giving people permission to perform bodily functions when they need to, nor that they should have to ask. What they do that to ask for is the right to leave the room, because I have to know where they are, and some of them don’t have the right to leave the room for various reasons.
Also, I don’t want to correct grammar that is already correct, colloquially if nothing else. Makes people feel like you’re trying to make them look stupid. That’s the last thing kids need, and talking to an adult like that would probably get you lots of :rolleyes: , :dubious: , and even :mad: for being a snot. I’d rather correct actually incorrect grammar, and save my good will as an English teacher for those occasions. YMMV.
Even over in northern New Jersey, one of the few places in the U.S. where the full Mary-marry-merry (and Murray) distinction is in force, “Harry” generally rhymes with “Carry”.
I’m not aware of any accent where those two don’t rhyme. Out of curiosity, to those of you who make “our” and “are” homophonous, do you also make “our” and “hour” homophonous, or does “hour” preserve a separate identity? (I presume the former)
(Incidentally, my own accent is a rather complex pish-posh when it comes to the Mary-marry-merry business, for reasons unclear to me. Since I began paying attention to it, the following is what I’ve noticed: In most contexts, I merge the sounds of “ferry” and “fairy”, both in production and normal perception (how on earth I came to do this considering that none of my peers growing up seem to have done the same, I have no idea), but in a select few (“err” vs. “air” and similar words (“error”, “terror” vs. “airer”, “tearer”); “heritage” vs. “hair”; inconsistently with “serendipity” and “Serengeti” vs. “corsair”) I maintain a strong distinction in both. (When I merge, I use the sound in my “air” words). And in some contexts, I seem to readily perceive the distinction while still manifesting the merger in my productions. The distinction between “paragraph” and “pair a graph” is almost always strong in both perception and production for me, but even here, there are some oddities: I’ve noticed myself capable of merging (again, using the “air” sound) in production with many of these pairs, except, notably, with the class of words which rhyme with “arrow” (“wheelbarrow”, “marrow”, “narrow”), which I never, ever seem to produce with my “air” sound. I seem to often use the “air” sound for people’s names which would normally have the “arrow” sound, though (“Harry”, “Carrie”, “Larry”, “Mario” (the way that doesn’t rhyme with “starry oh”); I think I may have in
fact started using the “air” sound for these much less than I used to since becoming explicitly aware of the merger at hand, though that sort of thing is, of course, hard to tell), and also often for “marry”, and much less commonly for “carry” (never for “tarry”, though). For the most part, my perceptions track my productions; contexts where I very strongly maintain a distinction mostly correspond to contexts where I very clearly hear two sounds as separate, whereas others may be ones where I sometimes have difficulty telling which of the two sounds better matches the one I heard. But, as I noted above, there are some few contexts where I perceive distinctions fairly clearly without actually maintaining distinctions in my productions.
The humorous thing about all this is that, while I do draw distinctions between the underlying sounds in many contexts, I am, for whatever reason, often drawn to pronounce “Mary”, “marry”, and “merry” homophonously, and thus, in response to the canonical question regarding the issue, would wrongly appear to have a full merger of the three sounds.
The above is all based on my own fallible observations, and quite probably subject to all kinds of frequency illusions and that sort of thing. I’ve long wanted to have a professional phonetician give me a thorough IPA transcription of several passages of my speech. Why? …Well, I guess I just like the sound of my own voice.
Speaking of which, I’ve just spent an awful lot of effort typing up something of very little value to almost anyone. Well, if I ever need to consult a reference to remember how I speak (or, at least, how I spoke at a particular time in my life), I suppose I can always come back to this post.)
I can only speak for myself, but for me, are and our are different from hour. Using a rough phonetic spelling (nowhere near connected to IPA, too tired to call that knowledge up), are and our are pronounced ahr, while hour is ow-er. My personal dialect tends to be Southwestern-ish US, FTR (sort of a blending of California and Southern-ish speech patterns).
If I heard somebody pronounce hour as ahr, while saying nothing else, I’d presume they have a very strong Southern drawl, though what kind I probably wouldn’t be able to pinpoint accurately. I’m a bad linguist.
Ah, I see. Well, that’s interesting, then. Puts the kick right back into #43, which I had originally read as merely a hypothetical “I could speak this way, and thus could ask you…” rather than, as I now see it to be, an actual “I do speak this way, and thus will ask you…”
Then you’re wrong. Sorry. You don’t get to decide that dialects used by millions of people are wrong just because they sound different from yours. Is Scottish English “wrong” too? How about East Texas? Or New York English?
There’s nothing “incorrect” about it. The way English speakers speak English = correct English. It’s great fun to pretend we’re all 19th-century aristocrats sipping Earl Gray tea in a mansion, but linguistics is not a game of dress-up, it’s a scientific study of the way people actually use the language.
Then why are you doing it?
I don’t even know where to start with this. First off, nobody said “hour” is the way you “should” pronounce “our”–just you, and your argument is ignorant and provincial. When will you let go of your “my way or the highway” mentality? Are you aware that you’re not King of the English Language?
We live in a free country and you can think whatever you want. But just because the facts sound funny to you doesn’t mean they’re not facts. Most people who grew up in California do not have the vowel that someone from Philadelphia, for example, would use in the word “caught”. That’s a fact. It’s not “wrong” and it doesn’t mean we can’t pronounce it, it means we have our own pronunciation. Again, would you argue that every English speaker is using the language incorrectly except for those of your dialect? Cause that’s a hell of a lot of people doing it wrong.
BTW, there are specific linguistic differences within California, too. But the people native to California* sound more like each other than people from, say, Oregon or Colorado or Texas. This is especially true of those from California’s big cities.
I mean people who grew up in California, not Native Americans.
Just one sentence ago California was “way too vast and diverse” to support a single linguistic phenomenon. Now it’s just the right size. Which one is it?
OK Sigmund, IANAP and I can’t help you with your childhood baggage, but I appreciate the sentiment here. (Which is why I said your argument is ignorant and provincial above, not that you are ignorant and provincial.) I’m not the expert either–I don’t have a linguistics degree (yet)–but what I do know this: each language does have a set of standard rules, but it’s defined by how native speakers use the language, not by the ministrations of concerned schoolteachers and ancient literary figures. English even more so, because it has such a large and diverse body of native speakers, and because it doesn’t have an official Language Academy like Spanish and some other languages (German and Dutch, I think?) do. The thing that’s stuck in your head, and you need to get out of there, is the idea that it’s “OK” or “not OK” for adult native speakers of a given language to use it a certain way. The way someone uses their language may stick in your craw–there are some of these things that drive me up the wall, too–but it’s not “wrong” as long as they can communicate effectively.
That’s nice. I’ll be sure to use “may” when I need something from you, then.
Spot on. The thing is that “may” isn’t always the preferred term. When I played basketball in high school, if I asked one of my teammates for a sip of his Gatorade by asking, “Excuse me, sir; may I please partake of your beverage?” I would have been laughed off the court. In the same way, when I was offered water at my last job interview, I probably would’ve done serious damage to my employment prospects by saying “Hey man, lemme get that up out you”. That doesn’t mean either way is universally “correct” or “preferred”. It just means you have to be comfortable with both if you expect to be accepted in both situations.
It’s helpful for a teacher to teach children to use “may” for permission in formal settings. It doesn’t do diddly squat if the teacher says “You must always, always, always use “may” instead of “can” when asking for permission!” and then turns around and violates that “rule”. That just takes away from the teacher’s credibility, and it may be part of the reason that so many Americans have trouble turning off their “casual” language. Ideally, you should know how to avoid coming off as an uneducated rube or a pretentious jackass. It sucks that you have to modify your language based on the situation you’re in to achieve that, but you do. That’s a fact of life.
Those are both ignorant ways to think about English. The thing is that even the English dialects that sound most objectionable to you–Alabama English, or AAVE (Ebonics), or whatever–have their own set of grammar rules, which are in some cases more logical than the standard English rules. When someone’s speaking in Ebonics, they’re not “breaking the rules” of Standard American English, they’re following the rules of Ebonics. Which can be totally inappropriate and wrong in formal contexts where people are expected to use SAE, but doesn’t mean that that speaker is using the “wrong” grammar.
The problem here is that you’re letting a motherboard tell you how to judge your peers. People don’t thank each other for things the same way in different places, just like people don’t ask each other for things the same way in different places. In San Diego it’s (usually) perfectly acceptable to ask for something by saying “Can I get…?” and then thank them by saying “Hey, thanks”; and it’s perfectly acceptable for the other person to say “No problem.” All three of those would be shockingly rude in other places and contexts, but in their rightful place they’re not offensive. I’ve never heard anyone use “OK” in place of “thank you”, but if that’s good enough for most people where you live, that’s what people are going to say. I don’t think those people are all just being rude or ungrateful.
How come everyone else who speaks what you call “incorrect English” is “not too bright”, but you’re just an unfortunate victim of biology? What makes you so special?
What support do you have for this “fact”?
Nobody said it’s a matter of anyone “having trouble” with their pronunciation. You inserted that value judgement yourself. What I said was that “our” is pronounced with the /a/ vowel (the one used in “are”, “top”, “cot”, etc.) in some dialects, most notably the dialects of California. You could just as easily say that people from Philadelphia “have trouble” with their pronunciation because they pronounce “caught” differently from “cot”.
Some people probably misspell the word because the two words sound the same where they live. I haven’t seen it spelled that way, but there are lots of other examples of this. The thing is that those people know they’re two different words–they know the difference in meaning–they just don’t know that the two words are spelled differently. There are lots of examples of different words that are actually spelled the same, so I can see where the confusion comes from–for example, the plural noun “proceeds” and the third-person present tense verb “proceeds” are two very different words with very different meanings, and just because we all spell them the same way doesn’t mean we think they’re the same word. In the minds of the people who spell “our” as “are”, they may be spelling two words the same way but that doesn’t mean they don’t know the difference between them.
Maybe where you live. I don’t know a single person who pronounces it that way, and I live in a city of 2 million people, so I don’t think “everyone” does that. I don’t think the people who do are “confused”, though; they’re pronouncing it right in their dialect. To use another example: some Brits and New Yorkers pronounce an “r” at the end of some words that normally end with a schwa. For example, I heard a British soccer commentator pronounce Mark Viduka’s last name as “Viduker”. I don’t think he was confused about it–it’s not like he thought the guy’s name was actually “Viduker”–that’s just how “viduka” is pronounced where he’s from.
Linguistics is not mathematics. I was just talking about this in another thread, actually: it’s the same reason that the prescriptive “rule” about double negatives (“two negatives make a positive”) is wrong. It comes from 19th-century prescriptivists who made up the rule out of a faulty analogy with math. I don’t know what’s so hard about this: there is no one correct way to say things. Period.
There’s no “excuse” and no “hard to pronounce”–the pronunciation is not wrong. It’s just how the word is pronounced in some places.
Really? I don’t have any trouble with it. But you said earlier that I am “not too bright” or am lacking a “grammar gene” because I pronounce “our” as “are”.
Actually, you don’t have to take SpoilerVirgin’s word for it. We can tell the difference from context–just like you did when you heard that newscast. And just like we can all tell the difference between “two”, “to” and “too” in spoken English even though they sound the same.
It’s not a malformation! What is so difficult about this concept for you? There are millions of little differences between dialects and we could spend entire lifetimes figuring out why people say “sweet tea” in Atlanta and “iced tea” in Vancouver or why “nuclear” is pronounced one way in Baltimore and another way in Houston. None of those are “malformations”, they’re dialect differences.
Please do everyone a favor and actually read the thread.
fetus, that’s a fine post. I’m with you except here:
Why do you distinguish between an Alabama dialect or “Alabama English” and “standard English rules”?
If you had ever heard my mother-in-law in Montgomery speak the English language as if it were silk off a spool, you would never have a negative concept of Alabama English again. I called it her “magnolia dialect.” Perfect syntax and modulation. Flawless word choice. Educated context. (Think of a female Shelby Foote – although he was from Mississippi and lived in Memphis.)
We so need to stop thinking in cliches about the voices of our countrymen.
I doubt that you meant what you said quite the way it seemed.
For me, “Our” and “Are” are pronounced the same, and are pronunced differently than “Hour.” (I am fairly certain I’ve heard some southern accents in which “Hour” is pronounced like “Are” as well, however.)
Specifially, the San Francisco Bay Area. We actually have some excellent teachers here, which is how I learned about our unique speech patterns. I had a choir teacher who struggled mightily to get us to enunciate properly, while carefully explaining that our accents were making some of our words sound wrong when sung.