Fair point, might be.
Ah - sorry to disappoint, but no, I’m English. The name just seemed appropriate for the board, or at least my use of it. (I could almost add, see the above….)
j
So a news story that included the line, “Smith successfully navigated the morass before he reached the glacier, where he fell into a crevasse” would be a real knee-slapper then. 
“Because I’m the President, Nancy.”
OK, if that one doesn’t work, there’s “fillet,” which gets the more Frenchy pronunciation in US English (/fɪˈleɪ/ or “fih-LAY”) and usually the more Anglicized pronunciation in UK English (/ˈfɪ.lɪt/ or “FILL-it.”)
Well, obviously the first is a British Automobile (Morass Minor) and the other is just a crevice.
As to harass, hair-us is the older pronunciation. I just checked two print dictionaries, from '79 and '74, and both give hair-us as the preferred pronunciation. I have read older ones in which it was the only pronunciation given.
Ah, word shortening. The one I can’t stand is “alum.” Why? I always read it as alum, aluminum potassium sulfate, as used in pickles- not as alumnus or alumna.
Oh, alum is bad, but nowhere near as detestable as ‘celeb’.
I just listened to a podcast where you can go to their web site and buy “merch.”
Aw, you guys are totes adorbs!
See, there’s why you need IPA right there. In my native variant of English, “why” is aspirated and doesn’t sound at all like the name of the letter ‘Y’. So I have to guess what your variant of English might be (and I have to be familiar with it) in order to work out what pronunciation you are suggesting here.
Why (:)) do you have to guess? I pronounce them them same. The letter “Y” and the word “Why” are pronounced the same to me. I’m not sure how IPA would help if I put the same characters for both of them.
Why should he necessarily know that that’s gow it works in your accent/dialect?
It would tell him exactly what he needs to know. Because if he transcribes his own pronunciation, he would NOT use the same characters.
Maybe, but if he did, he would be wrong 
I just looked it up: I pronounce “why” like waɪ
And I pronounce the letter “y” like waɪ
does that help?
Yes, it does. Now I know what previously I could only guess; you pronounce “why” /waɪ/, rather than /hwʌɪ/ or /hwaɪ/.
It was obvious to me that you have the same pronunciation for ‘Y’ and ‘why’. But that doesn’t tell me what the pronunciation is. That’s where IPA comes in.
Does anyone pronounce the letter “Y” as /hwʌɪ/ or /hwaɪ/?
This post is another example of why something like IPA (which, I agree, is a bit of a pain to use when you don’t use it often enough to memorize it, and you’re on a mobile device) is necessary. I infer from pulykamell’s post that he or she pronounces the word “sure” as ʃɜɹ. But I pronounce “sure” as ʃoɹ. It’s 100% homophonous with “shore.” So the first thought that went through my mind when reading pulykamell’s post was “why the heck would anyone pronounce that word as ‘shore-bit’ or ‘shore-burt’?”
Not that I’m aware of, but there are more, and more diverse, variants of English than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio, so my ignorance isn’t necessarily the yardstick by which this should be measured. Different variants of English do name letters of the alphabet differently; why should ‘Y’ not be one of the letters to receive this treatment?
And the general point holds good; there have been many instances on the Dope where someone writes, in effect, “I pronounce like I pronounce [y]” and I’m left thinking “well, that’s not a lot of help”.
Bear in mind that we’re in a thread about pronunciation. The utility of the IPA in conveying, in written form, information about pronunciation is obvious.
I live in Illinois, too. I live outside a village called Versailles. It’s pronounced “VER-sales”. It was named after Versailles, KY- where the settlers of the town came from. I’ve had people insist that the town, where I was born and raised, is pronounced “Ver-sie”. Like the one in France. I’ve even been laughed at and called stupid. Hey, what it’s called is what it’s called, and this is a rural farming community, not France. It’s “VER-sales”!
For example, in some varieties of Indian English, “H” is called [hɛtʃ] “hetch” and “W” is called [ɖʌblu] “Dub-loo.”
Exactly