Richard,
I haven't heard this set of contrasts described with quite this precision, outside of the acoustic descriptions that Labov and his associates use. Your distinction among merry, marry, and Mary covers a narrower range in the area of Cardinal 3 than what I've heard from New Englanders, where the vowel for "Mary" is closer to Cardinal 2. But I've found that one of the most difficult sets of contrasts to teach to a phonetics class, and I'm in the middle of it right now, is that range between a very fronted low vowel (Cardinal 4) and slightly above Cardinal 3 and centralizing nearly to inverted <a>. What we transcribe as [ae] tends to show up all over that area. (Actually, in both some Lower North, like Anderson, IN, and in cities influenced by NCVS, what I as a rural Inland Northern speaker have in "hand" can sound like the vowels of the second syllable of "idea", a falling diphthong starting near [i] and falling to fronted low central.) In my own speech, where merry/marry/Mary are all the same, the vowel in all of them is at about the height of the [E] of "bet" but somewhat more centralized.
Herb
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of Paul E. Doniger
Sent: Sat 3/18/2006 8:40 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: merry, marry, Mary
Richard,
Your pronunciation matches my own to a tee, but then, I too was born and raised in NYC. Here's another word that holds some fascination for me: orange. In my ear the first syllable sounds like the word 'are', but my wife and kids, who are New Englanders, pronounce it like the word 'or'! The opportunities for teasing are endless.
Paul D.
"Veit, Richard" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} st1\:*{behavior:url(#default#ieooui) } As a TA at the University of Iowa, I once performed a magic trick for my students. I wrote the words "merry," "marry," and "Mary" on the board, turned my back to the board, and had one of the students point randomly to one word after another. I asked the only student in the class from New York to pronounce the word being pointed to (which I could not see). I amazed the class by correctly spelling each word he pronounced (which all sound the same to Midwestern ears).
In my (New York native) dialect there are four different and distinct vowel sounds after the m's in the following sentence:
Merry Mary may remarry.
Phoneticians out there can correct me, but I think my pronunciation of the vowels might be described as follows:
merry - lax mid front vowel, like the e in bet
may - tense mid front vowel, as in bay
marry - lax low front vowel, as most Americans (but not, say, Chicagoans) pronounce back and cat
Mary - vowel between low front and mid front (the one many Chicagoans use in back and cat).
Midwesterners generally pronounce merry, marry, and Mary the way New Yorkers pronounce Mary.
Dick Veit
________________________________
Richard Veit
Department of English
University of North Carolina Wilmington
---------------------------------
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Beth Scholler
Sent: Saturday, March 18, 2006 4:35 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Question: Language change and malapropism
Paul E. Doniger writes:
" it's hard to hear the difference among the words, merry, marry, and Mary (the all sound like merry).
I'm from the midwest and they have always sounded alike, the meaning being made clear in context. Lippi-Green also made the same reference, but I'm curious--how are they "supposed" to sound? Or, perhaps it's better to ask how other parts of the country pronounce them.
Beth
lurking student and future English teacher
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