The way I say it, marry rhymes with carry, and Mary rhymes with dairy, although that might not be of much help to someone already hearing all these words as homophones. We are not responsible for republished content from this blog on other blogs or websites without our permission. Merry works as a noun in the verb phrase make merry, meaning to be festive or to celebrate, and it also appears in the compound noun merry-go-round.. And, she certainly would not want to marry you. But English is quite dynamic in this regard. I would’ve thought it would’ve been the other way around, considering that most Americans do not make this distinction. I preserve the merry-Mary-marry distinction (as you rightly point out, it’s not a split; where the distinction is not preserved, there is a two-or three-way merger). I get it, though, and have been able to say /mæri/ when I think of it. How do you pronounce them differently? This vowel is so ubiquitous as to make the accent largely unintelligible. I’m the same – moved to Canada when I was a kid and usually sound Canadian when speaking with other Canadians, but my vowels (& some vocab) have tended to stay the same. and so syllabification of a word like “marry” does not pose the problem for them that it does for RP speakers. Do not say I married with someone. Just saying it differently. But the thing is they really aren’t. Why are the words “lose” and “choose” written differently and pronounced the same way? earn/urn, All of these are distinct words; all were pronounced differently in earlier versions of English, and all are pronounced distinctly in at least some part of the world today. This must be by back-formation from “error”, which by the Mary-Merry merger comes to rhyme with “rarer”. Merry is not Merr-y [ˈmɛə˞.i] but Me-rry [ˈmɛ.ɹi] The Northeast maintains the distinction, and the Southeast has merged Mary and merry, but not marry. It’s possible in fast speech for me, there may be a tendency for the two to merge. Thanks. Naturally (nat-trell-ee). An /r/ in coda position tends to neutralize many if not all vowel quality distinctions in the syllable it closes, and thus in rhotic dialects, where these syllables are closed by an /r/, we get all three front vowels neutralized to the [-hi][-lo][+ATR] vowel /e/. This may be a completely different phenomenon (although I think proximity of the letter R plays a similar role): I was once talking to my cousin from northern New Jersey (I’m from Pittsburgh) about horror movies. You’re wrong about Southeastern PA. I’m for New Hope and everyone I’ve grown up with them differently. My LOT is different from START. In, say, RP, there is a problem syllabifying a word like “marry”. calve/carve It’s quite fascinating how American English speakers are able to naturally position their tongue in such a way that it accomodates all these factors. This blog does not share personal information with third parties nor do we store any information about your visit to this blog other than to analyze and optimize your content and reading experience through the use of cookies. For many Americans, it seems to be less a matter of there being no long/short distinction as much as there is a ‘tense’ category of vowels that includes FLEECE, GOOSE, THOUGHT (as might be expected in British English), but also TRAP. We seem to agree. Examples give [ei] and [ɛ] merging so that Mary and merry are pronounced identically, and [æ] and [ɛ] merging so that marry and merry sound identical. Marry: Harry, carry. Cameron's excellent answer shows that most people in the US do indeed pronounce these words the same. All rights reserved. A lot of time has been spent explaining how they can sound different–as a Brit I want to know how they can ever be pronounced to sound the same. If I had to split those words into syllables, I would tend to make it mair-ee (so I would group the R with the first syllable) instead of mae/meh-ree. Author has published a graph but won't share their results table. It’s kind of a difficult way of pronouncing -ar words if you didn’t grow up speaking that way. trawicks: “The split can be found in Boston and New York, which might suggest the feature is related to non-rhoticity (i.e. The “merry” sound is usually written “e” (“merry”, “Kerry”, “very”, “era”, etc.) I was a child in the 1970’s and early 1980’s and grew up from age 4 to 17 in Tucson, AZ and for the most part my speech is pretty typical “General American”. Although spelt differently, are “Marry”, “Merry” and “Mary” pronounced differently? Now looking into it, I see I was wrong on thinking it limited to the East coast. Only recently have I noticed that breaking the syllables differently makes it work. When did the British and the Americans start to pronounce “o” (as in “God”) differently? The tip of my tongue is actually facing downward during articulation. Though one can have a don/dawn merger without the cot/caught merger. Copyright © 2018 angmohdan. panda/pander d. merry and marry are the same; Mary is different (0.96%) In particular, Boston. To me this is a classic example of what I (obviously in a very prejudiced and prescriptivist way) regard as a ‘laziness’ inherent in a number of American accents (see also the death of a distinct ‘t’ in ‘wahder’ and ‘budder’ for ‘water’ or ‘butter’). It took me a while to realize there was a chance of flurries. It is also incorrect. By the way, if you answered ‘yes’ to the opening question, you may not understand how these three words sound different. There are only so many vowels that can come before r, a. Aluminium is spelled aluminum in American English (al-oo-min-um). (see also “Black Maria”). I thought my family were the only ones! Although there are a lot of other interesting mergers or near-mergers in Hiberno-English regarding these types of words, since Irish dialects (theoretically) don’t have a fully merged NURSE vowel. Repeat until you can get the two syllables close together as a single word. an /r/ formed with the tongue pulled back). I haven’t met one either. Since New Yorkers pronounce all three differently, there must be some other pronunciation for "Mary". I'm from southern New Jersey, but I do not have a Jersey accent whatsoever. For me (mixed central U.S.) all three words rhyme with fairy. Chary is cherry, ferry is fairy. No, I say that because I can read. What you describe, Chaz, is a braced/bunched/molar r. It’s entirely normal, it’s just different from mine, which is tongue-tip up, and often slightly (not fully) retroflexed. So, which of them is right? Can a small family retire early with 1.2M + a part time job? Here's some more pronunciations of words in my accent: Aunt (ant). Once we’ve discussed the shades, I can add that this is why r is often called a semi-vowel. Mayonnaise (man-aez). A lot of time has been spent explaining how they can sound different–as a Brit I want to know how they can ever be pronounced to sound the same. ‘r-lessness’). I highly doubt they are though if you’re American. For example, my current girlfriend is named that (only it’s spelled slightly differently), and although we both have accents that have the merger, I instinctively pronounce it [kɛːɹi] or something similar. “Ravuh” is a possibility in black American speech I think, although the “a” would be pronounced differently from how the English pronounce it. The main example of vowels becoming more neutral in American is in words with some vowel in front of an [r] that is also followed by another syllable, such as marry or hurry. Interestingly, this question appeared as number 15 on the Harvard Dialect Survey, so it is possible to give a good summary of the pronunciation differences in these three words as they are spoken in the United States. Yes: there’s the possibility of a sorry-story or coral-choral merger (anyone got a better name for it?). Although I see that you are a native US English speaker, I'd thought I'd contribute the British English version. all rhyme for me. When you said “I’m not sure how Merry and Mary would be pronounced differently”, I interpreted that as an interest in how they might be pronounced differently. Mary married on December 25th, merry christmas!!! I think of them as 2 completely different sounds. Same length. Envelope (ahn-vel-ope). J.R.R. Psychology Today's Classical IQ test question - abstract line shapes, Leetcode longest substring without repeating characters, Take postcodes and get the Lat long information from them. @PeterShor, not just New Yorkers, btw. Yet, dictionaries show different pronunciations for these words: \ˈma-rē\ for marry, \ˈmer-ē\ for merry and \ˈmā-rē\ for Mary, (măr′ē) for marry, (mĕr′ē) for merry and (mâr′ē) for Mary. caught/court Hum. The New Jerseyans all nearly jumped out of their seats, because they thought she said Don–the CFO! And, again, my background has nothing to do with my knowing about what you call a “transitional” merger. I do, indeed, merge all three! all rhyme for me. I do rationalise those things as ‘lazy’ too. Except, I think don/dawn it’s the east coast where they sound alike, backwards of Aaron/Erin. In New York City, Mary, merry and marry each have a distinctive sound. Carrot and caret have what (to me, anyway) is a very slight difference on the last vowel. * START = TRAP + /r/. This seems logical to me, but I don't know enough rhotic speakers to say if it matches my experience, and there will of course be exceptions everywhere. So merry-marry-Mary are pretty much always different for me, tho the difference may be a bit subtle depending on how deep in the accent I am. I know my “pirate r” is fully retroflexed, although many people bunch theirs (I can, too – but I don’t). It sounds really weird if it is not in your own accent, as I can myself attest. Or what about the growing number of English people who say “fink” for “think” and “ravuh” for “rather”? I’m from Cleveland and I pronounce marry, mary and merry the same, the vowel is about 500,1800 if you are familiar with formant values. The split can be found in Boston and New York, which might suggest the feature is related to non-rhoticity (i.e. I can easily say them differently if I say them like mae-ry, meh-ry, and may-ry. How can I get readers to like a character they’ve never met? In any case, this would explain how “marry” got added into the mix. Mary would be upset if you called her marry or merry. @KristinaLopez, well, I didn't say she was making me marry merry Mary Mack. In British English, these words typically sound distinctly different. I now live just south of DC, so still on the east coast. That is, the two have vowels very similar to each other, but slightly different, in that the vowel of Mary and marry is slightly higher than the vowel of merry. and recalling your parents being from chicago [generally not cot-caught merged land], growing up in st.louis [generally not cot-caught merged land] and living in kansas city [transitional area] it makes sense you might say that . Otherwise I don’t understand the rest of the graf …. It’s not really appropriate to call this distinction a ‘split,’ anyway. I was listening to a weather forecast, and I thought a new Portmanteau had been invented (like smog = smoke + fog). I find it slightly difficult to pronounce the vowel in ‘cat’ before this type of /r/, but that’s just a personal observation. I don’t know which I do more often, but I suspect it’s the latter. No “sorry” rhymes with both “starry” and “safari”. Multicolor inside borders for polygons in QGIS 3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3sOA6yQc4A. But the distinction feels psychologically real to me, and I’ve had certain incidents that suggest that it must indeed be real. Listen carefully and I think you'll see -- or rather hear -- that Mary, merry, and marry have quite distinct pronunciations of the first vowel. This merger actually caused a problem in one meeting I attended. Native Arizonan here but I speak with weird mixture of middle Tennessee and East Texas accents courtesy of both sides of my family.