The Pin-Pen Merger (2020)
acelinguist.com
acelinguist.com
There's also the line "our accents are completely different" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2gii2nenUg
fortunately no one ever needed six of anything from me, so i was spared any awkward confusion there.
I found this really interesting: The most important thing to notice about the pin-pen merger is that it only happens before nasals. This means that "pit" and "pet" are unaffected by the merger. Only "n" and "m" are really affected, since there are not many words ending in "eng".
But if I'm talking to my mom on the phone, it all comes back.
I can almost completely hide it at work if I want but I let some through bc people like a little. If I talked to my coworkers the way I talk to my siblings though it would be a disaster because of prejudice around our dialect.
Well... I don't find it so surprising that the home of Anglia and the Angles hasn't changed its pronunciation of Angle-land as much.
Some mercenaries (if you believe Bede) consisting of Angles from Anglia, Saxons from Lower Saxony, and Jutes from Jutland crossed the channel to fight for various Celtic rulers following the power vacuum left by the Romans leaving Britain. The mercenaries eventually took over part of it, and that part became known as Angle-land. (Of course, this is a gross oversimplification.) The descendants of the mercenaries became known as Anglo-Saxons (not enough Jutes, I guess).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_settlement_of_Brit...
From South of Mason Dixie line and anecdata of one, but don’t pronounce pen like pin or English like Ingrid (or -ing).
// Of course the beginnings and endings make one think of big endian and little Indian.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1KP4ztKK0A
If you didn't grow up with the distinction (as I didn't), you may find it easy to enough to notice the difference—particularly between marry (~mat) and the other two—when listening to someone without the merger say each word one immediately after the other. "Implementing" this knowledge when listening to the same person speak naturally is another thing altogether.
It's very hard to acquire new phonological rules as an adult, no less in your first language than a second one.
An audio example: https://forvo.com/word/merry_mary%2C_marry_me/#en
That is the awkward thing with vowel sounds. While linguists specify a matrix of vowel sounds, a lot of people use vowel sounds that land in between them, and the sounds are not just exactly the same every time, but have some level of variation between them.
And of course, thing probably differ with word stress, as vowel sounds often do in English. Not sure how they vary though.
Definitely, but this is equally true of mat, met, and mate.
As for marry/merry/Mary, there are speakers with a partial merger. Usually they maintain a distinction between "marry" and the other two. That does not discount the fact that there are English speakers who feel (rightly) that the strength of the difference between these three in their own dialect is equal to the strength of the difference between mat, met, and mate in most dialects.
When it comes to mergers more broadly, many speakers who grow up with distinctions that some of their neighbors don't make will wind up falling into the nebulous middle ground you're describing. There's a cognitive burden placed on someone who consistently distinguishes sounds that others in their community do not, because the speaker who makes the distinction will regularly misinterpret what they hear out of the mouths of others. ("Wait, did they just say 'Mary'? Oh, no, it must have been 'marry.'") This is true even when there can be no confusion over homophones: "What does 'fahl' mean? Oh, they must have meant 'fall.'" This is one mechanism that makes it quite easy for a vowel merger to spread. Speakers are conditioned not to pay too much attention to phonological differences that are not a part of the grammar of others in their social circle.
marry: the 'a' as in 'apple'
mary: the 'ar' is pronounced like the word 'air'
merry: the 'e' as in 'elephant'
Not sure if this does a great job illustrating it, since if the examples I chose also sound the same to you, it won't work. To me, they are distinct, but they aren't hugely different.
* Pin/Pen - Totally distinct * Marry/Merry/Mary - Mary ~= Merry, totally distinct from Marry. * Been/Bin - I never thought about this, but even I say "How've you bin", rather than "How've you been" * Again/Agin - It's a stereotypical elderly farmer accent, but I think even current elderly farmers I know don't have it, so maybe it belongs to a couple generations before that, or even more rural areas.
Some of the videos of elderly Irish people the article mentioned:
https://youtu.be/GT2OVUY2gZY?t=6 - "Shearing sheep, dipping sheep, roasting? sheep, correcting them down off the mountain" - I mean, there's definitely less distinction between how he says sheep with ship, compared to how I would do that or the interviewer does.
The last one was caused some communications difficulties when we were dealing with a Customer contact named Dale and also dealing with technical support from Dell simultaneously.
As for Pen, there are plenty of people who pronounce it pEEn, this is understandable to no one
“writer”: /ɹaɪtɚ/ → /ɹaɪtɚ/ → [ɹaɪɾɚ]
“rider” : /ɹaɪdɚ/ → /ɹaɪːdɚ/ → [ɹaɪːɾɚ]
[1]https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/4103/the-wri...
I'm not sure about the vowel sound. There might be a slight distinction (not one I can easily recognize if it is there), or might not.
(Maybe I can have a startup that transcribes videos with strong dialects/accents.)
The funny thing is, while the accent is indeed strong that is not IMO what makes what he says difficult to comprehend. He phrases what he says in a way that might be a bit unusual for folks like me (a Scot) so we don't immediately process what he says:
"Well there's 45 sheep missing, like. And the(re's) lambs and everything with the sheep. That's come out to a nice bit of money, like. Be done about it? Nothing"
Really cool accent though. I couldn't make out what his neighbour said immediately after when he points over to a hill in the distance. I think (hope?) that's gaelic because I couldn't make out a single word. He goes on to talk completely clearly in English about how it's a bit better when you have a good dog to protect the sheep.
Hol' up. If Texans can distinguish the way other Texans say "pen" and "pin", then surely they aren't actually merged? Yes, the vowel sounds are very similar, and perhaps Yankees can't tell them apart, but they must be different.
That's just the way with mergers, though: we don't attend to differences that are unimportant in our personal grammars except through conscious striving. I'm the same way with marry/merry/Mary: I know there are people who say these differently, but even if I'm talking to someone who does, those words are all the same to me. The other speaker may be giving me one of three distinct tokens by their interpretation, but whichever one it is I interpret it as one of a set of identical triplets and rely on context to tell which meaning was meant.
Or to give another example: many speakers where I grew up (Pittsburgh) reduce the diphthongs in "tire" and "tower" so that both of these words sound like "tar." In other words, three words share the same token. But I've never misinterpreted a strong-accented Yinzer's "tar" as "tire," "tower" as "tar," etc. That doesn't mean a Texan would be wrong to say that some of us pronounce these words all the same: we do.
English tabloid newspapers have absurdly popular columns peeving about some abominable usage in one or other colony that, in every case, originated in mainland England and was very common typically between 400 and 100 years ago, and just fell out of fashion there. English peeving, thus, always turns out to be complaints that colonies do not slavishly follow London fashions.
Yosemite Sam represents a snapshot of Victorian English.