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Comment by strken | Hacker News Reader

I'm actually having difficulty working out in which accent they don't rhyme. Presumably talk is different, but I'm not sure how.

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"pork" and "talk" sound basically nothing alike in most American accents, for two reasons:

1. The "r" in pork is pronounced in most American accents,

2. The vowel is not the same.

They will fail to rhyme in any rhotic accent (e.g. general American, most Scottish accents, etc), where the ‘r’ in pork is pronounced.

A lot of song lyrics would be happy with the last sound (k) rhyming anyway.

In most USA English, both the vowel part ("long" vs "short" in our goofy classification system) and the r/l part are different.

Most of these accents have a rhotic r but not a rhotic (lotic?) l in this position.

I think he might be referring to the words themselves - 'rabbit' and 'pork' - in that, despite not rhyming, together they are nonetheless described as rhyming slang.

The rhyme is "pork" and "talk". In rhyming slang, the slang term rhymes with the original meaning word.

Example: "comment and post" for "eat toast".

Apples and pears: stairs

for example too (for a single word example)

It’s pork and talk, I can’t make them rhyme even with a Boston accent ( which could do “car park” and “talk”).

In my London accent “park” and “talk” do not rhyme completely. Park has the usual “ah” vowel, but talk has an “o” vowel (in southern England we would call this an “or” vowel but I suspect that might confuse you more).

I'd love to hear someone pronounce pork and talk in a way where they rhyme because I sure can't picture it.

Just watch EastEnders, mate.

Hi, shawn_w: Pronounce the or in pork and the al in talk like the aw in shawn.

I can see /park/ and talk rhyming with a transformation like that (like a Boston accent), but the o in pork is a completely different sound. Going from pork to pawk isn't something I can wrap my tongue around.

I think the above poster is also assuming "Shawn" is sounded differently than it is in the U.S.

As luck would have it, "pork" and "talk" are rhymed in the first verse of Ian Dury's superb song This Is What We Find. I suspect the rest of the lyrics will only add to your confusion, unfortunately.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKoh1J84uCU

Around 25 seconds for anyone interested.

My Canadian ear somehow corrects the "pork" and "talk" so that they still don't quite rhyme (though they're certainly close enough for slant rhyme)

I hear the "r" in pork even if it's less audible than it would be in my English. And the "a" in talk sounds a little more like the "a" I'm familiar with from talk than the "o" in pork does.

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