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The first quiz was wrong in my case. As a life long New Englander, it came out that I'm from California.
But the second quiz was almost frightfully accurate. That's because it gave you a chance to say that you didn't have a word for that or that you used a couple of words for that. It gave me the exact city in Massachusetts that I was born in. That definitely is NOT Bawston--they talk funny and we don't. Amazing and fun quiz.
Ha, I was talking to someone on the phone once in the Midwest and she told me I had to call someone named Don, so I said, "May I have his phone number?" She said, "Don is a she, not a he." Apparently the person I needed to speak with was DAWN. Must be those same people who drive an Otto.
That "aw" sound gets lost in some parts of the country, while in NJ we often put it IN where it doesn't really go. Cawfee, tawk.
And now I'm wondering how ELSE you could possibly say "bury". Boory?
My neighbor is from NJ so I'm used to people wanting a cwup of cwaffee.
"Bury"? When I was a kid I said berry (rhymes with very) but when I got older I thought it sounded childish so I switched to the more adult sounding bur-y. Bur rhymes with sir. I also dropped "parlor" when I was about five years old and informed by mother that it was called the living room. (And I do not know where she got "parlor" from. Her family came from Vermont and they pronounced it "pahler".)
We can't change the English language and make it phonetic because so many variants exist and even one person often changes their pronunciation within their lifetime. It will evolve on its own although I hope the English teachers keep it more or less under some degree of control--it gets messy when people can't spell.
The first quiz was wrong in my case. As a life long New Englander, it came out that I'm from California.
But the second quiz was almost frightfully accurate. That's because it gave you a chance to say that you didn't have a word for that or that you used a couple of words for that. It gave me the exact city in Massachusetts that I was born in. That definitely is NOT Bawston--they talk funny and we don't. Amazing and fun quiz.
I should have posted the original quiz right from the start. The original quiz has been bastardized over the years on various websites, and I unfortunately found one of those before I was able to zero in on the original.
Here is the original quiz again, for anyone interested:
On the West Coast, "bury" sounds like "Barry." Or maybe "berry." Those sound the same to me. Anyway, "bury" rhymes with "very."
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mightyqueen801
...which rhymes with "worry".
No no! Bury doesn't rhyme with worry, what gave you that idea?
We've got two vowel sounds here, "air" and "er."
Furry, worry, hurry, Murray have the "er" sound.
Barry, berry, bury, Mary, merry, marry, Harry, hairy, very, etc., have the "air" sound. All of these rhyme for most people in the West.
And despite it all we who have these mergers never get the words mixed up because they are all used in different ways in sentences. "Mary married Barry" could not possibly be construed as referring to berries or being merry.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mightyqueen801
I suspect then that you say bury/Barry/berry all like Bare-E? I watch a lot of true crime, and sometimes I hear that someone baried the bodies.
English is the world's first global lingua franca, and has so much momentum it's likely to stay that way for centuries.
There's a lot to recommend English: a huge vocabulary, simple grammar, and expressive flexibility.
And then there's spelling.
Should we reform English spelling to make it phonetically consistent? That means as long as you can pronounce a word, you can spell it once you know the rules. No exceptions to memorize.
For those who would say this is impossible, Chinese provided an example of an undertaking of similar scope when it simplified its characters.
There are only two downsides to this I can see, the first being that English's loose phonetics currently allow for more verbal diversity than, say, German. English dialects and pidgins all use the same spelling, with some minor differences, yet are pronounced differently. A stricter phonetical system would privilege a single dialect.
The second downside is that many historical written works would be inaccessible to those who did not also have some familiarity with traditional English spelling. These could be translated however.
As to the upsides, they are almost too numerous to list. The main one I see is that it would make English even easier to learn as a second language and cement its status as the language of humanity for centuries if not millennia.
I see it as letting English evolve as it has been and other languages have through millennia. Why try to change it in a forced way. As societies change, so does the language as people come-up with new ways of expressing themselves. So, my opinion is to let it evolve. Why change it? As it is, with all its flaw, it has become the lingua franca as you said.
You have a great day.
elamigo
To further illustrate the differences in speech patterns across the United States, y'all/you guys/yoose people might want to try taking this brief quiz:
The quiz nailed me accurately as being from the Northeast.
That was cool. The quiz said I was from California but I'm from coastal Florida. We do share some of the same pass times (surfing, skiing, messing around with boats) but with a more tropical and Southern flair.
Test narrowed me down to these cities: Yonkers, New York City, and Philadelphia.
This one got me to within 70 miles (Orlando to Tampa Bay) and all the way out to Jackson Mississippi.
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Must be those same people who drive an Otto.
Boory?
Anyway, "bury" rhymes with "very."
