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[Thecard]

Isn't a homophone defined as sounding exactly the same?

[fqllve]

Yep. Although that paper I linked in the post before my last shows that (at least) some homophones actually differ in how quickly their spoken due to frequency. It's a study of time/thyme.

e: 'their' See! Errororororororor

[Starver]

Personally, "your" and "you're" are not homophonic.  Without delving into the subtleties of IPA, as it applies to my accent (and those I most frequently encounter) the former is more a homophone of "yaw" and the latter like a truncated "urea".

The three th* words are much closer, I'll admit, but in comparing "there" and "their", there's a certain oral constriction (*fnar fnar*) for the latter that isn't present in the former.  The third in the series has a (different) squeeze and gains an extra syllable... no, not quite (i.e. my version definitely isn't as pronounced as if I were from the American Deep South), and maybe it's a half-syllable if that's possible.  But it definitely heads towards "they'ur".  (Noting as a reference that I'm not given to extending words like "film" (Northern Irish: "fillum") or "vehicle" (especially US deep south law enforcement style "vee-HICK-әl", but neither do I tend to glottalstop or use the "reverse cockney L"[3].  In polite company, at least.  I'm very close to a geosocial divide where "th"s turn into "d"s, though, and might sometimes lapse thusly.)

Not that I'm saying that my personal rules are going to be universal enough across the whole English-speaking world to correctly hear these subtle differences in others but, for most people I would interact with daily, they're there in their speech.  Interestingly spoken correctly (at least, never jarringly wrong), but when it comes to written text one cannot really be ambiguous enough to slip under the radar on that point.


OTOH, the "Could've"=>"Could of" confusion[1] I attribute to a homophonic conjunction having occurred, as (for want of a better set of stereotypes to blame) the inner-city inter-cultural mix of accents bring the "әv" of "'ve" towards the "ov" of... well, "of".  And hearing "ov" enough it gets engrained[4] in spelling as well.  Still, absolutely hate hearing it.  (OTOH, when I expect it from a character in a film or drama, it'll jar when they don't use it.  Still can't stand it from 'real' people.  And there's no excuse for writing it[2] and I restrain myself (most of the time) when I see it here to not send an advisory PM.  And I hate it when I do succumb to temptation, with the flimsy excuse of saying something else at the time.  No excuses and no apologies, though, but I regret most that I have to do it.)


But that's me and my thoughts, and doubtless none of this travels quite so well as I might imagine.



[1] A generous word.  Personally I think it's as heinous as pronouncing "ask" as "aks/axe"

[2] "Language changes" be blowed.  It transitions and evolves, yes, and there are novel idioms developed (even mondigreens), but this is like a colony of moles developing flight.

[3] "Milk" => "Miyuwk"?  No, I don't know what IPA would do with that, either.  If you know it, you know what I mean.

[4] Or, if you prefer ingrained.  But the above alternate is how I say it (with both spellings being valid), while we're on the subject.

[Thecard]

Umm... Starver... y'know that Could've thing?

It means "could have," not "could of."  Like most contraptions, the apostrophe is just replacing the first letters of the second word.
It is sometimes pronounced that way, but only with some dialects.

[fqllve]

Starver, I'd have been able to follow that post way better if you had gotten into the subtleties of IPA. :p Is it really meaningful to talk about subtle phonemic distinctions without it?

Which accent do you use? Because I use ASE (although I travel quite a bit so it's kind of nonstandard in ways) and I pronounce both your and you're as [jər] except when emphasizing, in which case I use /jɔ:r/ (basically yore) for both. Pretty sure that's consistent with standard usage.

I don't have any access to corpus data, though, so it's not definitive. But like I said earlier, I would strongly suggest that in most dialects any phonemic differences between the words would likely be attributed to the fact that they all play different roles in a sentence. Each is a very different kind of pronoun. So I think if you were erroneously using one form or another (which doesn't really make sense given what follows) then it would be impossible to distinguish because it would be occurring in the same context.

My ear really can't pick out a difference in ASE. I'm not ruling out the possibility, but I'd have to see a study before I'd be convinced.

[Starver]

Umm... Starver... y'know that Could've thing?

It means "could have," not "could of."  Like most contraptions, the apostrophe is just replacing the first letters of the second word.
It is sometimes pronounced that way, but only with some dialects.

Erm... I know this.  Obviously whilst in the midst of my tirade I didn't stay coherent enough to convey this, though.

I was really comparing and contrasting the (arguably) non-homophonic nature of alike-sounding words with the phoneme-mutation that has caused the other confusion through the dialectical phoneme-drift.


But enough of that.  Now ask me about my thoughts about the term "PIN Number", if I haven't already mentioned it in this thread...

@fqllve: My trouble with IPA in the there/their/they're example is that I still can't easily give the first two separate notations by consulting the standard diagrams (although I can with the third, if I trust myself to have the correct mental voicing of the characters), even though they feel and... in my dialect... sound different enough.  Given the difficulty of cutting and pasting all the non-standard characters on the off-chance that I'm write, I thought I'd stick to word-forms that I'm fairly sure that even if they shift, that they shift consistently (and thus still demonstrably).  I won't try to tell you that "Buoy" sounds like "Boy", of course.  Even though for me it does.

ASE = American Standard English, yes?  My Google-Fu and Wiki-Fu have utterly failed to confirm or deny my idea that it is, but on the premise that it is... I probably wouldn't know Tallahassee accent from a deepest Tennessee one, myself, on a 'blind' listening.  If you're at a similar disadvantage, trans-Atlantically, I could point you at some of my "local" brethren who have made themselves known internationally.

The trouble is that within a dozen or so miles of my birthplace (including three cities and every landform from moorland and agrarian through to fully urban and full-on (or ex-)industrial) we're talking about a swathe of people from Sean Bean to Michael Palin to Brian Glover to Jarvis Cocker to Brian Blessed and William Hague.  And if you can't tell the difference between at least some of them, at least, then you're as much a lost cause as I am with US accents, and probably even think I sound like... erm.. whatshername... Daphne?  ...in the series Fraser.  Which is probably something like mixing up the accent of Boulder, CO with one from Los Angeles, CA.  If that's possible.

[fqllve]

Yeah. I always do that. I meant SAE.

So you're from the UK then? I can usually pick out the differences between the major strands, RP from Northern from Western (and of course Welsh, Scottish, and Irish), and I'm familiar with more than I can actually distinguish. Couldn't tell you what city a person's from by their accent though, like I know some people can.

I don't think most people in the US could tell the difference between someone from Boulder and someone from LA though, at least not through accents. Accent-wise pretty much everyone in the Western two-thirds of the country speaks similarly. There are slight differences, and some pretty distinct ones (such as Minnesota), but most dialectical distinctions are lexical rather than phonological or cultural rather than regional.

Also, and I missed this before, I'm in the South right now, have been for years, and the extra syllable you're talking about occurs in both there and they're, not quite sure about their, though. Would bet it does.

[Starver]

So you're from the UK then?

Yup, and I wrote a lot about accents and grammar and stuff, as an FYI, but it got long-winded (and Windows is popping up every 15 minutes wanting to restart to apply an update, and making me realise what time it is).

Let's just say that we've had time to develop a lot of accents and dialects (as have most Old World places) and in an extremely densly packed patchwork.  The big historical reset that came from the Industrial Revolution probably forged the main City accents (Bradford, as distinct from Leeds and Halifax, for example, about ten miles apart from each other; the old hamlet of Sheffield that outgrew its old superior of Rotherham and almost made the latter a suburb of the former; and there are certain situations where you should definitely avoid getting Newcastle and Sunderland mixed up[1], if you value your health... ), with the ancient rural accents from ages long past happily continuing in whatever expanses and gaps did not become subsumed into urban molehills, and even urban conurbations that met up but still maintained boundaries[2].

I believe Prof. Harold Orton (amongst others) had a "party trick" he presented to his new students each year, getting them to read a carefully selected sentence or two and then narrow down where they were raised even to the village or part of the town they came from.  But post-WW2, social mobility and just the propensity to move a family home (even if it's just ten miles down the road, across two or three local authority boundaries and who knows how many dialectical transitions) has eroded some of the keener potencies to that method.  (Look up "Survey of English Dialects" from the 1950s, IIRC, if you're interested at all.)


Sorry.  Hadn't I just deleted a wall of text?  I'm nowhere near being back near the same length, but this is more than the 'brief' summary I was going to be making in its stead.


The point.   There was a point?  Maybe.  Yeah, well, as a fledgling nation of immigrants, I can actually imagine Boulder and LA being similar (or at least similarly diverse) and I've heard much the same about Australia as a whole.  Next time I'll try to pick New Orleans and somewhere in the Appalachians, perhaps?  Or Amish Country and deepest Texas.

(Anyway, it's now way too late tonight/early tomorrow morning to work out if I'm being comprehensible.  Apologies if I'm not.)





[1] Unless you have an excuse, like being American, and thus not being interested in (association) football anyway!

[2] There's a distinct "dee dar" boundary, near me, where the local accent on one side would have one say "thee" and "thar" (nominative and objective forms of the more ancient "thou", as I understand it), but on the other it's "dee" and "dar".  There's also a line where the word "house" (albeit with a dropped-H already ) changes to "arse", would you believe.  

[Thecard]

Well, as someone who has been around he Midwest a bit, I can tell if someone has a different accent from another guy, but I couldn't say where either is from.  It's a bit easier to tell dialects apart I the south though.

[Machiavelli]

Yes.  I can HEAR when people don't know the difference.

Between they're, their, and there.  Most specifically they're.  They're is only a homophone when its pronounced wrong.

[fqllve]

Wiktionary disagrees with you, and in my experience it's the most accurate online dictionary with regards to pronunciation (and other things, such as etymology; it's a damn fine dictionary).

[Starver]

Now... if only we had a reference resource that could be user-edited to reflect updated and additional information about a subject that's obviously not currently completely and accurately covered at present...

[fqllve]

Well it's not like I can link the OED online and I don't particularly trust M-W online as a pronunciation guide (Although M-W does agree with me, except for not listing, curiously, the schwa pronunciation of the adverbial form of there, which I would guess is the opposite of what Machiavelli was saying anyway). So I'm not sure what other dictionary I should link.

I've used Wiktionary for both English and Japanese and I own several dictionaries for both those languages. In most cases it is superbly accurate, and in situations where I disagree with their listing the discussion page often has already had someone express the same misgivings I've had. In this case not only can I not find a single research paper on the issue but the discussion pages on the listings notably lack any information about differing pronunciations. If anyone has any evidence to the contrary I'd gladly look at it, but I actively looked for something to prove me wrong and I came up empty, so I don't really know what else to say on the matter.

[Starver]

Sorry, appear to have pressed a hot button with you.  I'm actually someone who says how wikis tends to be more accurate (excluding particularly controversial things that have to end up Protected), so no need to preach to the converted for my sakes....

Perhaps you misread me as saying "It's wrong" when I more suggesting as how the wiki might be added to, given that at least two of us here seem to have an idea that there's more variance out there than currently acknowledged...

[Thecard]

It's been my experience that while Wiki's can be wrong (and do have a greater potential for error), they rarely are.  And if one is wrong, it generally will be fixed that day.