Talk:English-language vowel changes before historic /r//Archive 1

message: Article might be better titled "American-language vowel changes before historic r" since it is so American centric.
Just a suggestion.
:The thing is that it's North American dialects which are most affected by these vowel changes.  Such changes in other dialects do occur and are covered here. --Jimp 01:29, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd also add that the Americentricity reflects the academic literature, which is also largely focused on American English. Joeystanley (talk) 15:11, 22 March 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Americentricity

message: Here's what L. Craig Schoonmaker http://www.geocities.com/sswordday/ has to say about the ferry-furry distinction:
* Quote-THIS is the famous "distinction without a difference", except that there are about 4 times as many -erry's as -urry's. And please note that Dictionary gives woor.ee, foor.ee, and hoor.ee (that's the sound that the U with a 'hat' (circumflex accent) shows: short-OO), which I have not heard so regard as bizarre. Either they heard wrong or they're on drugs. 
+ 
* Dictionary, oddly, is sometimes just plain wrong. For instance, "water" is not shown there as ever being pronounced "wut.er", but I listened very carefully to reports of water-main breaks on TV stations in the New York Tristate Metropolitan Area (the broadcasting capital of North America), and wut.er is plainly the pronunciation educated people in this area give that word. The SSWD project, of course, cannot offer "water" precisely because it has more than one common pronunciation. 
+ 
* If you put together the -erry's and the -ery's pronounced the same, you get a MASS of words with ER as the crucial spelling, but if you try to use -ury rather than -urry, you get a completely different sound. So I think we'll go with -erry. But I appreciate your views. Cheers. 
* Quote-UR, ER, OR, and AR may be pronounced with tiny differences by SOME speakers in SOME dialects as to SOME words. I went to your URL for the Cambridge dictionary, which offers TWO bizarre transliterations (which may or may not be rendered in standard IPA but is opaque to me -- IPA transliterations tend to proceed from the positions of vocal apparatus of the linguists who speak them in preparing to write them; SSWD is concerned about what people HEAR, and if they hear no difference between, for instance, vaann and venn for French "vin", it doesn't matter to them whether the person saying it forms the word one way, because the listener hears it the same no matter which way a speaker might articulate it). Most to the point, the Cambridge dictionary shows TWO pronunciations, British dialect and American standard. 
+ 
* I then went to the Merriam-Webster URLs for the other words and clicked on the speaker icon to listen to the pronunciations rendered, in American English, and found no distinction worth making. All those words would rhyme PERFECTLY as most people regard things. Of course, we could avoid the problem altogether by saying that there are two different pronunciations for "worry", so the word can't be changed! 
+ 
* For most ordinary , for whom the SSWD project is intended, not for linguistics specialists, there is between a great many word pairs or groups, no difference worth 'worrying' about. There are a lot of overeducated people who have bugaboos about tiny matters of no consequence, and will argue them endlessly, to everyone else's tedium. I'm not about to argue the linguistic equivalent of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, a subject that may have fascinated some medieval theologians but nobody else. 
+ 
* The SSWD project is about NEEDED change, and preferably changes that people can readily apply to things they HEAR. One transliteration for a small range of actual sounds is convenient, and all spelling is convention. Few speakers of standard English distinguish in sound between "ferry" and "furry". Having a distinction in spelling for these two HOMONYMS is useful. As to which spelling you favor for a reform of "worry", I have noted that you favor "wurry".
You are talking nonsense. They don't sound even similar to most British speakers. 89.243.97.14 (talk) 00:07, 15 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: This page is about what is, not what should be. Benwing 07:34, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: What does it matter what L. Craig Schoonmaker has to say?  The man is as much a linguistics expert as is a jellyfish. Jimp 05:58, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Furry-ferry merger 

message: Is this merger just a near merger and not an actually phonemic merger? Something that I've read suggested that. 64.194.44.220 02:34, 13 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Furry-ferry merger

message: This is a personal blog? http://caxton.stockton.edu/classwork/discuss/msgReader$44 Sorry for putting with the references if it is. Foogol 21:06, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It looks like one to me. It's a teacher talking about something she's noticed in her students' speech and writing, isn't it? Anyway, even if it's not a personal blog, it's still not a useful source since she's just reporting on something she read about in an introductory linguistics textbook (Fromkin & Rodman, which is usually used in freshman Intro to Linguistics courses). If you get a copy of F&R out of the library and track down their source for the phenomenon in AAVE, that will be a useful source. --Angr (t·c) 21:10, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

text: It looks to me as if it's partly based on a Language Log posting: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000697.html --JHJ 12:02, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Moved from [[Talk:Bear-beer-burr merger]]

message: This looks like original research. Although this phenomenon is mentioned at http://www.rehabmed.ualberta.ca/spa/phonology/features.htm (scroll down to "Vowel Centralization Before /r/ (VC-r)"), that says it is "reported in Memphis data". No source is provided discussing this as a phenomenon of rap or of the AAVE of St. Louis. --Angr (t·c) 21:10, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It looks to me as if it's partly based on a Language Log posting: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000697.html --JHJ 12:02, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Original research 

message: I think that is actually useful information that you've removed, angr. So, I've reverted it and added quotation marks.
:I never said it wasn't useful information. I said it was a copyvio (copyright violation), which it is. You cannot copy text wholesale from other websites and paste it here. Even inside quotations marks it was far too long to count as fair use. But we can add a link to the page it comes from so the interested reader can learn more at the original page, which is what I've now done. --Angr/ 04:43, 31 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I think in most accents with the merger, the resulting vowel is closer to  than to , but for better or for worse linguists have agreed to transcribe the merged vowel as . In other words, transcribing merged ho(a)rse as  rather than  is more a matter of consistency with tradition than of phonetic accuracy. --Angr/ 05:45, 4 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Do you have sources for the agreed-upon transcription of the merged vovel?  I also come from a region where horse/hoarse are homophones pronounced with a vowel much closer to  or , and I know from experience that I differentiate the pronunciations  and .  Given my impression from undergraduate linguistics courses that linguists rarely agree upon anything, it strikes me that it might be more accurate to mention the various pronunciations of the merged aspect while noting that a/the predominant linguistic tradition transcribes the vowel as . JohannVII 10:36, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't have a source where a bunch of linguists have gotten together and explicitly said "let's transcribe the merged horse/hoarse vowel as ", but if you look at books and dictionaries that use an IPA transcription (Ladefoged, Longman's pronunciation dictionary, Kenyon & Knott, etc.) all or almost all of them do use . And for that matter, other dictionaries that use their own idiosyncratic transcription system will use their own equivalent to  in these cases as well (e.g. Merriam-Webster transcribes the merged ho(a)rse vowel as "hôrs", not as "hōrs", where "ô" is the vowel of "bought" and "ō" is the vowel of "boat"). I'm confused though by your second sentence: you come from a region where they're homophones, but you personally distinguish them? Or do you mean you distinguish merged "ho(a)rse" from "hearse"? —Angr 11:12, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

text: I don't think so. The toe-tow merger was earlier; in fact, the horse-hoarse merger is a merger of EME "short o" ( with the outcome of the toe-tow merger before /r/. --Angr (t·c) 06:24, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

text: I agree with JHJ. Toe-tow merger can be usefully merged with pane-pain merger as Long mid mergers, and horse-hoarse merger is long enough (and sociolinguistically important enough IMHO) to remain an independent article. --Angr (t·c) 12:22, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, that all makes good sense.  And merging Pane-pain merger with Toe-tow merger to Long mid mergers makes more sense than merging it with Rain-rein merger to Vane-vain-vein mergers did.  Perhaps words like four, source, etc. may have had /OUr/ as opposed to the /o:r/ of such words as perhaps oar, roar, etc. just judging by the spelling.  Wonder whether such a distinction would still be made (if it ever had been) by some. Jimp 16:59, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Previously under [[Talk:Horse-hoarse merger]]

message: Has this (the horse-hoarse merger) anything to do with the Toe-tow merger?  If so, let's merge the articles. Jimp 22Dec05
:I don't think so. The toe-tow merger was earlier; in fact, the horse-hoarse merger is a merger of EME "short o" ( with the outcome of the toe-tow merger before /r/. --Angr (t·c) 06:24, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree with JHJ. Toe-tow merger can be usefully merged with pane-pain merger as Long mid mergers, and horse-hoarse merger is long enough (and sociolinguistically important enough IMHO) to remain an independent article. --Angr (t·c) 12:22, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, that all makes good sense.  And merging Pane-pain merger with Toe-tow merger to Long mid mergers makes more sense than merging it with Rain-rein merger to Vane-vain-vein mergers did.  Perhaps words like four, source, etc. may have had /OUr/ as opposed to the /o:r/ of such words as perhaps oar, roar, etc. just judging by the spelling.  Wonder whether such a distinction would still be made (if it ever had been) by some. Jimp 16:59, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Toe-tow merger 

message: : Starting about the time that English incunabula were being printed (late 15th cent.) there begins to appear evidence that many words formerly spelled with er now began to be spelled with ar.
This is mentioned in Wells (Accents I:203), in Prins (History of English Phonemes, 1974:154-6) and especially in Wyld (History of Modern Colloquial English, 1956:212-222), where he connects the early appearances especially with "S.E. and E. Midland texts". The Wells book mentions some common examples such as star - far - heart which were not only previously spelled with -e- but also are easily related to German Stern - fern - Herz. In the first two cases, the spelling also changed, but in the case of heart it is not clear whether the new spelling reflects the new pronunciation which is clearly different from Middle English herte. Wells speaks of "quite a few instances" and Wyld lists several pages full of examples along with citations and sources. 
Along with the many words where the spelling changed to the new ar and has remained so, there were many other words in which the spelling did not changed, but in which the pronunciation must have also been ar. This assumption rests of large amounts of private correspondence from the 15th to the 18th centuries, some of which Wyld refers to: when people wrote "I hard it was so" the assumption is that they were spelling to reflect their own pronunciation, a habit much more in vogue several centuries ago. The public printers, on the other hand, maintained --- for some reason -- the older er---or in some cases such as learn,an ear---in this second group of words. Wyld states that the new ar pronunciation was spreading more and more in the 16th century, with, for example, Queen Elisabeth using less of them when young but more in her writings from later years. Prins (p.156), gives a short list of examples (certain - desert - mercy - person - sermon - servant - verdict - vermin) and states that they were all spoken with ar in the 18th century. He singles out these words as the kind which had earlier acquired the new ar spelling, but had later, "under French influence", reverted to the old er spelling. The American Encyclopaedic Dictionary 1895, which I have just started examining, lists several "obsolete" variants with an ar spelling for words such as merchant and perfect. 
To further complicate the story, with the rise, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, of spelling pronunciation and the new idea that there was only one correct spelling for each word, there began a large-scale reversion to the er spellings that had often been preserved by printing houses; this in turn eventually led to almost all such <er> [ar] words acquiring the ur ( ɝ ) sound that we now hear in mercy - certain etc. Wells's "spelling pronunciation perhaps playing a rôle" seems like quite an understatement when one considers the large scope of this reversion. The only survivors I know of in American English are sergeant and heart, hearth, while RP still maintains the ar sound in words such as clerk - Berkeley - Derby. The proper noun Clark still has the old ar since its spelling had already changed. Another doublet is parson, which used to be the same as person, with the latter, more common word undergoing the reversion. 
As a youngster in the US in the 50s, I occasionally heard such expressions as Marcy me! ( = mercy), What in tarnation... (old doublet related to eternal), "you consarned.. (&@#%$)" ( = concerned), That'll larn ya ( = learn ). More interestingly, the retention of the old ar in popular ("rustic") speech was also found in words which traditionally seemed to have had a long -e- vowel, and which today have been standardised with the er (not ɝ ) pronunciation: there's the old song about how Davy Crockett "killed him a bar when he was only three"" (=bear), and the even better known doublet thar for there, as in "in them thar hills" and the whaler's "Thar she blows!". When checking in the OED for early variants of some of the above words, I found some examples such as fern and herd where the earlier ar form was referred to as Scottish. A number of such ar variants are also cited in the Concise Scots Dictionary 1985; somehow I feel a connection between these Scots citations and the Scotch-Irish flavor of hillbillies,Davy Crockett, and sailors (Aye aye Captain!- Aye is northern English for "yes"). I wonder if these ar forms, although beginning in the South, ended up being preserved more in the nonstandard northern dialects?
The question of who said what and where is very difficult: was there another dialectal tradition where short er did not change to ar, and did this accent later become more dominant? From where do we get this mixture of long er and short er reflexes? In the same small section (4.19) Prins first says that short er merged with ir and ur, but then he says that "er frequently became ar". This is confusing --- I'm a specialist in Tibetan, not English phonology, but I'm interested in this problem due to its connection with parallel dialectal developments and the power of spelling pronunciations: can anyone offer suggestions? Also, I think at least some of this material belongs in the main article. Jakob37 11:54, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  a major topic is missing here 

message: Which are ,  and  respectly, in the dialects that the three-way contrast is preserved?
* Mary // - marry // - merry // → Are these all correct? ― 韓斌/Yes0song (談笑 筆跡 다지모) 16:57, 12 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes. AJD 14:44, 16 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Is Mary the only word which has  before an intervocalic r in the dialects in which the three-way contrast is preserved?  If not, then how does one know if a word will have  as opposed to  or even ?  For example, in modern day English English, marry, Mary, and increasingly the final two syllables of necessary, each are pronounced with a different vowel even though they are all spelled with an a.  Thegryseone (talk) 21:23, 7 December 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: No, Mary is not the only word. Fairy and hairy are also good examples. I'm not sure what you mean by "how does one know" which of the three vowel phonemes a word will have—the same way one knows whether a word has /θ/ or /ð/ in it, I suppose. AJD (talk) 16:40, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

text: I just mean are there any rules governing this?  Because most Americans pronounce all these words the same. Thegryseone (talk) 18:23, 11 December 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Are you asking if there's a way for an American who doesn't make a difference himself to predict which word will have which vowel in a dialect like British English that does make the difference? Not always, no. When I was singing in a choir in a Church of England church, I had to ask one of the British choir members whether parent is  or  because there's no way to tell from the spelling of the word. (Note that patent is either  or  depending on dialect, and parent actually varies across Mary/marry-distinguishing dialects as well.) —Angr 08:32, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

text: I was wondering if an a followed by two r's is always /æ/, because that seemed to be the case (marry, Harry, etc.).  You bring up something interesting.  I've noticed that sometimes singers that normally wouldn't have these pre-r distinctions in their dialect attempt to make them when they sing.  This seems to be especially the case in choir music.  Maybe they were just taught to sing that way.  Maybe I'm just wrong. Thegryseone (talk) 18:13, 12 December 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I think arrV (V = vowel) is always /ær/ (except in obvious cases like "starry", "marred", etc.) but arV is not necessarily /eər/. I don't think ar(r)V is ever , though. —Angr 20:19, 12 December 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Not so.  -ary words are, at least in dialects which haven't reduced the penultimate syllable to a schwa, pronounced with .  E.g., necessary, military, capillary, etc.  (This is only when it's the suffix; e.g., canary rhymes with Mary.)  Also the state Maryland has a DRESS vowel for the first syllable. 136.152.181.37 (talk) 05:56, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

text: It makes more sense if you consider that it's a three-syllable word, and short vowels in that position are the norm.  More examples: charity, parallel, marinate, arable.  Compare animal, catapult, tabula (but table), amulet.  136.152.181.37 (talk) 05:51, 28 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mary-marry-merry merger 

message: How is the "short o" before intervocalic r pronounced in the South?  I think it is similar to NYC and Philly. 208.104.45.20 (talk) 00:29, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Southern American English 

message: The article lists corps/core as a minimal pair for the horse-hoarse distinction.  Where does this information come from?  I don't agree.  I have sources:  dictionary.com lists the pronunciations [kawr, kohr] for both, which is their notation for FORCE words.  John Walker's Critical Pronouncing Dictionary lists both with the same FORCE (o1) vowel (with a usage note for corps about its final letters, not its vowel).
core clearly has a FORCE vowel.  The article implies corps has a NORTH vowel (as corpse, corpulent, etc., obviously do).  Maybe some who natively speak a distinguishing dialect can weigh in?  At any event, there are plenty of other perfectly good minimal pairs (the similar cord=chord/cored, born/borne). 136.152.181.37 (talk) 05:46, 28 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Is corps NORTH or FORCE? 

message: "The horse-hoarse merger is the merger of the vowels /ɔ/ and /o/ before historic /r/, making pairs of words like horse/hoarse, for/four, war/wore, or/oar, morning/mourning etc. homophones." Really? I guess my pronunciation of mourning with /ʊə/ is an affectation, then, and wouldn't be found in any dictionaries.... 91.105.52.52 (talk) 00:22, 18 February 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, only you can know if it's an affectation, but I can't find mourning with /ʊə/ in any dictionaries. +Angr 01:04, 18 February 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I too pronounce it with /ʊə/, and was unaware until reading this article that that pronunciation was in any way marginal. I thought it was standard RP, and became /ɔ/ only in those accents which had undergone the pour–poor merger. On investigation, /ʊə/ is given as an alternative to /ɔ/ for "mourn" in the ODEE, but not in any other dictionaries that I've been able to lay my hands on. Vilĉjo (talk) 17:29, 11 June 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Interestingly, the 1989 Second Edition of the OED gives /ˈmɔənɪŋ/ but the 2003 Third Edition gives /ˈmɔːnɪŋ/ for British English.  I've also heard /ˈmʊənɪŋ/ and I use that pronunciation if I wish to distinguish the word from morning.  Dbfirs 18:27, 22 March 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Mourning" 

message: I believe that in the pure-poor split in America, sure and your rhyme with fir in the Midwest, and store in the South. I think lure would be a much better example word than sure. If nobody has any objection (and nobody makes the change themself), I'll change it in a while.Peterwshor (talk) 00:21, 13 June 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I can't pin down my dialect, but for me, sure rhymes with fir and your rhymes with store, while lure is a bit peculiar. 173.66.211.53 (talk) 02:30, 17 March 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I guess I have a five-way split. (1) sure with fir, and (2) lure close to it. (3) poor with store. (4) pure and cure with year [or fear or ear or we're, but with an initial y-sound], and (5) tour with sewer [or newer]. 173.66.211.53 (talk) 02:44, 17 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Poor choice of words for American pure-poor split 

message: I went ahead and changed "In accents that do not have the merger, Mary has the a sound of mare, marry has the a sound of mat and merry has the e sound of met." to "In accents that do not have the merger, Mary has the a sound of mare, marry rhymes with Larry and Barry, and merry rhymes with berry and cherry."
I think the rhyming gives a better illustration.  Also, the old wording could be misleading, as there's no T sound in marry or merry.  Most people would probably realize it was just referring to the vowel sound, but still I think that's less clear, and I believe all of the vowel sounds are actually pronounced a bit differently when followed by an R.  The only possible issue with the rhymes would be how the rhyming words are pronounced in different American dialects, but in my travels I've always heard those the same throughout the country...  
Merry Christmas! -Helvetica (talk) 17:45, 25 December 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I've reverted, because just giving rhymes is no use at all to people who do have the merger. If "Larry" and "cherry" also rhyme for you, if "Barry" and "berry" are homophones, then you're no wiser about what it sounds like to pronounce the three sounds differently unless you're given examples like "mat" and "met" where the vowels really are different even in your accent. Angr (talk) 08:27, 26 December 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mary, Merry, and Marry 

message: I think statements about mergers need to be hedged a bit more than they are. Admittedly my own perception, as a Californian, has probably been overly influenced by education, including classes in English linguistics taken at a German university.  Still, it wasn't my study of Middle English at Göttingen that led me to stop merging 'mirror' and 'mere'.  I probably stopped doing that when I was eight or nine years old.  Call me prescriptivist, but many of the mergers in American English purported in Wikipedia merely suggest that kiddie English, spoken by children before they can perceive or articulate the distinctions, is becoming the adult norm.
With regard to Mary-merry-marry the last two sound the same to me but the vowel in Mary is longer.  At Christmastime I would notice if someone said 'the Virgin Merry' or 'Mary Christmas'!  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pithecanthropus (talk • contribs) 19:33, 7 March 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Whoever thinks most Americans merge tear/terror and air/err/error was unduly influenced by eight years of listening to George W. Bush.Pithecanthropus (talk) 04:20, 18 June 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Mergers overgeneralized

message: I'm pretty sure I have the vowel merger, also with Sirius-serious, but in whatever dialect I've grown up with, mirror rhymes with near and mere, because it has one syllable, not with near-er which has two. 96.231.17.131 (talk) 16:22, 5 November 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I've never picked up the other mergers listed under mirror-mere. Is there any explanation why mirror and mere may merge while the other examples do not? 96.231.17.131 (talk) 16:31, 5 November 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mirror-nearer? 

message: I know in my dialect [which is influenced by western dialects of NAmE], tour [which I keep mistyping tuor] has two syllables, the first with the goose vowel and the second with the nurse vowel. But the article mentions that some speakers pronounce it with one syllable, with the goose vowel immediately before r.
Is it even possible to pronounce either  or  immediately before ? 173.66.211.53 (talk) 00:13, 27 March 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Sure it is. In Scottish English all vowels that occur before other consonants like /t/ and /n/ can occur before /r/. If you don't know any Scottish people yourself, maybe you can find a youtube video of a Scottish person saying a word like poor. Angr (talk) 05:48, 27 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  How is the goose vowel supposed to precede an r in the same syllable? 

message: This article should describe how vowels change when  is elided: for instance, vowels often undergo compensatory lengthening and vowel breaking. — Eru·tuon 03:30, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: I think that depends on the dialect. My dialect, for instance, often uses a schwa in place of lengthening in certain instances. Although I personally usually speak rhotically, unless I am trying to be particularly patriotic. Tharthandorf Aquanashi (talk) 03:46, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
replies: text:  Right: the addition of a schwa would be considered breaking, the second option. Maybe calling this breaking is incorrect since the schwa derives from , but I don't know. — Eru·tuon 04:24, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Non-rhoticity 

message: What does the term "single-word merger" mean in the section "Cure-fir merger"? Eric Kvaalen (talk) 09:35, 4 April 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: I suppose it means that it only applies to the one word "sure" (which makes it not what I would call a merger, but maybe the literature describes it as such). W. P. Uzer (talk) 13:04, 4 April 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: "Single-word merger"

message: Is it really true that "In southern English English it is now common to pronounce CURE words with /ɔː/, so that moor is often pronounced /mɔː/, tour /tɔː/, poor /pɔː/"? That means they pronounce cure like core?! Eric Kvaalen (talk) 09:35, 4 April 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: I have just realized that I misunderstood. They don't pronounce cure like core, they pronounce it the same as they would pronounce "kyor". Eric Kvaalen (talk) 10:28, 4 April 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, the OED has both /kjʊə/ and /kjɔː/ for British pronunciations, though, here in the north on England, the second pronunciation sounds odd.  It's true that some British southerners have a poor-pour merger.  I've even heard it from BBC announcers (... and it annoys me, but I can't prevent changes in language).  The Merriam-Webster dictionary suggests that there is a similar merger in parts of America, as stated in our article.  Dbfirs 09:10, 5 April 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: "Cure" pronounced like "core"?

message: Shouldn't this be regarded as a split, rather than a merger, since they started as the same word?  Dbfirs 16:06, 5 April 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Flower–flour merger