gadfyl@mosquitoe.net wrote:
> Richard Polhill wrote:
>> gadfyl@mosquitoe.net wrote:
>>> For example, you claim, "The letter 'l' is quite often silent."
>>> But in some of the examples you give, the 'l' is weakened to a 'w'
>>> (psalm --> sawm, not sam).
>> I know Americans ... tend to pronounce "r"s fully, it is by no means
>> universal.
> Some people fully pronounce the 'l' in 'calm' and 'psalm', some
> pronounce it like 'w'.
> Is that your point?
No it is not. I said:-
>> In British English, the "l" in "psalm" is completely silent, serving only
>> to lengthen the preceding "a", sounding like "aa" in "aardvark", much as
>> the "r" does in the same word when spoken by Brits."
Meaning, that the "l" in "calm" and "psalm", and the "r" in "aardvark" are
silent modifiers to the preceding vowel in typical British English
pronunciation, so what the OP said is true for his given locality.
>> I know Americans, probably due to Noah Webster's ideas on how language
>> should be taught, tend to pronounce "r"s fully, it is by no means
>> universal.
I suspect that somewhere in the world you'll find people speaking English with
an accent that does pronounce the "l" in "calm" and "psalm", but that is not
what I was trying to say. I was attempting to allay any following argument
that the "r" in "aardvark" is fully pronounced.
My point was that anything you want to define about pronunciation is true but
only for a given value of "true". ;-)
In fact anything you want to say about how words are pronounced is only valid
for a given subset of the speakers of the language.
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