For any of y'all wondering, opera is based on chromium so google still tracks you. Also search "opera predatory loans"

Surely "Operer"

I wonder if you could do a video on how the pronunciation of the word "women" is being, rather quickly, changed to "woman"? I have started to hear it a lot in the last few years, and I'm assuming it has something to do with the pronunciation of the O in "women" being rather odd, and with words being written into AI and speaking programs, maybe that strange pronunciation is being worn away? Curious your thoughts

OMG Geoff - the BBC spelling Gibraltar without the final "r" is absolutely mortifying. I know that's not really the point of today's video, but there is now virtually no day at all - from 365 in a year - in which I don't see a spelling error. I don't refer to, say, others' Comments on various UKposts channels - or messages sent by friends/colleagues via SMS/Wattsapp and the like. I'm talking about the places where once it would have been inconceivable to have found one - the so-called "reputable" sources like the BBC website for starters - but during the past few weeks alone I also recall being very surprised to find them variously on those of the Royal Family, the Government, Audi UK, Sainsbury's, Omega, Tate&Lyle, Wedgewood, The Telegraph and Farrow&Ball - and this is merely what I can recall off the bat as I write this, otherwise there would be many others. Even someone like yourself, an expert whose stock in trade is words, I could easily imagine shrugging and suggesting it'd prolly be better to calm tf down 😏 Yet I implore, if not you, then the Universe, to hear my pain at what I feel is a symptom of an insidious - but pernicious - phenomenon. What started as an outbreak about 25 years ago progressed, slowly at first, to an epidemic, ballooned to a pandemic - and is now endemic to the extent that leads me to make the above assumption (ie what am I worrying about?) even of a language professor! I have found as the years go by, greater and greater wisdom in every single one of the various proverbs, sayings and epithets with which we were all brought up.... Buy cheap, buy twice Look after the pennies and the pounds look.. Treat people how you wish to be treated.../leave the place how you'd want to find it... Once bitten, twice shy Neither a borrower, nor a lender, be. You get the drift. Thus I find no reason to doubt "the devil's in the detail" Well, quite. If the above mentioned organisation s are either unable to get those things right - or can't even be bothered to check - or have checked - what appears in their respective Corporate shop windows, what HOPE is there that one might reasonably expect to procure well-made stuff and/or good service from the staff? It genuinely offends me; puts me off dealing with the institutions/companies involved and causes me real concern that the basic forces which glue complex societies (like cities - or countries) together, are disintegrating and that, by the year 2124, it'll have all just reverted to a "Mad Max-" or "Brazil"-esque dystopia where the very last doctors have all been dead for 20 years, no one's running the government, so you can ride around drunk, at 11 years old, in a fire-breathing jalopy with no MOT (or brakes - I have developed an actual allergy to seeing "breaks") doing drive-by shootings with total impunity. The flat earthers, Christian and Muslim fundamentalists and conspiracy theorists will have won. If you think I am catastrophising - or even merely exaggerating - well I don't think I am, entirely. Phoning Barclaycard - or EDF Energy or the Post Office - these days it really doesn't matter who it is, it is a nightmare. The (almost inevitably south east Asian) customer service (ha!) representative has been SOOOO highly inculcated to be so overweeningly polite, they're now too busy grovelling a thousand times how they can help you to begin even listening to you. They parrot what you've just said to them - except their training manager has just taught them to do that with no understanding of why : to check comprehension and to empathise. I find myself having to raise my voice over and above their apologies when, for the fifth time, I have asked them to please stop being so excruciatingly polite for long enough so they can hear what I'm asking. What used to be merely a somewhat workaday, slightly tedious call, is more than half the time, a disturbing ordeal where you start to doubt your own sanity. Having formerly and for a long time, been in retail management myself, I am aware of what it's like to be on the receiving end and therefore go at it from that perspective: quietly, patiently, respectfully and with the understanding of precisely what it's like to be understaffed, underpaid and overworked. You won't find me railing at some hapless worker if you input "Karen" on UKposts. Yet the other day, someone in Tesco actually walked away while I was talking to them! These are all examples of the same, overarching factor - erosion of standards - of which spelling, surely, is the most fundamental? Yes, I am aware language - including spelling - isn't ossified. However, I think it's also a bit of a cop out just to cite that. Indeed Chaucer and Shakespeare, through Dafoe, via Dr Johnson, to Austen and Dickens - to HG Wells - right up to EM Forster and PG Wodehouse (both of whom, despite living till the 1970s, easily had memories of Queen Victoria) were all writing at a time when strictly standard spelling didn't exist. Salman Rushdie and even JK Rowling are comfortably old enough to have been through childhood, completed their education and got careers underway before anyone had heard about computers let alone the internet. Of course there was going to be a lot of development with so many people going at it from so many angles, for so long. That's all gone now however - no one (at least not in the developed world) could countenance life before 24 hour interconnectivity - any more than you or I could really imagine writing on clay tablets - or having to cut our own quills. Dictionaries are on-line and anyway, there's spell check. Yes, we'll get new words, undoubtedly - I'm still acclimatising to "bling". As for pre-existing words though, I just can't see how they can change nowadays? In short, any variation from standard, is wrong. I heard something interesting the other day - that there's no such thing as human error. Only people inadequately prioritising. If you REALLY think hard about that, it's right, isn't it? Spinning those final two points - one micro (spelling) and one macro (prioritising) - and all wrapped in "woke", where everyone's opinions are equally valid, where valuing self is king, where no one's stupid, thick or just wrong, you get terminal decay. No, I'm not advocating for bringing back class humiliation, corporal punishment and staying behind after school - and yes, I know every generation bemoans the lowering of standards - yet I truly feel this is different and that society already feels like Alice in Wonderland, except we're having the Mad Hatter's tea party ON the tablecloth, UNDERNEATH the table, and that the March Hare just has to swipe it away and we're all doomed to fall into an even trippier dimension than we're in now!!😂 My tongue is half in my cheek of course - but for the part that isn't, I'd be fascinated to understand any slivers of simple sagacity which may have occurred to you in the course of your travels that you might be willing to pass on and, hopefully, reassure!😏

Watching the whole video in bafflement as literally every example that comes up, my local English dialect uses a glottal stop for, just sitting here like, "Yes, the Germans get it!" XD

This, and me too. I always thought of Gary Oldman as having pretty good American chops (the first movie I saw him in the 80s, I assumed he WAS American), but I've been noticing his slips more and more.

I've always thought that gives British actors doing an American accent a bit of an advantage over the reverse scenario. If an American actor is doing a style of speech that doesn't have ALL the features of a specific regional variety of British English, or has a mix of features from different varieties that wouldn't mix, it seems to become immediately apparent to most British viewers/listeners. However, a British actor doing something VAGUELY North American can sometimes have it come across slightly odd, but I usually can't put my finger on it and generally assume it's one of the many very rare N.A. varieties I'm unfamiliar with, or even that it's just an individual quirk of the character, and don't think too much about it.

It never bothered me that Oldman's Jim Gordan says "carm down" because I just assumed there must be some neighborhood in Queens or something where people say that.

Agreed. Other than obviously bad attempts, I don't hear the mistakes English actors make. I'm often shocked when an actor is interviewed, and I realize they're English. I'd guess most Americans are the same. But even I can usually hear a bad attempt by an American to speak with an English accent. We fail harder. lol

Americans are very used to hearing linking Rs because many of the big news and media companies are based in New York, so during national broadcasts we hear linking Rs all the time. An example: Many of the MTV VJs in the 80s were from New York where MTV was broadcast from. As a result, everyone nationwide heard the linking Rs regularly while watching MTV. Most of us didn't know why they sounded like that, but we accepted it as just another quirky North American accent.

That’s pretty much it lol

you mean English lol. we don't do the R thing in Scotland

I just want you to now, and I say this in the most sincere way possible, no American has ever said "Britain" and been referring to Scotland. It's like when I said "American" you knew I wasn't talking about Mexico.@@skinnyyoungjiggy4471

That's a great idear!

​​@@skinnyyoungjiggy4471No the Scottish just do whatever the hell you want to, whenever you want to, pretend it's a "regional thing", and then complain about the English while doing it. "Agh tuljuz negta kep theh durr opin when yeh gowws outseed!"

when i was very young my mother and i (appalachian) would visit relatives in NYC and were always amused how they’d say “docta” and “lawya” and “teacha” removing the Rs but would ADD an R to words that didnt have them like “Brenderrr” for “Brenda” !

Rhode Island is the same way! (And fairly different in other ways! I've seen the Rhode Island accent imitated in accent videos but it's usually Boston and not right at all)

tie girls cheaters and boomers

And let's not ferget words like "warsh"

Khakis≠ Khakis= car keys ≠ car keys

I don't know if I just have some weird Chicago influence or something, but I often pronounce "anything" as inny-thing, instead of "eh" in front, I'm from the midwest. American accents are incredibly varied though so no surprise if I pronounce it differently 🤷‍♂️

It was quite fun reading this in an amerivan accent haha

Yes! And "anybody". Americans say "ENNY buh-dee" instead of "Annie boddy" or "Annie b-dee".

I pronounce it more like “inna-thang” sometimes, but that’s probably just the southeastern dialect slipping in and out.

@@tomothythimasa lot of people when talking about American accents (including this video) really mean a Californian accent, what they are exposed to from Hollywood.

😅🤣😅

So the song is actually “Rice, Rice, Baby” by Rice Pudding? 😂

Its not exactly this rip lmao vanillar ice, its added to liase the words, like in french with dans une becoming danzune

You might be happy to learn there is a product called 'Vanilla Rice Dream' !

He took his dementor advisors' advice and became another soulless pop performer.

I have heard this actually

It's also found in the Midwest

Older, or rural (background) people in the Midwest use it as well. Have never heard it from anyone middle aged or younger. Growing up with TV maybe stopped that up here?

'draw' is another example of this I think. As in draw(r)ing

Indeed, I was surprised it was never brought up. Yellow belly, pronounced as yeller belly, which both isn't one of the par, pa, or paPa vowels, but belly doesn't start with a vowel. And this is all over the southern accent mostly from older folks (although I find myself code switching into it when interacting with the older generation)

Southern California as well, unless that was just my family.

😂😂😂 so true

You caught that 😂😂😂

Warsh is my grandmother word

it's funny that you have to recognise him by voice because you can't just recognise him by face like most actors hhh

@@Envy_May Gary Oldman is a chameleon.

@@Envy_May Carm down.

Now I have to watch that show just for this. I wasn't too interested in watching Mr. Sunshine before, but now I am.

Kinda like the Southern (broadly speaking) version of fellow is feller.

@@goma3088 Honestly, it’s one of the best drama television series I have ever seen in my life. Be forewarned, it is set at the beginning of a terrible era in Korea’s history, so have some tissues at the ready for the last 2-3 episodes.

@@SirSaladAss That’s exactly how my grandmother pronounced “fellow”.

My dad and I speak pretty similar, except for some reason he doesn't say "wash" he says "warsh." "We need to warsh the dishes. Where's the warshcloth?" So any time I hear something weird in an American accent I think it must be some weird thing they picked up somewhere like my dad with wash.

"Supahnovurr" will never not be funny 😂😂

Trained singer here. We are trained to use an intrusive r to help transition vowel sounds because you can't do a glottal stop in singing as easily. Trust me, Charlotte Church's decisions are intentional.

I have an American accent and I love this song, that was one of my first times noticing this feature of brutish English

@@TN-rf7nt It doesn't make in not funny though. Just like we all laugh at JT's "It's gonna be May" meme every April, even if we know that long Es should be avoided when singing.

@@TN-rf7ntas an american musician i cannot relate to sung glottal stops being more difficult than spoken

the issue about toons and tunes for looney tunes is that they are cartoons or literally "toons". disneys "toontown" or the toon cards in yugioh. plenty of people referred to cartoony things as toons. so if you are watching a loony cartoon.. it would quite literally be a "loony toon". the fact that its looney tunes makes little sense without seeing the name before and memorizing it. it has nothing to do with the tune toon phonetics really. just the obvious assumption that a cartoon is a toon and that tune makes no sense.

I think the cause of this is due to the popularity of the animated series Tiny Toon Adventures and not the two words being homophones.

Damn dude. I was positive it was ‘toons. Mandela effect strikes again.

They're not homonyms in *my* North-American English.

And you say YouChube, Choona steak, Chooseday.

I have seen the Cuyahoga river spelt Cayahaga, by Germans i think.

@@gameratortylerstein5636 “Cayahoga” is how I’ve always heard it pronounced, so I can understand why someone would spell it that way.

Rockefella Centa 😂

@@maggiem.5904 Yeah. It's not exactly the same as whatis being talked about in the video but it reminded me of that. It's not pronounced Cayerhoger, I know. I think they have some similarkty to discuss about, ghough.

Just imagining a bloke with a stack of rockets behind him. 😊

"My mother has a non-rhotic Down East Maine accent ... she was trying to refer to the character Nala from The Lion King and repeatedly said Narler and none of us could understand what she was talking about" Hard to believe. If her accent was non-rhotic why do you use the spelling Narler to represent how she said Nala? And I don't believe you really couldn't understand what she was talking about.

@@rosiefay7283 I think they're saying that their mother was trying to speak in the accent of the others around her, but since she doesn't have a native rhotic accent, she hypercorrects and adds intrusive Rs, pronouncing Nala as Narler to try to sound rhotic, but I could be wrong

​@@rosiefay7283non-rhotic speakers insert r's where they don't appear in the spelling. that's the whole point. also your ability to read when someone is lying is really lacking. think about the context. why would they lie about this? there's literally no reason to at all. it's far more likely either they made a mistake when telling the story, or you're misunderstanding something use some common sense

⁠​⁠@@rosiefay7283A lot of people in New England who drop the R in words like “river” or “car” or even “park,” add in the intrusive R that Dr. Lindsey was talking about. I am also from New England and we also spoke this way. We’d say “rivah” instead of “river” but “Idear” instead of “idea.” It’s just the regional accent there. I think it’s dying out among younger people, which is probably why her mother has the accent (as my parents did, as my husband and I both do) but her children don’t (as my children don’t). I think a difference from what Dr. Lindsey said about his own accent, is we add in the intrusive R before a vowel, but also if there is no vowel following. For instance, we’d say, “I have a great idear.” The Maine regional accent also has a very particular intonation, a kind of sing-song quality, that you don’t hear elsewhere in New England. When my mother moved from Maine to just outside of Boston, people there thought she was from the US South, because they noticed her accent was different, but couldn’t place it. (It sounds nothing like a Southern accent.) My parents spoke this way until they died not too long ago, and some of their still-living siblings still speak this way. My cousins who are only a little older than me still have this sing-song quality to their accent, which my sisters and I never had.

Down easters might also add an r in words like warsh

Glad you like them! I really appreciate it.

I’ve had a significant benefit in my German accent by being an English speaker with hard attack. 😂 Learning Romance languages has been fun though.

I think this is more of a substitution than a "linking r," but upon reflecting on my own pronunciation, I find it fascinating how often I notice myself using a glottal stop in places I'd never noticed. For example, the other day I just noticed how I tend to substitute the "d" in "and" with a glottal stop in phrases like "and I..." when speaking casually.

@@DrunkenHotei Well, that'll teach you to say "and me" like a normal person.

@@TillyOrifice Sorry? I don't think I follow. My example is with subject pronouns, like, "My friend and I dance." But now that I try it, even with object pronouns, when I say, "Come with my friend and me," I seem to omit the /d/ entirely on the word "and." The /d/ on "friend" in my pronunciation seems to be a bit harder to pin down, but I feel it oscillates between a plosive and a glottal stop depending on how quickly I'm speaking. I guess I still don't know how I tend to pronounce things until someone gives me a reason to pay attention to it lol. Thanks for that :)

I think it's not just that. The glottal stop is more difficult to hear than an r anyway, and it's used less consistently (it's not the only way Americans can break a hiatus). We also almost always use it when starting a sentence with a vowel, so we tend to just think of it as the only way to start a vowel. (Singers are an exception, I assume.)

Oh boy does this give me spelling bee flashbacks. I narrowly avoided missing a word by catching that the judge reading it had a different accent from mine-only to get eliminated because he misheard how I spelled the next one. Rude!

My great grandmother from Arkansas did this. My great aunt picked it up, despite nobody else in the family using it but her mother. She's always going to warsh something.

@@julilla1In my best friend’s family, her mother (and only her mother) pronounces it “warshcloth” and gets teased for it.😂

That’s a totally different type of intrusive R! More like when my grandmother pronounced oil as “erl” and toilet as “terlet.” I believe it’s brought over from Ireland.

Get in the barth, boy! lol

I had exactly the same reaction: As a Seattleite, I placed the speaker as a NY detective.

In Chicago, some people actually call the street "Go-EEth-y".

3 is not the vowel that you are taking about e/ø, vs 3/(3

@@christopherellis2663 The British version of the NURSE vowel, which is just a syllabic R in rhotic American accents, is /ɜː/. /œ/ in Goethe, the short ö, is different from the NURSE vowel in being higher, fronted, and lax.

I watched a PBS show about Hitler with a British narrator and I thought his propaganda minister was "Gerbles" (Göbbels).

the british NURSE vowel is actually /əː/: /ɜ/ used to be a variant symbol for schwa, but it was changed to a different sound.

Colonel is not written nor pronounced with an R in French

@@runscopeable "Colonel" in Modern French is descended from "coronel" in Middle French. The French dropped the 'r' from both the spelling and the pronunciation while the English retained the rhotic pronunciation but not the spelling.

Given that we are between language nerds, I point out that it is "Colonnello" with 2 n's and not with one :-)

As a French native, this word is one of those who bugs me the most. In writing doesn't make sens to me and is a nightmare to pronounce. 😅

I’d love to see an episode on why lieutenant is pronounced “left-tenant” in the UK. Is it a simple anglicization substituting English words that sound similar or is there some deeper reason related to changing speech patterns?

I agree! I'm a non-rhotic speaker but this has always been pretty obvious to me as well. I've always been puzzled as to why so many British actors seem to have a hard time getting this right and it has always been pretty obvious and jarring when they get it wrong, even when I was a kid. Best example I can think of from back then is Red Dwarf. Robert Llewellyn (playing Kryten) got this so _consistently_ wrong I thought he must be doing it on purpose!

It's just because most of the time when "translating" and accent (or whatever the word is), you are doing it your head based on sounds rather than thinking of the spelling. So if you are trying an American accent and add an "r" when you say "bigger", "painter" etc., it seems easy to think on the fly that you should add it to "Jehovah" or whatever as well - it's the same sound (to non-rhotic speakers) being translated, so it's easy to just track it in the same way.

right ??? then again for me personally i tend to see the spellings of words in my head when i think or speak in general and on top of that i grew up learning a european second language, so i wonder how many little factors like that contribute for y'all or other people who notice these things without first studying linguistics

@@artmarkham3205 Yeah, you have to literally know how every word you're saying is spelled.

@@SomeUKpostsTraveler Well, for actors that shouldn't really be that much of a problem, unless they only ever have their scripts _read_ to them. 😁

"not a Rupton" I.e. not eruptin'? 🙂

@@davorzmaj753 haha nice!

Amander Rupton has a nice ring to it.

To a US person, those are 2 completely different sounding phrases. I had to slow them both way down to hear how they could be the same.

there's got to be a joke about "inter-Upton" in there somewhere 😉

The phrase "law and order" is a great illustration of the difference between rhotic and non-rhotic. Americans mostly pronounce the Rs and use a glottal stop between the first two words (or sort of run them together); non-rhotic speakers often say "Laura Nawduh." About as different as can be.

A non-rhotic Brit would only put an intrusive R into “It is the law” if the phrase was immediately followed by a vowel with no pause, so it’s whatever word immediately follows “law” that is the key factor. For example, “it is the law and you must obey it” might have an intrusive r in it. “It is the law that you broke”, on the other hand, wouldn’t. Neither would “it is the law”, as an isolated phrase with any kind of pause at the end of it (such as that typically placed between sentences)

@premanadi YA KNOW British english used to be a rhotic language. In 1700 they said all the Rs. That’s why the spelling standard had an R in various words. By 1800 the Rs had started to fade (and British teachers were reminding students to say the R).

@@fromchomleystreet did you not see the the part where they said the actor **Repeats** the phrase?

@@Amy_Dunn Ah. No.

Pilgrim is an interesting one too. We don't like words with repeated L or R.

​@@DrGeoffLindseynow I'm confused... How do you say pilgrim? In my North American accent, there's nothing incongruous between how I say and read pilgrim. Pill, grim. Maybe pill grem or pill grum if speaking quickly. Is there a tricky history to it or something?

@@christophervollick4634 It didn't use to have an "L" in it. Latin "peregrīnus" -> Old French "peregrin/pelegrin" -> Middle English "pilegrim" -> Modern English "pilgrim". The double "R" was preserved in the word Peregrine, as in Peregrine Falcon.

@@ericsmith5919 Oh! I see. That makes sense. Thanks!

Weirdly, the French "coronel" was itself a corruption of an original Latinate word meaning the leader of a military "column" - hence the equivalent "colonello" in Italian ("colonna" being Italian for "column").

Reminds me of a guy online who insisted that Americans said "Parsta"

@@OtakuNoShitpost yep, I can see an English person thinking this. Not me though 😃

But what explains why people write "loose" when they mean to say "lose"? I see this constantly and can never understand how that happens. What accent could that possibly derive from??

​@@revealviewthat's just a spelling error because 'oo' is more likely to be used for that vowel sound than the o..e configuration. I don't think it's accent dependent.

@@ruthbryce2667 I don't see anyone writing "moove" though!

Same. Southern Midwest American here, and I can tell when the actor is not American doing an "American" accent because they hit the Rs too hard. They sound almost like a pirate, Arrrrrr there matey.

Watch Shakespeare in original pronunciation. He sounded like a pirate too (with rolling Rs). British english used to be a rhotic language. In 1700 they said all the Rs. That’s why the spelling standard had an R in various words. By 1800 the Rs had started to fade (and British teachers were reminding students to say the R).

​@@wootentottle6570British actors are naturally rhotic if they're Irish or Welsh or Scottish. Listen to some interviews with Welshmen Michael Sheen and Matthew Rhys. Their Rs are not as strong as in Scottish accents but they're definitely there.

@@karinanemica5973I found it interesting when I noticed Maureen O’Hara’s accent kept slipping in Miracle on 34th Street. If anything, she put more R into it than an American would.

@@karinanemica5973depends on the person. My Welsh friend has a non rhotic accent

I live in Canada among rhotic speakers, many of whom are very interested in history and geography and some of whom have taken linguistics courses, and I've never heard anyone not pronounce the R in Burma or Myanmar. I'd never even considered that it could be pronounced any other way because the spelling is the spelling, of course that's how it's pronounced.

Parcheesi got the r the same way.

Compare also the common use of "Park" as a Romanization of the Korean surname 박 [pak̚].

That's really interesting!

@@AtomikNYSo it should really be “Pahk”?

Thanks! Can I quote you?

​@@DrGeoffLindseysorry i got locked out of my account, im on my alt right now, yes you can quote me. Thank you.

Lol you're like "why the hell would I watch half an hour video about hard Rs" and suddenly 2 hours later you're an expert on the English language

That's Dr. L to you lol

Thae "pirate" accent did not exist as a term until Robert Newton from Cornwall played Long John Silver in the movie, "Treasure Island". Newton was from Cornwall and decided to really push the accent that he had heard from rough seamen back in his youth. It is doubtful that an Englishman like Blackbeard would have talked like a Cornish seaman.

@@jmchez I'm fully aware of that, it was said as a joke.

😂 thanks for the laugh.

That's pronounced "Ahhhhs"

"Rs = ours"? Just as we say it here in my old Kentucky home. Gotta' ask... are you from the south, or maybe the Appalachian region?

YA KNOW British english used to be a rhotic language. In 1700 they said all the Rs. That’s why the spelling standard had an R in various words. By 1800 the Rs had started to fade (and British teachers were reminding students to say the R).

@@electrictroy2010 I wonder what influence was causing the R's to fade out of the accent.

Yes, Cumberbatch in the first Dr. Strange went waay overboard with the hard Rs and flat tone, even tho I thought his accent was perfect in August Osage County.

I can forgive the mistake when Gordon does it because the very first actor I (and many other people) ever saw in the role of Commissioner Gordon was Neil Hamilton, on the 1960s TV series. Hamilton was from Massachusetts, and had a discernible non-rhotic accent. What especially amuses me is that English people sometimes give the impression they think we Americans can't pronounce the open back unrounded vowel (the "a" in "father"). They seem to think we move it toward the front of the mouth and make it slightly less open, so that it sounds like the "a" in "cat." We never do this, at least not if we've gotten an elementary school education. It used to bother me that when John Lennon was trying to do an American accent on the Beatles' "Rock and Roll Music," he sings, "I'm in the mood to take a maambo." [sic] We Americans, who generally understand Spanish pronunciation rules better than the English, know to pronounce "mambo" as "mombo." We never say "maambo," unless it's to mock the stereotypical "hick" pronunciation. On the other hand, I was surprised to learn that the English can easily pronounce the near-open front unrounded vowel. I had never thought about it before, but it's a bit counterintuitive that an English person would say "I'm too fat to wear these pants" exactly the way an American would (aside from the fact that "pants" means "briefs" and not "trousers" in British English, of course). I would have guessed that the words would be pronounced "fot" and "ponts," since "chance" is "chonce" and "bath" is "bawth." But they're exactly the same in both dialects. It's tricky.

@@electrictroy2010 Doesn't make you superior. Yo mama's just anatha ho in the end. 😉😉😉

Yeah that's what I grew up with and at age 10 in 1968 we moved within broadcast range of Schenectady where a lot of TV was developed an my pronunciation very much developed following the restricted Midwestern accent that many of the News broadcasters followed. When my company was developing early speech recognition software I was asked to participate so that a "proper"; accent could be obtained as a baseline from which to work from. (Their words not mine)

Being from Long Island I hear a lot of people do this, including my grandmother who grew up in Brooklyn in the 40’s. It varies by an individual’s personal and ethnic background, though the latter is losing importance and it can even vary within families or context. My brothers and I say drawer, but my sisters say draw. I usually speak rhotically, but when I’m talking faster, agitated, or even very at ease my r’s tend to disappear, though I haven’t notice myself do linking r’s.

I still use warsh sometimes and my kids think its the funniest thing in the world.

yeah several of the examples of it as a mistake just sounded southeastern to me, as a northwesterner. carm is right out though lmao thats bad it also does exist in old Noir mystery radio plays set in LA. so i don't think the BBC example is a mistake at all!

“Warsh” is also found in mid-Atlantic accents like in Pennsylvania.

traditional southern ("suthuhn") is more likely to be non-rhotic: Vuh-ginia, suh.

My grandma had very unusual pronunciations for someone born and raised on the west coast. She would also often comment on some of her values and mannerisms being the “Scotch” in her. She comes from what we call a “Scots-Irish” or “Scotch-Irish” heritage. The Appalachian speech sounds very much like my grandma and also has a healthy percent of people claiming to be of Scots-Irish decent. Having been born and raised in rural areas often without even a radio, her family was very much isolated from other speech patterns until she started first grade at nearly age 7. It’s interesting to hear her speech patterns very much in the accent of rural Appalachians.

Fantastic

“I’m from Boston” is not excuse to sound uneducated. It’s pronounced “car” or “door” not “cah” or “daah”

@@electrictroy2010nah. A Baahstan accent is like wicket ahsum.

Well, no, those words are in fact *not* pronounced in this manner by speakers of traditional non-rhotic Boston/New England English, or similar non-rhotic forms of English. What sounds uneducated to me is implying that certain pronunciation systems are correct (presumably yours) and other are incorrect.

@@electrictroy2010 сяу

As a child, I thought they were saying, "dialects"...

I used to think the same thing when I heard the Top Gear trio pronounce Peugeot - I was tempted to say "Purr-zhou" in my own, rhotic accent.

@@GohTakeshita You from appalachia perchance? That's a straight up homonym for some daleks. I mean--dialects.

@@HOUROFPOW3R No, I live in Texas.

I didn't watch Dr. Who until I was a teenager, but I had a book about famous sci-fi robots as a kid, so I encountered the name written first, and I assumed it was pronounced "daylek" until I heard it said in the show.

It’s pronounced Lawn Guyland.

It’s pronounced Lawn Guyland.

Yeah, when I sing along with that song I feel very wrong about calling her anything but “Brender.”

My Grandma was small village from south of Boston. It always made us laugh as little kids that she called my aunt Brenda "Brender" and a granddaughter Barbara was "Baabrer" and my dad Arthur was "Aathaa" After living in Cleveland and Chicago for decades, her Boston area relatives thought she sounded very Midwestern while us Midwesterners heard her as clearly from Boston .

It's a good example of when Americans use Intrusive R. And now I'm a bit confused because I don't know how others connect the two workds if they don't insert an R.

Maybe this whole time it's actually charmeleon

😂😂😂😂that one messed me up as a kid

Many years ago I visited the Palace of Versailles and got a guided tour by an English-speaking French guide. She took great care to pronounce "18th century" with a distinct "h" in (H)eighteenth. Very charming. hehe!

Also a stereotypical Cockney mistake: fresh Heggs!

@@lakrids-pibe I was speaking to a French speaker from France the other day (who's English is not great), and they asked me "How old are you?". I swear, every time I asked them to repeat it, I heard "How hard are you?". They pronounced 'old' with an H at the beginning, and struggled a bit with the 'ld' pronouncing it like an American r. An odd misunderstanding, to be sure.

French people too!

Once had a French teacher try to ask me if I'd seen a recent movie. Her vowel for it was so weird that I had no clue what she was talking about (notably, I hadn't seen or cared about the movie, though I had heard of it), and then she tried to clarify by, with great effort, making an H sound at the front. Me: Oh! The Hours? 😂 I also can't stand Esperanto turning key Silent H words into having H sounds. I vaguely recall getting annoyed with "honoro" or something. Borrow words by sound, not spelling, and adapt to your system as needed -- don't utterly butcher the sound to keep the spelling!

I have Missouri relatives who did the same thing.

I used to say “warsh” and “wartch” until I moved away. My sister still says it. We are from Vancouver, BC, and our mother lived with her Scottish aunts for many years. She also pronounced the h in whether.

Hmm... That's weird because in this case "r" is not between two vowels. In "draw-r-ing" (the way non-rhotic speakers pronounce "drawing") /r/ is put to separate two vowels. But "warsh" for "wash"? Interesting where it comes from.

I didn't include warsh(ington) as it isn't considered General American, same reason I excluded feller, yeller etc., and the pronunciation of 'oil' like 'earl'.

Same in neighboring Illinois.

Same in New Hampshire. Mother's side up there always talked like that. But add "lawnd" for lawn, "gararge", Ty-yota (Toyota)

Lol

Heyyy I'm from northern VT too! The accent is sort of dying off but my grandparents still have it : ]

@@stevetalkstoomuch interesting parallel between the spellings of Toyota and coyote...

My head teacher used to say 'singin' and 'playin', yet complained about our pronunciation!

You just blew my mind. I would never have put that together erm = um.

I used to notice this is british set novels. I thought they were muttering err under thier breath every sentence. Like a low growl

Depends when the book or play you’re reading was created. “erm” had an R sound in most accents pre-1750. Even British english used to be a rhotic language. In 1700 they said all the Rs. That’s why the spelling standard had an R in various words. By 1800 the Rs had started to fade (and British teachers were reminding students to say the R).

I remember seeing the Andy Capp comic in the Sunday newspaper when I was young. He was British (Cockney maybe) and when stammering he would say "er". It never occurred to me until fairly recently that in his accent it would have been pronounced "uh".

What. WHAT.

yeah, Brenda Renetti!

Exactly what I was thinking of!

My boyfriend from New York literally doesn't hear the "r" sound. I gave up arguing with him about it.

Another Long Islander - comedian Jon Gabrus - started pronouncing "ninja" as "ninjer" on his podcast when the movie discussion got intense enough for the islander accent to return.

That's a great example! You know what's funny about that example? It sounds odd to me because Joel is American, but when I hear a Brit do intrusive r, it doesn't sound unusual at all because I'm used to it in their accent.

I'm from Chicago where the local dialect has been particularly influenced by the Irish. I have that same discombobulation when I discover a character in a BBC program is Irish while I thought for a long while they were American. I thought Moriarty in the BBC Sherlock series was American with a couple of oddities in his speech. I only learned the truth when the actor was interviewed on a talk show. Say whaaat?!

My parents being from the Boston area and me being first-born in Southern California, I could never understand when the hell they were dropping certain R's or why. My mom hated her accent and worked hard to change it to sound more like the one I was born in, but it would inevitably slip out and we'd just laugh at her because we knew it made her miserable. Kids.

I was born and raised in central Mass, and had several heated arguments over the pronunciation of words like "idea". I was *shocked* when my third grade teacher declared the regional "idea(r)" the correct one 😂

So your teacher reprimended you for pronouncing the r in the same way that 99% of non-black Americans do? Doesn't she know that Boston is the exception to the rule?

@@thefaboo It is a correct one IMO, but not a singular "the". My mother had words with her at the next PTA conference, I never got grief about my 'foreign' accent again

I'm happy he included James Bond in here. I remember watching the "making of" documentaries of James Bond and having all these people with posh British accents saying stuff like "sawR it" and I was like, what? Why do they put an extra R in there? 😄

Speaking of songs, hearing Oasis rhyme "saw" with "door" wrinkled my 14-year-old brain.

help i think that was the first time i noticed it too 😭😭 i wonder how many ppl had that same experience…..

I never fully realized this until you articulated such. Now I'm going through countless nouns in my head just to see how they sound with "the" before them.

I thought exactly this while watching the video because that's what I do. Thanks for articulating it so well. I'd noticed that sometimes I pronounced it "thee" and sometimes "thuh" but couldn't put my finger on why until I watched this video.

I thought I pronounced it "th' idea" but I tried it out and said "the idea" and "the apple" aloud; and I find you're right, I definitely say "thē idea" in that context, I just say it really fast so I don't even realize what I'm saying. I'm from Arkansas, if that matters.

I was even taught to explain that pronunication difference to students learning English as a second language: thee before words beginning with vowels. But then again, I'm an old time Californian when they said we had thuh least accented English of all.

i would love to find out if Dr Geoff has any videos that address the pronunciation of the word “to” in the regard you mentioned. Sometimes i’ll hear “to” pronounced with a strong shwa like “tuh” for emphasis (“tuh have and to hold”) and im wondering what circumstances or regional accents or word combinations this occurs in.

Drawers is not the same word as draws In Australia, you can say 'in the draw' and refer to each drawer individually as a 'draw', so 'draws' is not wrong

@@anthonycotter1493 wait so they really are just calling this thing a draw? And in my bedroom is a chest of draws with a sock draw and an underwear draw? This explains a lot actually...

​@@anthonycotter1493 I'm Australian and the word 'draw' does not refer to a single 'drawer'. It is simply a spelling mistake to spell the word as 'draw', if referring to a single 'drawer'. Find me an Australian dictionary that says otherwise.

I have discovered this as well. Quite a few fanfiction stories I have read have sentences with the word "draw", and at some point I realized that they meant "drawer", and since they pronounce drawer as "draw", they must have thought that was the way to spell it. 😄

With my Long Island (NY) accent, I might pronounce “After you’re done drawing, put the crayons in the top drawer” as “After you’re done drawring, put the crayons in the top draw.” But I’m beyond bewildered when I hear my Philly friends pronounce crayon as “crown”.

When I began doing genealogy, I found an old census with my family on it from 1860 in Tennessee. It took me too long to realize the census taker was using the pronunciations of the names instead of the actual spellings. "Emer" was there, as were "Ainy" and "Poley".

That's really interesting! Has anyone ever picked you up on that pronunciation? I've never heard anyone say the 'L' in those words before.

@@bloosy1771It's possible that you *have* heard people say the "L" in those words, but you haven't noticed -- just like I hadn't noticed people *not* saying the "L" in those words for decades. In the discussion I had online about "yolk" and "folk", about half the people said they pronounce the "L"s and couldn't believe that other people don't, while the other half said that they don't pronounce the "L"s and couldn't believe that other people do! Both sides cited the example of the character Porky Pig saying "That's All Folks!" at the end of the classic Looney Tunes cartoons, and both sides were sure that Porky Pig pronounced "Folks" the same way that they do (either with or without the "L"). So I think there are two things going on here. First, the difference in pronouncing or not pronouncing the "L" is subtle, since even if you do pronounce the "L", it gets masked somewhat by the following consonant (especially true for words ending in "k", but less true for "almond"). And second, I think there must be some confirmation bias at work, where we perceive the sounds that we expect to hear. Having said all that, I'm an American, and most people in the discussion were American. I'm not sure if this same dichotomy exists in England, Australia, etc.

That's interesting. I've never heard anyone pronounce the "L" in talk, walk, stalk, or yolk, but I have heard L in the other words before, I alternate between either pronunciations of those other words myself.

​@@Paul71H i think even if we are not pronouncing the L in some of those words, its still performing a function. after all 'calm' and 'cam' are totally different vowel sounds to those of us who dont say it. i think it applies more for the a than o vowels, as our o is pretty consistent (unless its doubled oo which is more of an uu), since we have a soft a and a hard a. the L helps us differentiate which vowel sound to use

It doesn't. 😄

Older people from Washington state calling it "WARSHington" always gets me.

I grew up in SW Michigan, have lived abroad quite a bit, and have taught for 20 yrs, lots of consciously speaking clearly, and especially for non-native speakers of English, so to whatever degree my native accent wasn't already inflected, I've washed it out and I sound like House! Hopefully without the condescension. 😂

Convenient.😆

It still seems to widely fool a lot of Americans and Canadians, who if they hadn't seen Laurie elsewhere had just assumed he was American and were surprised to learn he was British.

@@beerosaurusrex it should. The only flaw is that he speaks too perfect, there’s no regional dialect. It’s almost Californian, but he speaks too slowly and he enunciates more, lol.

Not all Americans have a regional dialect. I don't. People asked to guess where I'm from have picked California, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Arizona, Florida, Colorado, and other random states. Nobody has ever gotten it right, they don't even get close, because I sound nothing at all like I'm from East Tennessee.

Charlotte Church is Welsh and Welsh English does have flipped Rs. But in general yeah people, especially trained singers, don’t necessarily sing the same way they speak.

As a singer, I've always thought it was funny how much of an accent is lost when singing. There are just things that are necessary or more comfortable when singing that aren't present when speaking, especially for opening up vowels.

That's interesting. What specific accent do you and your students naturally speak?🤔 I'd never thought about that before and would have to think pretty hard to find exceptions, but it almost seems like a rule to me that a short "e" in "the" naturally precedes words that start with a consonant, and a long "e" precedes words starting with a vowel. It takes extra effort for me to extend the "e" in "the first" and to add a glottal stop between "the" and "angels." And hearing them reversed would _sound_ just as awkward. If I'd ever heard those two word combinations pronounced any other way, it would be extremely noticeable to me (like trying to say "Meghan Thee Stallion"!). It's hard for me to imagine anyone needing to be taught that ... except for a very young child just learning how to read by sounding out the letters (as I did when I first started trying to learn how to read, and I still have difficulty because I read _every_ word when reading a book (or story or news/magazine, letter, email, or blog--especially so if I'm reading--or typing--on a backlit screen, the latter most likely because, as I discovered three years ago, _well_ into adulthood, I'm autistic, which finally explains my hypersensitivity to light), OR a deaf or hard-of-hearing person, for whom written English _is_ very difficult to learn because of all the exceptions to the rules. One of my Deaf sign-language teachers gave us the example that, logically, "laughter" & "daughter" should rhyme. And I had a Deaf boyfriend (among the 10% of genetically deaf people not born to hearing parents who are the ones who keep American Sign Language alive, or at least that was the story last time I, ahem, heard it back in the '90s) whose mother taught him how to read using comic books. So he often made/still makes spelling errors because he reads entire words at a time. (We're still friends; I just got an unexpected email from him two days ago for the first time in a long time, in fact. Apparently, it's been my turn to write back for almost a year now! (I'm too busy writing long replies to replies to UKposts videos to a bunch of strangers! Which is probably another of my autistic traits: hating small talk but "overthinking" and, therefore, "overwriting" about topics of special interest to me when I find someone who seems to share them and have no one around to interrupt me/break my "hyperfocus" Happy last two hours of Autism "Awareness"/"Acceptance" Month!😊 Now the countdown to Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome Awareness Month begins.⏱ I'm lucky enough to have _both_ plus ADHD--the trifecta!!!🏆🙁--all of which are frequently co-occuring with each other.) If, however, what you're teaching is universally true in _all_ native-English-speaking accents, we'll have to call it "Thuh Nichols Rule."😉

I grew up in the Air Force as my dad was a pilot. So I was exposed to Arkansas, Southern dialect, Guamanian, Spanish, influenced dialect, Northern Maine, Twain, and, of course, deep east Texas, southern accent akin (a kin?) to the Tennessean accent. I studied voice at Baylor University, a southern or southwestern institution. We had to notate the addiction, two songs and I just remember that money before words beginning with a bowel was a rule.

Lie-berry sounds like a speech impediment.

And of course his masterfully hilarious portrayal of Hollywood film magnate, “Irving C. Salzburg”. Pencil droppers eh?

@@stvitalkid7981That’s the one I thought of! “It just so happens my idear isn’t lousy, so get out!” Splunge.

The Pythons were terrible at American accents. The best American accents I've heard are from Peter Sellers as the U.S. President in "Dr. Strangelove", and Hugh Laurie in "House". I binge-watched the entire series before learning that Laurie is British. His accent is flawless.

"Bart"? That's a new one for me!

Both my sets of grandparents used those!

A star of the Hoarders TV program said, "It could be warshed," and my wife and I immediately added that as an affected alternative pronunciation. Though ironically we use it when we're actually going to warsh a thing, unlike the original speaker who had never warshed anything.

The best and worst for me are from Eddie Marsan. He was in Hancock and had the most ridiculous, all over the place American accent. Years later he’s in Ray Donovan doing an excellent Boston accent. He definitely put in the work in the interim.

​@@ericmills9839his role in Hancock is also broad and over the top, whereas he has to actually carry some dramatic weight in Ray Donavan

@@calebgoodman8729 totally agree, but it was just bizarre. It was a mashup, like listening to a bunch of different folks trying to do a New York accent in succession, very inconsistent. Love the guy, but t was a bit cringe.

he's REALLY incredible! if you listen when he says "anything" you can tell though. love hugh dancy and hannibal!