Today I learned: some people think “aero” and “arrow” are homonyms.
Baffling.
Uh…how do you pronounce aero, if not like arrow? No obvious alternative comes to mind.
“aero” is “air-oh”.
“arrow” is “ah-row”, with the “ah” a little darker than in “cat”.
As I said in the comments, I’m pretty sure this is another example of the Mary-marry-merry merger, which is a common source of dialect confusion. Most Americans will pronounce all three of those words the same; many of the rest merge two of the three.
I mostly but not entirely have a full three-way split. (“Mary” and “merry” are fully distinct in my head, but it’s subtle and doesn’t always come through out loud.) So I pronounce “aero” like “merry”, and “arrow” like “marry”.
A while back I came up with a dialect test and made all my friends online take it:
How many distinct rhymes do you have in the following 14 words:
marry hurry wary cherry blurry dowry
jury quarry eerie starry gory fiery Siri
couri(er)
For example, I (northwest England) have 13/14 of them\u2014bc of the North’s foot=strut I have the same vowel in hurry and courier (many England dialects would have all 14 distinct).
Americans tended to have much fewer\u2014I think the record was something like just 7:
marry = wary = cherry (the aforementioned marry/Mary/merry merger)
quarry = gory
starry
hurry = blurry = jury = couri(er)
dowry
eerie = Siri
fiery
Okay, “fiery” rhyming with any of those blows my mind; in my dialect it doesn’t have the same number of syllables.
I think for me I have
marry
hurry blurry jury
wary cherry
dowry
quarry gory couri(er)
eerie siri
starry
fiery
Which looks basically like the American sample you gave, but without the marry/merry merger.
With a couple of caveats. One is that sometimes “courier” rhymes with “gorier” and sometimes it kind of half-rhymes with “blurrier”.
Second is that vowel space is continuous in the world, but discrete in our brains. But that can create a sorites paradox. I want to say that “Mary” and “wary” are the same, and “wary” and “cherry” are the same, and “cherry” and “merry” are the same; but “Mary” and “merry” are not! But I could argue that “cherry” and “wary” aren’t quite the same, depending on how I stress and emphasize.
Similarly, I could pronounce a difference in “quarry” and “gory”, but I’m pretty confident I don’t actually do that.
I’m genuinely surprised at dialects that don’t rhyme hurry/blurry/jury.
Interesting, I’m from Northwest England as well, though I have a pretty standard southern accent (probably picked up from my mum) with the FOOT-STRUT split. I’d say I have all of these different, though Siri-eerie and jury-courier are very similar with the same quality and only a small length difference between them (So /s\u026a\u0279i/ /\u026a\u02d0\u0279i/ /d\u0292\u0275\u02d0\u0279i/ /k\u0275\u0279i\u0259/ respectively)
@jackhkeynes Hmm actually yeah of course /\u025b/ and /\u025b\u02d0/ are just length distinctions, for me at least there’s a lot more difference in length between those than with the others, especially /\u026a/ and /\u026a\u02d0/ which sound extremely similar in these example words, though I’d say the difference is much more pronounced in other contexts, like bit /b\u026at/ and beer /b\u026a\u02d0/ are much more different, probably the /\u0279/ doing weird things again
So this is one reason I pointed out that vowel space is actually continuous but we treat it as discrete.
In a lot of these words, there are maybe slight length or stress differences. But they don’t rise to a level where I’d consider them “not rhymes”.
So like, “Siri” is shorter than “eerie” for me. Enough that I think it’s noticeable if you listen for it. But it doesn’t feel like an important distinction to me, and I wouldn’t call it not-a-rhyme.
But I think this is as much about how we analyze the sounds as it is about the physical sounds we’re making.
jackhkeynes Oh absolutely, BrE has a much stronger phonemic vowel-length distinctiom than AmE does
Oh that’s fascinating. I never knew that! (Even after living there for a year.) I wonder if that’s part of why Americans have trouble getting British accents quite right?
One weird thing I, personally, have going on, is that because of singing training I am unusually aware of non-phonemic distinctions. So that, like, I don’t consider the Siri/eerie vowel length distinction to be phonemic, but I still hear it really clearly.
(This comes from lots of singing instruction saying things like “make this vowel slightly darker”. That’s not phonemic\u2014it’s “the same vowel"\u2014but it’s a real change and you can learn to produce and hear it. Also useful for singing in other languages, where the phonemic boundaries don’t lie in the same places.)
This came up in a vicious internet fight once, where I pointed out that most Americans pronounce the word "strength” with an “sh” sound at the front. And a linguist told me I was definitely wrong, and after some back and forth they said, okay, yes, the initial “s” is often aspirated, but it’s not an “sh” sound because it’s not a phonemic distinction; everyone is analyzing it as an /s/.
Fascinating the different mergers people with similar numbers have