I can tell that I am from Jersey because I think Mary/Merry/Marry are all pronounced differently. The two consonants are perfectly balanced in “Mary.” (MARE-REE) The first consonant is emphasized in “Merry,” with a little emphasis on the “err” part of it. (MARE-E). The last consonant is pronounced in “marry,” with an emphasis on the “rr” sound. (MARE-RHEE). Apparently, only Jerseyites, some people in the Philly Burbs, and folks near Boston think these three words are pronounced any differently from each other. Y’all are wrong.
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Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
nah those are all the same.
“Marie” however, is accented differently.
Okay, but which is it? MARE-E, MARE-REE or MARE-RHEE?
And, by the way, Marie is pronounced MARE-RHEEEEEE
No, it’s more like “Mah-Reee”, I live in South Florida so between the Latinas and the Haitians, every other woman down here is named Marie. 🙂
That’s how my friend Marie from Australia, I mean Aus-TRAWL-ya, pronounces her name.
My fifth grade teacher essentially pronounced “merry” as nearly identical to “Murray”.
She was terrible.
Funny. I’m from Jersey too and say them all differently. But my wife, from Ohio, says them all the same. We joke about it a lot.
I was born in Philadelphia. And yes, those are all pronounced differently. Especially “marry” and “merry”. It’s two different vowels for god’s sake.
Sneakers. Hoagie. Soda. Sun shower. Crawfish. “Bin”. “Grosery”.
‘.
We say them differently here in NY as well.
Yes, how did New Yawk get overlooked? I’m from Long Island, though I haven’t lived there for over 30 years, and I still say them differently. My character has been forever warped by those first 18 formative years.
That speech pattern extends down into the Baltimore region as well. I know my family and friends from the area pronounce them all differently. It might have something to do with the Great North Midwest sound shift which has resulted in these vowel phonemes being pronounced the same. That historically opens up the orthographic symbols to be used by some of the other vowel or dipthong phonemes, so who knows what American English will sound like in 200 years. In listening to an audio course on language, some student commented to the professor giving the course that Elizabethan English before the current vowel sound shift would have sounded like “Pirate” English as we joke today. I wonder what adjective they’ll apply to our version of the language.
Mary: MAYR-ree rhymes with “fairy”
Merry: MEHR-ree rhymes with “very”
Marry: MARR-ree rhymes with “parry”
Born, raised, lived all my life other than college within 30 miles of Boston.
that’s not really helping your point for me
BTW Go Hawks!!
Born and raised in the Midwest…
and, yes, that’s how we pronounce them too.
haha! and fairy, very and parry all ryhme and sound alike too! 🙂
“fairy”, “very”, “parry”, (and “perry”) all rhyme as well,i.e, they are the same except for the initial fricative, so I don’t dispute you. Born and raised in Chicago (important! – North side).
At the end of all that, we get a “y’all?”
I’m dyin’ here!
Glad that you picked up on that.
We have a problem here in Philly and Delaware with people who pluralize “you.”
So, for example, if “you” means more than one person it becomes “youse.”
“Youse people are out of your minds.”
Isn’t that Brooklynese?
I grew up in Brooklyn, and it was already dying out by the 1950s. In my experience, you were most likely to hear it in Italian and Irish neighborhoods. And it wasn’t really “youse”, it was “yez” (unaccented in the sentence). There might still be a few old coots around that talk like that.
Incidentally, that’s why some people think the plural of “bastard” is “bastiges” — as in “yez bastiges” (= yez bastids, yez”).
Thanks for the info.
Oh, yeh, and while we’re on the subject of pronunciation:
Ant: “ant” as in “antonym”
Aunt: “ahnt”
Only in England.
Not so! There are many parts of the US where you will hear “ahnt”, though NY city is not one of them.
True. It always sounds very affected to my ears, but I have a strong bias towards my birth accent.
I say ‘Ahnt’ for the opposite reason. Ant sounds uneducated to me.
Touche (I forget the key code for the accent mark). You say Tow-mah-toe, I say Tow-may-toe.
“Only in England.”
And New England.
I know. It was some strange attempt at early morning humor.
totally agree with you
It’s because you easterners speak American English and the rest of us talk American.
Wrong.
Mary and marry are the same.
Merry is completely different. You can tell because it’s got a different friggin’ vowel.
I’m not even a little bit from Jersey, and I pronounce each of those words differently. I think if you’re not from Jersey, then if you have a mother who is a language nazi it’s kind of the same thing.
And I ended up to be a language nazi myself. And language has gotten so bad now that I have to stop people every third word it seems/
I pronounce them differently, too. SWOhio, represent! 😉
I remember in grade school chorus that our teacher had us sing “the Babe, the son of May-ree” so it was very clearly pronounced.
My family already tunes me out because I have my own grammar autocorrect function. I automatically correct TV commercials, etc, because it drives me crazy. “Lie” and “lay” seem to be tough for people and I hate when people use words like impact and gift as verbs. Whether those are acceptable or not, I don’t like how they sound.
Just my own little quirks, folks. I don’t correct others in person out loud. Just in my head…
I’d like to rate you 8 for sounding off on ‘gift’. “I gifted him with a fine gift.” I actually heard that on the radio. The verb “to give” seems to be disappearing.
BTW, in High German, closely related to Middle English, “Gift” means “Poison”. Interesting, is it not?
I hate the act of receiving and giving gifts, so it makes perfect sense to me 🙂
In Norway as well – gift (pronounced yift) = poison
Must be some proto-germanic root. How did it come to mean dono (from donatum) ?
Most likely. Tried to find the etymology for the word without success.
Interesting abut “May-ry”, because in the NY/NJ area, though we also have three pronunciations, that’s not one of them.
What happens to the vowel in “May-ry” is called palatalization. (The back of the tongue is pressed against the palate at the end of the vowel.) On a scale of palatalization going from none towards max (ultimate vowel palatalization is “eee”), I would order them “merry” “marry” “Mary”. Your “Mayry” is a lot more palatalized.
I hate when people use words like impact and gift as verb
I sympathize as I too have grammar issues that, when I hear them from others I correct them in my own head. But this might be one you reconsider. I remember back in the mid-80s a guy sent out blast on usenet: “To those of you who think “port” is a verb, it’s NOT”. As you might guess, it was being common to describe the migrating of technology from one platform to another as a “port” and the act of doing it as “porting”.
Well the poor guy not only got numerous responses pointing out that language was a living thing, he also was presented with numerous citations of the word “port” as a verb from the 1700s. Who’d have thought? Apparently establishing new shipping connections between ports was porting.
English’s defacto role as the international language of choice had a lot to do with first the British Empire and then the US Empire, plus US-based mass communications and entertainment. But it also happened because the language is unusually flexible and malleable. Being a hodge-podge of so many very different languages has made it so. Thus new verbs, nouns, and modifiers appear all the time and once a word appears in one role it’s likely going to be used in one or both of the other roles before too long. A couple decades ago I read an analysis that English had 550k words, but checking now I see some people documenting over a million. By contrast French has about 100k and German about 160k.
OTOH, don’t get me started about “NOT” logic in language. I will literally remove someone from the candidate list for a detail-oriented job if he/she uses the phrase “I could care less”. (I don’t apply this to, say, marketing jobs – but if you are responsible for, say, detailed cost accounting I expect you to be precise.) And while I don’t get upset if someone uses a formation like “All is not lost” I personally will use the more precise formation “Not all is lost”. (The former provides little info, if read literally, and is also probably incorrect since it is used in contexts in which something has indeed been lost.) While words evolve at rapid pace, grammar changes much more slowly. There is a grammatical logic to an English sentence – and the meaning varies greatly depending on the placement of the word NOT.
“bury” sound like a fruit… everywhere? This confuses Spanish-language-firsters, who want to make it sound like “burro”.
Say “boo-rial” to somebody who isn’t Latino at the next memorial service you attend and see what kind of reaction YOU get.
“bury” rhyming with ‘burro’ common in many places in the South also.
Had this discussion re: ferry/fairy with a man from Baltimore. I could not distinguish the difference in his pronunciation of the two words, after many, many repeatings. Many.
They’re very different. It’s all in the ‘e.’
When you pronounce an ‘f,’ you do it differently if you know you are going to follow with an ‘e’ than if you are going to follow it with an ‘a’ or an ‘i.’
“Fair” is very flat. Like ‘fight.’
Fehgetaboutit and even pheromone have the ‘fe’ sound of ferry.
From NJ, eh?
Maybe you can explain why you folks from there add an “r” in certain words – particularly, those involving the word “wash.”
“I’ll warsh your mouth out with soap!”
“In Warshington, DC today…”
“The warsher is in the spin cycle.”
They caught the ‘r”s that Bostonians threw away? For example, ‘cahn’, vegetable on a cob, ‘cah’, vehicle, ‘bah’, a place to buy liquor.
No, no! We don’t waste those stray “r”s, we tuck them onto words ending in “a”; thus, for example: Asia Minor becomes AY-sher MI-nah.
Ah! Like Cuber (the place cigars come from)?
Actually, if I recall The Story of English correctly (after all it was 27 years ago), the Boston USA accent is exactly the same as the Boston UK accent.
I was born and raised in Brooklyn, and I can tell you that throughout the great city of New York those three words are pronounced differently. But not with any emphasis on the r’s.
Growing up, I did not come across a lot of people from north Jersey, but when I did, they seemed to talk pretty much like New Yorkers, except with much stronger R’s. Philly is quite distinct, but they also have the strong R’s.
Banana (Bah-naan’-nah)
Coffee (Caw’-fee)
Chocolate (Chaw’-clit) (pardon the anatomical reference)
All regular NJ identifiers.
Same in NY City, except I’m not sure what vowel you intend in the second syllable of “banana”. In NY, “banana” rhymes with “Havana” or “cabana”. Apologies to Bugs Bunny, but it is NOT the same closed “a” as in the famous NY pronunciation of words like “man”, “ran”. But I think in some places they do pronounce “banana” that way. Not sure where, maybe Philly? Boston?
Same as in Chicago if banana is pronounced with a hard sound peculiar to the USA and not with a soft ‘ahh’ sound as my Belizan neighbors used to pronounce bah-nah-nah. Aren’t bananas native to Central America? Shouldn’t her pronunciation therefore be the correct one?
I pardon the anatomical reference, are they not both good things to (STOP -don’t go there Voice).
Jimmies or Sprinkles? That’s an easy identifier. They’re Jimmies, btw.
what the f*ck is a jimmy? Around here, that’s your johnson. Get ‘im a hat.
They’re jimmies in the Bay State too.
And if you want a thick creamy frozen drink, for heaven’s sake don’t ask for a milkshake, ask for a frappe.
In this neck of the woods, natives would pronounce them:
MAY-UH-REE – Mary (notice the equal stress)
murray – merry
MARE-REE – marry
And “y’all” is the second person plural pronoun. And when speaking to one person, “y’all” implies you and all of your kinfolks.
Reminds me of an incident in Northern Virginia. While shopping in Woolco (does it still exist?), I handed my credit card to the young (surely teen-age) salesclerk. Noting my Italian name on the card, she looked at me and said,”Y’all has a funny ak-saynt, are y’all for’n-born?” My wife was offended but I just replied, “Yes, I was born in Chicago.” I just can’t describe those vowel sounds but I’m sure they are familiar to you and they are subtly different from the non-South sounds.
The trick in some parts of the South is to somehow slur through all of the vowels as you encounter each vowel.
But there are multiple Southern accents. Tidewater Virginia and Lowcountry South Carolina accents (remember how Fritz Hollings used to sound) have the peculiarity of pronouncing “ou” as “oo” instead of as “ow”. “About the house” becomes “a-boot the hoose”. And the speech is much faster, often slurring across words. So “New and Courier” becomes “New-sand-korea”. There are also words that get diphthongs, but differently than other Southern speech. “Boat” becomes “bow-at”; “paper” becomes “PAY-upper”.
“a-boot the hoose” sounds distinctly Scottish, but then wasn’t the original stock Scots-Irish? That would explain the many pretty redheads.
I love regional language!
My dear friend, born and raised in Tennessee, was transferred to New Hampshire. She is all Southern, sweet as sugar and talks with a lovely Southern drawl. Charming!
But when she was hired to work at a stitchery shop, a native New England customer asked for a “patten”. My friend said, “I’m afraid I don’t know what that is”. The woman fairly screeched at her, “You work in a sewing shop and you don’t know what a patten is?”
My friend said, “Could you spell it for me?” and the woman exasperatedly spelled P-A-T-T-E-R-N. My friend smiled and said, “Oh, you mean PATTERN! Where I’m from, there’s an ‘r’ in there.”
How anyone could be mean to her, I’ll never know, but she lived there for two years and left without making friends. Unpossible!
Y’all need to watch an oldie but a goodie: American Tongues, from the Center for New American Media:
http://www.cnam.com/videoclips/American%20Tongues/tongues_videomain.html
Loved the quarreling Cajuns! Couldn’t understand a word!
They are three different words with different meanings, spellings and pronouciations. If they were not then that would have been a pretty stupid plan, wouldn’t it? But I am from Jersey and we like to think we can eat the weak and stupid. Note emphasis on “think we can” there.:)
What about “their”, “they’re”, and “there”? Or do you pronounce them differently in Jersey?
All three are THISCLOSE in pronunciation, but when saying them aloud I noticed that for “they’re” my lips drew back in a way they didn’t for either “their” or “there”, and the vowel was stretched out a wee bit longer, with just a hint of the underlying “they are”.
In Jersey, “their” and “there” are very close to indistinguishable. But “they’re” has a harder ‘r’ and a hint of an ‘eh.’
‘Their’ has more on the front-end than ‘there’ (which is totally flat) but it is hard to detect.
I think I’ve noticed the same in New England. In Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and at least Western Indiana, they are all the same and often sound much like “thur” (REALLY wish I could attach an audio clip).
“Weak and Stupid” should be a breakfast cereal.
Ha! At the Straight Dope Message Board, there’s a catchphrase insult: “__ had stupid food for breakfast.”
should be a compliment.
Not given the backstory. Summary of anecdote: Boy is being a total jerk before/at dinner table; sister mutters softly “You had stupid food for breakfast.”
And another thing:
“Owl” has one syllable. It does not rhyme with vowel or towel. Philadelphians pronounce the team from Temple University correctly. They’re the ALS, not the OW-ulls. Everyone who pronounces “OWL” two dyllables is wrong, including the dictionary.
* sticks tongue out at squid; resumes saying “ow-ull” *