Now, there's a thing...flour has one syllable, flower two. Certain English dialects make a very distinct separation of the two syllables of flow-er
"You've let the schwa out of the bag now!", as the gorilla would grunt. You want to bring syllabic notation into this, too!?! In that case, I'm off ... LOL
My understanding is words starting with vowels and silent consonants, of which 'h' is the only one I can think of off hand, use an. I've never heard the diphthong rule before. I thought diphthongs were made with two vowels, not a consonant and a vowel. Guess I'll have to go look that up. The h is silent in hour. And we've had this argument before about one and two syllable words. I don't think it was ever settled with 100% agreement. I have no problem hearing 'our' and 'hour' as the same sound. And 'are' and 'our' can be pronounced the same. But 'are' and 'hour' don't sound the same. So 'our' must be pronounced two ways, both of which sound right to me.
So, I had some washing to put out on the balcony (Grater London flat owner), and whilst out there, I decided to tryout pronunciation of hour, honour, heir, with the 'h' at the front pronounced, just to see if I could get it to feel natural. After about five minutes of oration, I get a call from the flat above.. "Oi, CJ!" Leaning over the balcony, looking up at the amused face looking down, says I, "Hello Tim, what's up?" "Nothing, mate - not with me anyway!" Fearing bad news, I asked, "The missus OK?" "She's fine, too, mate. It's you I'm worried about! You preparing for entrance exams to the local mental 'ome!" "Eh?" Forgetting the past five minutes entirely, I was somewhat bemused for a second. "You've been goin' on about this being our how-er of discontent, and Kings that need new hair, you been smokin' something, or what?" LOL
'Our' is a bugger. I have lived in places where "our car" would be pronounced with one syllable, and also in places where it would be pronounced as "ow-er car" I also work with an English lady who was brought up and schooled in South Africa, she speaks totally different to me but insists she speaks the "Queen's English" and says everyone in England should speak like she does. Who's right?
Wow. I've clearly been learning my syllables wrong if I say "flower" as two syllables (same as "towel"). But then again, I'm from Wales. I have no right to say my "English" is 100% fool-proof, right?
@GingerCoffee - You were right, there are no consonants in a dipthong - it is made up of two or more vowel sounds that are interlinked, causing you to have to move through the two sounds as one. If there is movement of the mouth, or tongue, when pronouncing the vowel sounds, then it indicates a dipthong, as each individual vowel phoneme can be pronounced (when said solo) with a single shape! / i: / - a long e, as in sheep is a smile / o: / - or, as in four is a open, rounded mouth, with the tongue pulled back etc. Dipthongs require movement of mouth to move 'through' the sound. / aI / - ay, as in hay - made up of / a / and / i: / - you start with a wide mouth, then segway to slightly pursed lips, bringing jaw up, and pushing the tongue onto the alveolar ridge. (hard to describe in words, but hopefully that gives an image at least!)
My English / history teacher from India said the same thing (I speak the Queen's English), and the students would bait her thusly: Mrs Oswald, would you say the King of Mesopotamia was very parfull? Oh yes indeed, Graham, he was very parfull. (Parfull = powerful).
What about "crisp"? You basically move from the back of your throat to your lips. I've never even heard of a dipthong before. Sounds like some kind of underwear variant that never made the store.
@Snoreos the vowel sound in crisps is a hard / I /, as in 'in' - no dipthong there. / krIsps / (not got a phonetic keyboard here, but that is close) k - r - I - s - p - s Imagine sounding it out to a young child first learning to speak, and break down each sound, you can then say each as a separate sound (phoneme), and you see that the i here is a hard sound that needs no continual movement to produce - form the shape, and you can make it over and over, without having to move anything (mouth, tongue, jaw), you just need to provide voice. Now try the i sound in cry, and you will see that your jaw rises slightly, and your tongue moves forward and up, as you do the 'i'. You are starting in a sound of / a: /, a stretched sound, a bit like 'are', and then moving into the / i: /, from 'sheep' two consonants / k / and / r /, followed by the dipthong / aI / so phonetically, it is / kraI/ so the i sound (here a y) is transcribed / aI/ Make any sense?
I could suggest something way more horrible than that, but I shall refrain (and let the seed grow in your own minds, now that I have put it out there!)!!
No one is saying that all h's are dropped. They're just saying that the ones that are dropped, are dropped. Or, to put it another way, there are times when h's are perfectly correctly dropped. My understanding is that English English is just about the only dialect of English where h's are ever incorrectly dropped. As a result, it's the only dialect where hypercorrection results in the pronunciation of h's that should be dropped. I'm always a bit jolted when Gordon Ramsay insists on pronouncing the "h" in "herb". Before this thread, I'd never, ever heard the idea that one should pronounce the "h" in "hour". In your first video in your latest post, I do hear a barely perceptible difference in the vowel and in the speed that the word is spoken, but I'm not hearing any 'h' at all. In your second video, all of her 'h' words are words where the h's are normally pronounced. That's not the same as saying that h's are always pronounced. (Admittedly, I got interrupted before watching the whole video, so for all I know she may declare that they should always be pronounced. But I'm not taking her word for it either.) Should be dropped: herb (though this is hypercorrected to the point that it's probably debatable) hour honest Not dropped (chosen to have the same first vowel sound): Herbert house hopper And there are a gazillion other examples, of course. Edited to add: Of course "correctly" is debatable. In certain dialects of English, it is, I assume, perfectly correct to drop the h in "house". But since this started with the idea that it is necessary to NOT drop h's, I assumed that we were talking about conventional, prescriptive, dictionary pronunciation. So when I say that an h is correctly dropped, I'm saying 'correctly' based on what the dictionary would prescribe.
@GingerCoffee Sorry, I may have missed some question here. Dipthongs have nothing to do with the 'h' being pronounced or not. The original reason for introducing them was in relation to using the articles 'a' or 'an'. I said that if a vowel / dipthong sound begins the noun, then you use 'an'. Apologies if I confused you with my ramblings.
Me, too - I believe that BrE (British English) only ever pronounced it with the 'h' - never herd it pronounced over this side of the pond in any other way!
SOoo .......... Regardless of the way we speak (for speaking and writing really are totally different entities and no reader is going to read what we write the way we think we wrote it ...) the general consensus is to use 'an' before herbaceous.
That's interesting. For the name I pronounce the h, for the spices, I don't. I think it's because Herb is short for Herbert where I pronounce the h.
I went Googling and found this admittedly non-authoritative page: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/25410/correct-pronunciation-of-herbs saying: The American pronuncation is usually /ərb/ without the h, while the British pronunciation is usually /hɜː(r)b/ with the h, but maybe without the r. It was formerly pronounced without the h in the U.K; the British author E. Nesbit used "an herb" in her book The Wonderful Garden (1911), probably indicating that she pronounced it without the h. However, the same page agrees that the "h" is currently pronounced by the English. Ah, and there's this page: http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/herb.html It appears that the British were using the French, no-h pronunciation around the time that the Americans wandered off. The Americans kept the older pronunciation, while the British added an H. Rather like forks. The American hand-switching eating method is also an older method--it's the British method that's newfangled. Edited to add: Aha! The same page says, "This was not a problem for English, of course. We often don't pronounce written h, for example in hour and honest and heir,"
