How do you pronounce the words Mary, marry, and merry?

bah, should read "differently than I pronounce the other two," for those of you who can't parse that.

[x] I avoid using all three words when speaking

all three are homynyms as far as I'm concerned.

All alike, but you think of them a little differently? Especially "merry." You almost think you're pronouncing it differently. Maybe Henry Higgins could tell the difference. And, um, sometimes spelling changes pronunciation! Like, "comptroller." People just started saying comp-troller instead of controller.

I am from England and I say them all differently. "Mary" and "merry" are quite close though, slightly longer vowel sound on the first.

same

these three words are homophobes

I am from England and I say them all differently. "Mary" and "merry" are quite close though, slightly longer vowel sound on the first.

^^^ same here, but i'm american

people who pronounce the words Mary, marry and merry differently are disgusting savages, imo

you shouldn't call homos Marys, that's not polite

ah, the joys of regional dialect. cf. cot/caught, pin/pen

btw i hear and articulate the difference in all of these

this has definitely been discussed here before.

I'm a savage from Belgium, so uh... I pronounce merry differently. Shorter I guess.

I've probably mentioned this in another thread, but my dad will sometimes exaggerate the proper pronunciation of "pin" and "pen" because otherwise he pronounces them the same.

a brit uploaded an mp3.

All alike, but you think of them a little differently?

I know what you mean; my brain is definitely more finely tuned than my tongue, so even if what comes out of my mouth is 95% similar to what I'm thinking, it might be enough to change the sound/meaning for anyone who hears me. still, I think if I recorded mary, marry, and merry and played it back for you, you'd hear the difference, if only slightly. but I could be wrong.

This thread moves too fast to respond to anyone.

I knew this'd be a clusterfuck thread the second I hit "create poll." um sry.

. cot/caught, pin/pen

WTF. People sometimes pronounce this the same?!?

Maybe my brain fools me into thinking that I pronounce these words differently.

we should all upload mp3's of us saying "marry merry mary", then edit them together and play them back over a banging donk. just a thought.

I say pin and pen differently. But not cot and caught.

What's a donk?

It sounds like dank

But it's actually closer to dunk

I pronounce "cot" and "caught" the same ... "pin" and "pen" sounding the same is somewhat common - though the pronunciation varies: my dad is from West Virginia near the Ohio border and pronounces them both as "pin" ... I have a friend from Tennessee who pronounces them both as "pen"

What about dink and denk?

http://www.freewebs.com/mewtwins/HonkytonkBadonkadonk.jpg

xxpost That regional morphology or whatever it's called sounds about right.

lol badonkadonk

One of the funniest words?

not as funny as poop.

a bangin' donk, for instance:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckMvj1piK58

I offer no apologies for perpetuating that year-and-a-half-old meme

It's not a meme, it's a religion.

not as funny as poop.

― my display name is an honor student at ilx high school (sarahel), Friday, September 18, 2009 3:50 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

a brit uploaded an mp3.

That was me (a few years ago). I'll see if I can dig it out and reupload it.

All alike. Midwestern.

homonyms.

deep south/west coast

all the same

all the same

http://www.wikiupload.com/download_page.php?id=170332
I think I've managed to upload it there, but I'm not sure.

pin/pen are merged in the purple area

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pin-pen.svg

boo

here
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/12/Pin-pen.svg

ugh!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/12/Pin-pen.svg/300px-Pin-pen.svg.png

what's up with that weird dot in california?

I think that's Fresno.

its bakersfield, the only bastion of country music outside of the south.

iatee posted about the particularities of Bakersfield vis a vis pronunciation in another thread ...

fwiw i pronounce pin and pen distinctively... pen is longer and breathier.

but both are borderline schwa-y, i can see how people can pronounce them similar.

can't find a map for mary/marry/merry

Yeah, pin has more of a short i than a schwa.

My favorite article about my accent:

http://www.citypaper.net/articles/081497/article008.shtml

(I pronounce Mary, marry, and merry all differently. But shore/sure the same, pour/poor/pore the same, you're/your/yore the same...)

phillypholx pronounce Mary like "Marr - ee" right?

xpost: Me too, Mordy (but I'm English). In fact, you can add 'paw' to that set too.

Like "Mare" but with an "eee" at the end.

Mary = marry; merry sounds like but is still distinct from Murray. (S. Jersey)

Once upon a time, when I came to live in this country (Canada), I noticed that three distinct names were pronounced almost identically:

Carrie, Kerry and Carey.

I pronounced them differently then, but after this thread reminded me (the words in the thread are pretty much the equivalent), I checked, and sadly no longer... I mourn my lost Englishness.

Thing is, I already voted for "I pronounce all three of these words differently" before I checked, so that, however true once, is now a lie.

i pronounce these words "bullshit."

mp3 of me saying 'mary marry merry'

sound quality is crap because I used a pair of $5 earbuds as a microphone

hi-fi (sorta) version, using $45 Sennheisers as a mic this time

mary = rhymes with hairy
marry = r/w larry
merry = r/w berry

^^^ exactly the same for me. they're all quite distinct

ha, doesn't help those of us who rhyme hairy, larry, and barry

or berry

here's the California english pronunciation thing that iatee posted

basically Californians pronounce those three words the same

mary = rhymes with hairy
marry = r/w larry
merry = r/w berry

this. Am English therefore disgusting and probably savage.

Definitely disgusting.

I'm tempted to dispute that sarahel, but I don't dare wake my wife up to ask her!

mary = rhymes with hairy
marry = r/w larry
merry = r/w berry

my accent is a crisp northeast kind of "standard american english." admittedly helped along by some diction training in music/drama education, but my accent's never been outrageously regional.

i pronounce all three the same, but i try to remember which words fall into which categories. i think geographically in the u.s., the only places that prounouce all three differently are on the east coast from philly northward. but people farther south usually say mary/merry the same, and marry differently.

i want to say my accent still carries traces of Missouri, even though my family moved from there to California over a hundred years ago. I also have this weird habit of mimicking the accents of people I spend a lot of time with, and there are particular words I say in a way that is inconsistent with my normal accent because that was how other people said them -- like, there's this one guy I hung out with a lot a year or so ago whose pronunciation of "garbage" I've incorporated into my normal speech.

they're usually spelled differently, right? mary words get "long a" type spellings, like -are and -air; marry words get "short a" spellings with double Rs; merry words almost always have Es, not As, and usually double Rs after

Trying to make marry sounds like Mary in my head ends up with me affecting a weird faux-posh West of Scotland accent and sounding like my in-laws. All three massively different here (North-of-Scotland-with-some-West-Central-speech-patterns accent).

East Los Angeles and the Gateway Cities house a distinctive form of Chicano English, notable for its use of the word "foo" for any person.

<3 wikipedia

lol

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

people who pronounce the words Mary, marry and merry differently are disgusting savages, imo

sarahel OTM as long as she doesn't merge "pen" and "pin". (Obviously, "hairy", "Larry", and "berry" all rhyme too.) I take it I can blame Britain and NY for these results.

Participate in a North American Dialect Survey!

I am going to throw everything off by pronouncing "eggs" as AYGS, as I've always done but which does not appear to be at all standard anywhere I've lived.