Re: "y" and "r"

On Sat, 31 Mar 2001, Nik Taylor wrote:

> Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
> > JOOC, then, where do things like the American Heritage Dictionary or the
> > World Book Dictionary get their pronunciations?  Do they take an
> > average of news anchor voices or something?  :-p
>
> Well, sometimes if you compare different dictionaries you'll see
> different pronunciations given.  :-)  Plus, the actual phonemes are
> often the same, just the realization is different.  Like, most dialects
> have a distinction between foot and boot, but exactly what those two
> vowels are differ.
Ah!  You're right.  It's been too long since I looked up pronunciation in
a dictionary.  They'll give you things like "a as in hat," which was
perfectly adequate to my mind before I learned about things like dialects
and phonemes.  <sheepish look>

Plus, when you get to things like math jargon, despite Prof. Bailey's
insistence that "monodromy" (as in monodromy group) is pronounced so as
to *not* rhyme with "monotony," people pronounce it to rhyme anyway.  :-p

YHL