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0 pointsrrrrrrrrrrrryan4y ago0 comments

This is the Horse-Hoarse merger. [1]

> Accents that have resisted the merger include most Scottish, Caribbean, and older Southern American accents as well as some African American, modern Southern American, Indian, Irish, and older Maine accents.

If my understanding is correct, in some accents that don't pronounce their "R"s at the end of words, the vowel shape changes slightly while pronouncing "four," but "fore" is pronounced with a simple vowel.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_vowel_changes...

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aasasd4y ago

Wiktionary sometimes comes handy in such musings, because it has IPA spellings and recordings of pronunciations, and marks the dialects—not always but frequently for more popular words.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fore

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/four

The IPA suggests that pronunciations of the two words are identical both with and without the merger, but I'm no specialist.

rrrrrrrrrrrryanOP4y ago

Just dug a little deeper, and I've arrived at this conclusion:

In accents with the merger, "four," "for," and "fore" are all always homophones.

In accents without the merger, "four" and "for" are never homophones.

And in some subset of these non-merged accents, "fore" may be pronounced identically to "four" (as listed in the IPA guide in your first link). In another subset, it may be pronounced identically to "for" (as implied by the "Homophones" section in that same link).

lproven4y ago

Fascinating. Thank you.

It is extremely hard for me to even _imagine_ this, as apparently my native accents both contain this merger. This is a rare experience for me, but a previous occurrence was discussing the rhotic-R phenomenon.

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