My wife is from New Zealand. They pronounce 'pen' as 'pin' and 'pin' as (something like) 'pun'. So their pronunciations have shifted, rather than merged. See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift
Ah no vowel conversation is complete without mentioning how they work in NZ accent :D I loved Flight of the Conchords (strongly recommend it for anyone who likes deadpan comedy) there's a funny bit similar to the pin/pen example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRdg1MOYxHo
This has been a source of much amusement for my wife. If I'm very intentional I can force a distinction between 'pin' and 'pen' but it's not at all natural.
I found this really interesting:
The most important thing to notice about the pin-pen merger is that it only happens before nasals. This means that "pit" and "pet" are unaffected by the merger. Only "n" and "m" are really affected, since there are not many words ending in "eng".
I do not have the pen/pin merger (raised in the Seattle area), and I do not pronounce "enter" and "inter" the same, but I do pronounce English as if it were Inglish. I think that word is an exception.
> Still pretty close in the German pronounciation[sic].
Well... I don't find it so surprising that the home of Anglia and the Angles hasn't changed its pronunciation of Angle-land as much.
Some mercenaries (if you believe Bede) consisting of Angles from Anglia, Saxons from Lower Saxony, and Jutes from Jutland crossed the channel to fight for various Celtic rulers following the power vacuum left by the Romans leaving Britain. The mercenaries eventually took over part of it, and that part became known as Angle-land. (Of course, this is a gross oversimplification.) The descendants of the mercenaries became known as Anglo-Saxons (not enough Jutes, I guess).
What's puzzling to me is that I'm from South Florida while my parents are from the South, of which S Florida is not a part. They have the pin-pen merger. However, they are distinct for me. I've always wondered how much of a role parents' speech patterns vs. peers' and teachers' play in phonological development.
According to Prof. Robert Sapolsky, children are the innovators of language, and children speak like their peers. A famous example is a sign language spontaneously invented by deaf schoolchildren in Child (iirc). The sign language persisted, but after a couple of generations the original generation couldn't even understand the way the new schoolchildren spoke. Children are adaptable and innovative, and both learn and invent new speech. In contrast, adults tend to be rather ossified in their speech and don't change with the times (generally).
Exactly what I was referencing. Excellent series; I watched/listened to them maybe 4 years ago and couldn't stop. Honestly better than any college course I took myself by far
Code switching. Super common with southerners living outside the south in my experience. We all have various degrees we let the accents out depending on who we're talking to.
I can almost completely hide it at work if I want but I let some through bc people like a little. If I talked to my coworkers the way I talk to my siblings though it would be a disaster because of prejudice around our dialect.
I'm from Nashville, TN and live in Seattle, WA and recall one particular instance on a date here when some girl was trying to get snippy & sassy about the "pen" vs "pin" issue. She and many other people here, and generally outside of the southern states, immediately equate the accent with ignorance. Which makes everyone adopting "y'all" more casually now really funny and weird to see, like are you mocking it or celebrating it?
I think "y'all" is becoming more common at least in part out of an interest to avoid "you guys," which people perceive to be overly gendered. I notice (in my own speech and others') "folks" replacing "guys" in other contexts, for the same reason. The fact that both make everyone sound a little more casual, and a little more southern, is probably mostly a side effect -- general American English just doesn't have obvious gender-neutral words to fill those semantic functions.
IDK if this is everyone, but I, as a native English speaker raised in Canada, use it because English doesn't have a better 2nd person plural pronoun (think German "ihr").
This is one of the few tells that I am from the south when I speak. If I am talking to someone from the mid-atlantic, where pin-pen is still strictly differentiated it can lead to some interesting confusion!
I could not distinguish pin/pen as a child but learned to later in life. Another such pair for me was bowl/bull. I still dont distinguish marry/Mary/merry though I have been told others do.
For speakers without the merger, marry:merry:Mary as mat:met:mate.
If you didn't grow up with the distinction (as I didn't), you may find it easy to enough to notice the difference—particularly between marry (~mat) and the other two—when listening to someone without the merger say each word one immediately after the other. "Implementing" this knowledge when listening to the same person speak naturally is another thing altogether.
It's very hard to acquire new phonological rules as an adult, no less in your first language than a second one.
I'm not sure I always clearly distinguish between the three of them. My "merry" is most certainly not normally the same vowel as "met" (it is a hybrid that vowel sound and some other one). Neither is my "Mary" reliably the same sound as "mate". I think my "marry" normally comes closest to the vowel sound of "mat", but I'm pretty sure it generally is not all the way there. (Although it can be, especially if I am trying to enunciate clearly). Over all I'm pretty sure I have at least two and possibly three disguisable vowels (with Merry and Mary probably the merged ones if it is only two) among pronunciation of all three. If I have three vowel sounds they they are allowed to vary enough that there is overlap between the pronunciations I will produce.
That is the awkward thing with vowel sounds. While linguists specify a matrix of vowel sounds, a lot of people use vowel sounds that land in between them, and the sounds are not just exactly the same every time, but have some level of variation between them.
And of course, thing probably differ with word stress, as vowel sounds often do in English. Not sure how they vary though.
> While linguists specify a matrix of vowel sounds, a lot of people use vowel sounds that land in between them
Definitely, but this is equally true of mat, met, and mate.
As for marry/merry/Mary, there are speakers with a partial merger. Usually they maintain a distinction between "marry" and the other two. That does not discount the fact that there are English speakers who feel (rightly) that the strength of the difference between these three in their own dialect is equal to the strength of the difference between mat, met, and mate in most dialects.
When it comes to mergers more broadly, many speakers who grow up with distinctions that some of their neighbors don't make will wind up falling into the nebulous middle ground you're describing. There's a cognitive burden placed on someone who consistently distinguishes sounds that others in their community do not, because the speaker who makes the distinction will regularly misinterpret what they hear out of the mouths of others. ("Wait, did they just say 'Mary'? Oh, no, it must have been 'marry.'") This is true even when there can be no confusion over homophones: "What does 'fahl' mean? Oh, they must have meant 'fall.'" This is one mechanism that makes it quite easy for a vowel merger to spread. Speakers are conditioned not to pay too much attention to phonological differences that are not a part of the grammar of others in their social circle.
I do say all three differently. It's hard to write out the differences, but:
marry: the 'a' as in 'apple'
mary: the 'ar' is pronounced like the word 'air'
merry: the 'e' as in 'elephant'
Not sure if this does a great job illustrating it, since if the examples I chose also sound the same to you, it won't work. To me, they are distinct, but they aren't hugely different.
All I can think of is pronouncing "marry" and "Mary" as "mar" (as: to damage) rather than as "men" (as "merry men", where the "me" parts are pronounced the same) but if I try to do that it comes off, to my Midwestern American ear, as very rural-sounding.
I grew up in Wisconsin. The local accent to to make a's before g's long. So the a in bag, dagger, dragon, wagon, etc. It took me until college to realize that people from other areas couldn't distinguish between "beg" and "bag" when I said it. And once I did realize it, it took me a while to differentiate between bag as I said it, and bag as most people say. And yet longer to fix my pronounciation.
It lists the south of ireland (though it's unclear if the author actually just means "not Northern Ireland" by this, as I'd consider it a "western" feature to have thick accents, as does his source) as a possible influence on this. Of the examples given:
* Pin/Pen - Totally distinct
* Marry/Merry/Mary - Mary ~= Merry, totally distinct from Marry.
* Been/Bin - I never thought about this, but even I say "How've you bin", rather than "How've you been"
* Again/Agin - It's a stereotypical elderly farmer accent, but I think even current elderly farmers I know don't have it, so maybe it belongs to a couple generations before that, or even more rural areas.
Some of the videos of elderly Irish people the article mentioned:
https://youtu.be/GT2OVUY2gZY?t=6 - "Shearing sheep, dipping sheep, roasting? sheep, correcting them down off the mountain" - I mean, there's definitely less distinction between how he says sheep with ship, compared to how I would do that or the interviewer does.
If you pronounce the letter "a" you'll find that it's a diphthong. While pronouncing Mary, you can start the "r" either sooner or later in the transition of the "a" sound that precedes it.
An old friend and co-worker from southern Ohio has an amusing accent which I always ribbed him about. "Pin" and "pen" are indistinguishable, as are "color" and "collar", and "Dell" and "Dale".
The last one was caused some communications difficulties when we were dealing with a Customer contact named Dale and also dealing with technical support from Dell simultaneously.
I can't believe the article doesn't even mention New Zealand, where "eh" has become "ih" (or "eeh") right across the vocabulary. It's the most striking thing an American tourist hears from arrival on.
I make the distinction as do most native speakers I know. however... it's probably as weird to the people who don't distinguish it as is the rider/writer distinction[1] some people make on the "i" sound in those words whereas I don't make a distinction.
Is that distinction just talking about vowel sound? Because those words are quite distinct to me because the "d" and the "t" remain entirely distinct sounds.
I'm not sure about the vowel sound. There might be a slight distinction (not one I can easily recognize if it is there), or might not.
Yes it’s a vowel distinction, longer and kind of ascending tone quality (like when asking a question). Intervocalically d’s and t’s sound the same in North American English unless you’re enunciating them on purpose to make a bigger distinction.
It's funny that the author couldn't understand modern Irish farmers well enough to look for this effect. It absolutely does exist in the south-west of the country, and is not limited to farmers. It's not ubiquitous by any means, but it's completely unremarkable to anyone who's spent much time there.
(Maybe I can have a startup that transcribes videos with strong dialects/accents.)
I think the reason they've come to the conclusion it's a farmer thing is related to the included image of "Mikey Joe O'Shea" - a sheep farmer that went semi-viral for having a very thick accent: https://www.irishpost.com/entertainment/irish-farmers-go-vir...
The funny thing is, while the accent is indeed strong that is not IMO what makes what he says difficult to comprehend. He phrases what he says in a way that might be a bit unusual for folks like me (a Scot) so we don't immediately process what he says:
"Well there's 45 sheep missing, like. And the(re's) lambs and everything with the sheep. That's come out to a nice bit of money, like. Be done about it? Nothing"
Really cool accent though. I couldn't make out what his neighbour said immediately after when he points over to a hill in the distance. I think (hope?) that's gaelic because I couldn't make out a single word. He goes on to talk completely clearly in English about how it's a bit better when you have a good dog to protect the sheep.
> When back home in Texas, when asked for a "pen", I've never given someone a "pin" or the other way around.
Hol' up. If Texans can distinguish the way other Texans say "pen" and "pin", then surely they aren't actually merged? Yes, the vowel sounds are very similar, and perhaps Yankees can't tell them apart, but they must be different.
The point is that context usually suffices to tell which word is which, same as with wait/weight, time/thyme, and so on. Speakers with the pin-pen merger do pronounce these words the same, and I've known someone who was surprised to learn that I didn't—more than a year into our friendship. Yet he'd heard me talk about our friend Jen and gin, possibly even in the same sentence. He just hadn't noticed that I said them differently.
That's just the way with mergers, though: we don't attend to differences that are unimportant in our personal grammars except through conscious striving. I'm the same way with marry/merry/Mary: I know there are people who say these differently, but even if I'm talking to someone who does, those words are all the same to me. The other speaker may be giving me one of three distinct tokens by their interpretation, but whichever one it is I interpret it as one of a set of identical triplets and rely on context to tell which meaning was meant.
Or to give another example: many speakers where I grew up (Pittsburgh) reduce the diphthongs in "tire" and "tower" so that both of these words sound like "tar." In other words, three words share the same token. But I've never misinterpreted a strong-accented Yinzer's "tar" as "tire," "tower" as "tar," etc. That doesn't mean a Texan would be wrong to say that some of us pronounce these words all the same: we do.
I don't think he's saying he can differentiate how they say it, rather that given the context of the situation he's never mistakenly given someone a pin when they were asking for a pen, and vice versa.
The people that study this kind of thing spend a lot of time listening to and transcribing human speech. Plus, you can see the vowel formants in a spectrogram of the audio.
anyone who's interested in American English accents/dialects should check out https://aschmann.net/AmEng/ it's a bit clunky and old-school as far as websites go but there's a lot of good information there
The cot-caught merger is another interesting one, but the lines for that one are more odd. I grew up in Maryland and say "cot" and "caught" differently; my native Californian wife says them both the same. We have a friend named Don and a friend named Dawn; she pronounces both names the same.
My father (LA area native) merges pen and pin. Both sound like "pin" in the midwesternish "standard" American accent. He may have picked it up from his mother (south Texas accent).
There is no such thing as "original English". At most there are snapshots taken of mainstream English, or of some offshoot, from some past moment, since evolving more slowly. The greatest variety of forms and accents is found in England, Scotland, and Wales, far exceeding variation in all the colonies combined.
English tabloid newspapers have absurdly popular columns peeving about some abominable usage in one or other colony that, in every case, originated in mainland England and was very common typically between 400 and 100 years ago, and just fell out of fashion there. English peeving, thus, always turns out to be complaints that colonies do not slavishly follow London fashions.
Yosemite Sam represents a snapshot of Victorian English.
