Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2009 November 12

= November 12 =

Flour and Flower
Do these sound the same in your dialect? --71.142.84.90 (talk) 05:50, 12 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Yup. (Wikipedia tells me I speak West/Central Canadian English.) Adam Bishop (talk) 06:46, 12 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Certainly do, central southern UK. 86.4.186.107 (talk) 08:08, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Then, it sounds like it's probably the same in all English dialects. Any exceptions you know of? --71.142.79.136 (talk) 08:13, 12 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Heh. The above reminds me of a linguistics department variation of the How to Hunt Elephants joke: "THEORETICAL LINGUISTS describe the first two elephants they run into, note that neither of them has fur, and pronounce this the "Smooth Elephant Constraint" (or SEC). At the meeting of the Linguistic Society of America the constraint is declared a universal after a five-minute discussion with no dissent." r ʨ anaɢ talk/contribs 15:01, 12 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Sure. For me "flour" is one syllable while "flower" is two, just as the spellings suggest.  But my speech is a mixture of different influences, so that doesn't tell you much.  So I looked up "flour" in four of the dictionaries under www.onelook.com.  The Cambridge International Dictionary of English shows "flour" with one syllable as US; looking at US dictionaries, Encarta shows only that pronunciation, Merriam-Webster shows it as either one or two without precedence (the schwa of the second syllable is just parenthesized), while American Heritage shows two syllables first and one syllable as "also".  --Anonymous, 11:50 UTC, November 12, 2009.


 * They sound the same in London. Alansplodge (talk) 12:14, 12 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Different in West Midlands. --TammyMoet (talk) 13:29, 12 November 2009 (UTC)
 * I've noticed that people from slightly more upper class London backgrounds pronounce flower with a rather more pronounced W sound than flour, to the extent that the latter sounds like a combination of "fl"+"our". Having said that, the upper class tend to shun the w in "flower" too, but to a lesser extent. No sources I'm afraid so OR alert. --Dweller (talk) 15:44, 12 November 2009 (UTC)
 * I can't understand much of our article on Received Pronunciation. Does it discuss this point? --Dweller (talk) 15:49, 12 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Despite the dictionaries, they sound the same (two syllables) in both rhotic and nonrhotic pronunciations in New England and New York. Marco polo (talk) 15:46, 12 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Similar sets of words include roil, royal; higher, hire; sigher, sire; sear, seer; dire, dyer; buyer, byre; lair, layer; mooer, moor; spier, spire; cuer, cure; vial, vile, viol; coir, coyer. -- Wavelength (talk) 16:27, 12 November 2009 (UTC)
 * What dialect(s) of English has lair and layer as homophones? In Australian English, lair rhymes with hair and layer rhymes with payer, and they're not even close. In fact, layer has two syllables in my lingo. Now, my Texan wife pronounced the "ai" and the "ay" of the two words almost identically, however layer has two syllables whereas lair only one. Curious. Peter Greenwell (talk) 10:07, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Mine, which is a variant of southern RP (British). But I know that a schoolfriend who also spoke RP did not have them as homophones, so I can only assume it's variable. Both are one syllable for me. 86.149.189.52 (talk) 13:03, 14 November 2009 (UTC)
 * I can't agree on some of these. Eg mooer/moor. If you'd said Moor, more and moor, perhaps, but mooer is an oo-er word for me! I also would differentiate slightly between dire and dyer - for me, as with mooer, the latter has two syllables, but the former one. --Dweller (talk) 16:32, 12 November 2009 (UTC)
 * When I said "similar sets of words", I meant that they are similar to the set flour, flower in being potential topics of this type of question. However, they are also "sets of similar words", in that the pronunciations of the words in a set may be identical or nearly identical.
 * -- Wavelength (talk) 17:11, 12 November 2009 (UTC)
 * In the Australian English I speak, they're said the same. Peter Greenwell (talk) 23:32, 12 November 2009 (UTC)
 * They're similar, but not quite identical, in New Zealand - the "w" is stressed very, very slightly more than the "u" (but that may simply be a personal case, and I still have some residual Home Counties English in my voice). As for Australia, I suspect it depends whereabouts you are. There are several distinct Strine accents/dialects: to my ears at least, Breezebin and Seednee accents are harsher and rougher than Milbun and Ohbaht. Eddelide is softer still. Dunno about Perth or Darwin, but the best known residents of Canberra can only just handle the concept of language, poor dears :) Grutness...wha?  23:59, 12 November 2009 (UTC)
 * In defence of Kambra residents, I'll just say that the people to whom I believe you're referring, the politicians, are with very few exceptions only temporary residents of that fair city, who immediately wing their ways to their home bases the moment Parliament rises (usually Thursday afternoon), and come back the next week. Most of them wouldn't be seen dead there on a weekend - or at any other time - unless they have no choice but be there (which is more a reflection on them than on Canberra).   For some of them, the first time in their lives they ever visit their nation's capital is after they've been elected to Parliament.  And all they ever see of the city is Parliament House, their hotel or wherever they stay, the roads connnecting them, and the roads to and from the airport.  On the basis of this, they proclaim that Canberra is not worth visiting.  --  JackofOz (talk) 01:32, 14 November 2009 (UTC)
 * I wondered if I'd get a bite from that tasty worm I dangled in the water :) Grutness...wha?  01:42, 14 November 2009 (UTC)
 * All good sport, mate. I just had to put the record straight about who lives there by choice (c. 350,000 people, most of whom have as little involvement in politics as they can get away with, and for the vast majority, none at all) and who doesn't.  :)  --  JackofOz (talk) 01:52, 14 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Okay, so maybe you phoneticians can explain this to me. Looking at flower, the US IPA reads /ˈflaʊɚ/, but the definitely sounds like it has the Voiced labio-velar approximant in the middle and an /ɹ/ at the end. Or am I just imagining it? I might be imagining the /w/, it's such a small difference that I can't really hear it, but that really sounds like an /ɹ/. Indeterminate (talk) 08:41, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
 * You're not imagining anything, you're just being thrown off by transcriptional conventions. /aʊ/ and /aw/ are equivalent, as are /ɚ/ and syllabic /ɹ/. The word could also have been transcribed /ˈflawɹ/ (with a syllabicity mark under the ɹ). +Angr 12:03, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
 * In the American midwest, at least, "flour" and "flower" are pronounced the same way. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 05:03, 16 November 2009 (UTC)


 * I came across when searching to see if has been discussed before a long time later. FWIW, flower and flour are normally pronounced quite differently in Malaysian English and Singaporean English. Flour is normally distinctly monosyballic something like flah (our Singlish article says /flɑ/). If you look at discussions involving Singaporeans or Malaysian, it's sometimes claimed the pronounciation is due to the British roots. However as discussed above in modern British English, the two are close to (or are) homophones AFAIK. Also in most other forms of English. At least whenever I heard it in Malaysia (which I admit wasn't that much), this was not the case. Not that I always asked them to pronounce flower, but even in the examples like the Cambridge dictionary, as well as any time on shows etc, the pronounciation of flour among British speakers sounds a lot like they would pronounce flower, which I didn't consider the case for the Malaysians. Edit: Found an example I think from Singapore of flour [//youtube.com/watch?v=Ybv2jphkX6I?t=43s] Nil Einne (talk) 12:08, 28 September 2016 (UTC)

What is the German word for button, you know the ones with the pins on the back?
What is the German word for button, you know the ones with the pins on the back or what the British call a badge? Part of the problem is that there is no one English word to describe it and those that are tend to be used for other things, too. Overpush (talk) 06:32, 12 November 2009 (UTC)


 * The German Wikipedia article for these sorts of things is de:Button (Ansteckplakette). Adam Bishop (talk) 06:49, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

The Finnish girl's name Päivi
How is it pronounced? Pah-eevee? Rhymes with gravy? An .ogg sample or an IPA transliteration would be great, if either could be provided. Thanks in advance. Peter Greenwell (talk) 23:31, 12 November 2009 (UTC)
 * You're correct - it rhymes with gravy. In IPA - ['pʰæj.vi]. Steewi (talk) 06:08, 13 November 2009 (UTC) edited for formatting Steewi (talk) 06:09, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Finnish stops are not aspirated: ['pæivi]. — Emil J. 11:03, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
 * So, is the äi combo a diphthong? From the IPA you two have given, it seems there's two vowel sounds there, unless I'm reading things wrong. Peter Greenwell (talk) 11:25, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
 * That's what a diphthong is. +Angr 11:58, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
 * (e/c) The word has only two syllables, if that's what you are asking. Whether you interpret the first one as a diphthong [æi] (more precisely, [æ͡i]) or as a vowel followed by an approximant [æj] makes little (if any) difference; I followed our Finnish phonology article which calls it a diphthong. — Emil J. 12:06, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
 * OK, thanks all. Peter Greenwell (talk) 13:24, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
 * In what dialect does ['pæjvi] rhyme with gravy? (I pronounce gravy with an [ej] in its first syllable, not an [æj], myself.)&mdash;msh210 &#x2120; 18:45, 16 November 2009 (UTC)