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[Opinions] Re: The American softening of T's
in reply to a message by Aine
Wouldn't an Australian pronounce names like Georgiana as jor-jee-ANN-uh intead of jor-jee-AHN-a? That's the one thing I've noticed that bothers me. Otherwise I really like the Australian accent. I especially like how you pronounce the word "skull" lol, which I think also is slang for what we'd call "chugging" a drink. I think it sounds really cool.
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Nope . . .Some might, some might not . . . that depends more on the level of education and cultural background, than on the Australian accent itself. I'd always say it AHN.An Australian accent tends to turn more vowels into schwas than other languages, and they're very short schwas, so Jacob, in which the 'o' is a schwa, ends up sounding something like JAY-k'b. The schwa is barely even pronounced. This makes some names that sound lovely in one's head come out as ugly and clipped.
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When I was in an English phonology class (NAE), I said that in words that end in -er, -el, and sometimes -en, I can't hear the schwa either. I know that in Czech there are words that don't have vowels, so maybe in my region with Slavic heritage, we lost some of the schwas. Also, in some words with 2 schwas in a row, we drop one of them and make the word one syllable shorter.
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I'd also pronounce Jacob that way. We like our schwas here too.And I pronounce Georgiana with ANN and think that would be most common. Maybe not. Though I like to smush it together so it sounds more like jor-JAYN-a.

This message was edited 5/10/2009, 4:20 AM

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I sound like you.
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Nope...I have only ever heard it pronounced jor-jee-AHN-a here. I am sure there are some that do pronounce it jor-jee-ANN-uh though. It is a bit like any of those -ana names- you will always have people that will use one pronunciation over the other for no reason at all.Hehe, yeah we say to scull a drink. Some people say chug as well, or 'downing' the drink, but generally the chanting that happens when someone is drinking the drink is 'SCULL SCULL SCULL'
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Nope...I have only ever heard it pronounced jor-jee-AHN-a here. I am sure there are some that do pronounce it jor-jee-ANN-uh though. It is a bit like any of those -ana names- you will always have people that will use one pronunciation over the other for no reason at all.Hehe, yeah we say to scull a drink. Some people say chug as well, or 'downing' the drink, but generally the chanting that happens when someone is drinking the drink is 'SCULL SCULL SCULL'
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