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A comment on The epic rise and fall of the name Heather. Parent comment

Re:The epic rise and fall of the name Heather by m-i-l on Tuesday September 25, 2018 @10:08AM (#18066397)
The "r" is an interesting one. I only recently found out that the "r" isn't pronounced in many words by most of the English in England. It was thanks to some homework that one of my children came home with. It had a list of homophones for them to practice, and on that list were "saw" and "sore", which both me and my wife thought must have been added by mistake because for both of us "saw" and "sore" have distinct pronunciations. So we did a bit of research. What we found was that English as spoken in England is considered "non-rhotic" where the "r" isn't pronounced before a consonant or at the end of words (hence "saw" and "sore" are both pronounced "sau"), whereas myself and my wife come from countries where the language / accent is "rhotic" and the "r" is pronounced (so "saw" and "sore" are pronounced as they are spelled).
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Re:The epic rise and fall of the name Heather by yorwba on Tuesday September 25, 2018 @12:00PM (#18067517)
If the English your kids speak at school is rhothic, then including saw/sore as a pair of homophones is a mistake anyway, since the whole point of homophones is that they sound the same, which is always dependent on accent. Teaching homophones as a list to be practiced reminds me of not being allowed to calculate 4-7 because negative numbers hadn't been taught yet. It essentially removes the actual understanding from the learning process.
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Re:The epic rise and fall of the name Heather by pbhjpbhj on Tuesday September 25, 2018 @10:22AM (#18066514)
>What we found was that English as spoken in England //

Ha, there's such variations in accent it's quite hard to make statements like this that apply generally.

Some like to add "r"s where they don't exist too: Bath - barth vs ba-th.

Strangely my mother and [only] one of my sons both have this more RP approach to pronounciation.

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Re:The epic rise and fall of the name Heather by m-i-l on Tuesday September 25, 2018 @11:09AM (#18066926)
I think the "bath" is the long "a" vs short "a" split[0] (usually associated with north of England vs south of England) rather than r insertion. There is however something called the "intrusive r" among "non rhotic" speakers "such as those in most of England and Wales" [1] which I learned about thanks to this recent research, where "r"s are inserted where they don't exist, e.g. "supernova-r-in the sky" and "law-r-and order".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap-bath_split

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linking_and_intrusive_R

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Re:The epic rise and fall of the name Heather by alistoriv on Tuesday September 25, 2018 @12:28PM (#18067781)
>"such as those in most of England and Wales"

Aren't Welsh dialects generally rhotic?

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Re:The epic rise and fall of the name Heather by buckminster on Tuesday September 25, 2018 @11:06AM (#18066903)
They are not adding an r. That's a long a. True, they are pronouncing bath like many English people would pronounce barth; but that is without an audible r.
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Re:The epic rise and fall of the name Heather by pbhjpbhj on Tuesday September 25, 2018 @02:01PM (#18068824)
It's not rolled, but if you don't call that an "r" sound then there's no "r" in many areas of UK. It's different to a long a, it's like a shortened "r" with no roll and the tongue further forward, but not as hollow as a long a.

Presumably you think "hearth" doesn't have discernible "[a]r" sound either?

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Re:The epic rise and fall of the name Heather by thaumasiotes on Tuesday September 25, 2018 @05:51PM (#18070816)
> if you don't call that an "r" sound then there's no "r" in many areas of UK.

By itself, that is not a compelling argument. There is in fact no postvocalic R in many areas of the UK.

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Re:The epic rise and fall of the name Heather by pbhjpbhj on Wednesday September 26, 2018 @11:39AM (#18077036)
I think what I'm referring to is that shown in the map (1950s) at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoticity_in_English#Distribut.... The alveolar and retroflex variants, which to my ear give an r sound distinct from, for example [ɑː].
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