To my ear, Scottish people would pronounce the 'a' in Karl as /ɑ/; an open back unrounded vowel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_back_unrounded_vowel

But I'm not sure, since in Canadian English, the 'a' in Karl would be pronounced as /ɑ/ and the one in Carol would be an open-mid front unrounded vowel (/ɛ/).

vs.

http://www.macmillandictionary.com/pronunciation/american/ca...

So probably for a brit's ear the difference is mostly in the schwa

(disclaimer, I'm not a native speaker. Living in Ireland though)

In other words, both dialects have a schwa inserted (even in NA English), but the difference is that Scottish people do not differentiate between the 'a' in both Karl and Carol.

Put differently, Scottish people pronounce Karl and Carol the same way to an English speaker (from England).

What I'm saying is that to my Canadian ear, I could hear a difference between the few Scottish people I've spoken to in Canada. But come to think of it, they were probably Canadianised.

However, the key player here is not laumars, but his friend Carol :-)

I mean, the interesting part is that she heard her name because the epenthesis process transformed a monosyllabic word into disyllabic one, and that changed the shape of the word: kar(uh)l has the same rhythm as carol, and small vowel quality differences are probably less important that the rhythm when the word gets parsed by the brain.

Unfortunately a google search of "philome" yields only pages about shakespeare pronounciation, especially by these two guys; I don't know what that means.

However, I think that thinking about the evolution of a language as a linear progression is misleading.

Is certainly possible that modern Irish pronunciation stems from what was spoken at that time, and the modern "mainstream" english pronunciation evolved later from a slighly different root, and epenthesis acted only in one of the two branches.

Film derives from west germanic filminjan, which in turn comes from proto germanic fello(m), and proto indoeuropean pel-, with cognates in lating and greek, pella and pellis respectivly.

So it's possible that epenthesis was applied on top of filminjan in irish scottish accents (possibly due to pressure of the gaelic substrate), while the dialect which originated RP didn't have this change.

I'm sure somebody with better knowledge of the matter can be more precise about that, however, it's strange how little (and often more misleading than uncertain) information is there about one the most widely spoken languages.

(Sorry, if I had more time, I would have written a shorter comment :-) )

(see http://goo.gl/TxMkG for an annotated extract of the text)