The first vowel of pyjamas is a schwa, same as the first vowel of banana - that's how I've always heard it in the south of England, and also how the OED depicts it, for both UK and US pronunciation.
But pajamas is the American spelling, so that is not usual in the UK.
Do you say the "h" on the word herb or herbal? Definitely said here, and noticeable when it's left off.
Up ere, they tend ter keep i' on - but back ome, they leave i' owrf.
(that ' is a glo'awl stop, and not having access to the IPA I'll have to leave you to work out the awfuwl dipthongs on all the vowels. As my French teacher once noted, 'despite a reasonable grasp of grammar, M_in_M has no pretensions as a speaker of the language'. It's hard when you're from Essex. )
I agree with @TheOrganist and @Doone. I think even people here who drop quite a lot of their 'h's would pronounce it on 'herb' and 'herbal'. Dropping it sounds uncouth, somebody trying to sound Cockney when they're not.
I agree with those that have said that pyjamas is normally with a 'y', by the way, but it had been spelt with an 'a' in previous posts. However spelt, though, in the UK the vowel is a schwa, ǝ.
I agree with @TheOrganist and @Doone. I think even people here who drop quite a lot of their 'h's would pronounce it on 'herb' and 'herbal'. Dropping it sounds uncouth, somebody trying to sound Cockney when they're not.
I could be remembering this totally wrong, but I think I recall learning in a podcast on the history of English that the original pronunciation of the words “herb” and “herbal” was without the “h” sound, inasmuch as both words are derived from French, and that it was sometime after British and American English had “separated” that people in Britain began to pronounce the “h.”
This suggests I’m remembering correctly (assuming it’s correct, of course).
I was gobsmacked because "tack-o" is precisely how we kids would pronounce it in order to irritate the hell out of my Mexican stepfather. Either that or tay-ko.
Pajamas - Pǝjahmǝs, stress on middle syllable here, sometimes colloquially P.J.s or jim-jams.
In these parts, quite a few people can be found who pronounce that word PǝJAMǝs, where the accented syllable sounds like a fruit food that might be spread on toast.
Pajamas - Pǝjahmǝs, stress on middle syllable here, sometimes colloquially P.J.s or jim-jams.
In these parts, quite a few people can be found who pronounce that word PǝJAMǝs, where the accented syllable sounds like a fruit food that might be spread on toast.
Once again my regionalect matches yours at this data point.
Up until recently I would have pronounced pyjamas 'nightdress' since I disliked them, particularly the buttoned jacket bit. But I've found it impossible (in the UK) to find cotton nighties that are full length. However I now discover pyjamas have morphed from the suiting model of my childhood into these comfy, stretchy T-shirt/joggers things which actually go down to the ankles.
I haven't though discovered the nightwear I encountered in The States in the '60s - the all in one with feet. Do they still exist?
Talking of pyjamas and pronunciations, I remember becoming very aware of how pond differences can impact on rhyme when I saw the Joseph musical in Canada. The lines:
All these things you saw in your pyjamas
Are a long-range forecast for your farmers
rhyme perfectly with an RP accent, but simply did not rhyme at all with Canadians singing them. And I've observed Andrew Lloyd Webber's subsequent musicals have avoided that sort of rhyme.
The heavy full length women's nightdresses - Lady Macbeth style - are sold at the market near here run by the Mennonites. They are suitable for all weathers and are probably bullet-proof too.
What about "wort". As in figwort, liverwort, ragwort, milkwort, and other plants my botanical mother taught me about? And the liquid from which beer is made? I grew up using the same sound as in word, work, world, worm, worse, worth, etc, but now people will talk about St John's Wort as if it were a relative of a verruca, with the sound found in war, which I gather is American. Same sound as worn, which is the only wor word which I can think of with that sound.
What about "wort". As in figwort, liverwort, ragwort, milkwort, and other plants my botanical mother taught me about? And the liquid from which beer is made? I grew up using the same sound as in word, work, world, worm, worse, worth, etc, but now people will talk about St John's Wort as if it were a relative of a verruca, with the sound found in war, which I gather is American. Same sound as worn, which is the only wor word which I can think of with that sound.
Does "wort' have the same sound as "warn" in your accent? Farm is different as is arm, barn, darn, which are the same.
Some local Saskatchewan usages, which we are told derive from 100 year ago Scottish terms, possibly true or false: a slough (said sloo/slew as in killed someone, Cain slew Abel) is a pond with marshy edges and reeds. It will be called a pothole if it is mostly round, as some of them are. There is another word slough, which is said "sluff" and spelling as sluff seems to be taking over with a short U, usually in the context of to "sluff off", which means "dog it" or not do the work, sluffing it off to someone else or to another day.
Rhyming with sluff, is bluff. Which means a bluff of trees in an otherwise treeless field. It does not usually mean a hill here, though that would be understood.
"Porch climber" means moonshine. I wondered if it was a misheard term and simply said as porch climber. Hootch is another word for it.
Leorning Cniht's rhyming with yurt and Bert is what I grew up with, and it is the sound most of the words in "wor" have. Note word.
I used to tease children that the word work could be spelled with any vowel and come out sounding correct. "wark" as is Southwark or Newark, "werk", "wirk", "work and "wurk".
I've just been dipping into this thread and it is a wonderful tribute to the richness of internationally diverse English.
For anyone interesting in our shared language, I would highly recommend Melvyn Bragg's book The Aventure of English, A Biography of a Language. It's brilliant - as is the accompanying TV series if you can find it.
For me the great joy was in understanding the story of English from being German with the arrival of the Angles and the Saxons to what we have today. There was a big Latin influence in the first millennium from missionary monks before the Vikings arrived bringing Danish words into English. The later Latin influence via French with the Norman conquest was more significant. What fascinates me most is how these geopolitical events still affect the language today. To cut a very long story short, the Saxons and the Danes basically fought to a high-scoring draw and England was divided diagonally. So in the North East Danish terms entered English. That is still seen today with words found in the North East dialect of modern speakers that derive from Danish. These words you'd never hear spoken in my part of the country. Similarly, when the conquering Normans arrived, they spoke French whilst the peasants continued speaking English. This is seen in modern English where there is a class difference in equivalent terms - the posher one will have a French root and the more common one Germanic.
In later chapters Bragg turns to how the Empire took English to the world but it evolved and diversified as a consequence. This is seen in the differences of expression here described. My favourite example is in South Africa whereby a traffic light (stop sign in USA) is called a robot... Always made me smile that one.
I think that to some extent what underlies this is a subconscious sense of ownership of the language - especially among Brits and Americans. I don't mean to be critical, I think this is a very natural way to feel about one's own language regardless of its origins (i.e. I suspect Austrians consider they own German). There is a friendly argument to be had here; us Brits tend to think of it as ours because 'we' invented it and we have Shakespear etc. Whilst in the 20th century there is no doubt that the dominance of the USA both economically and militarily as well as culturally is what took English to non-native speakers in a big way.
One of my favourite little quirks of English is the spelling of the suffice -ise / -ize. Such as Organise or Finalise. Most Brits would use the 'ise' form and consider 'ize' to be both wrong and an Americanism.* Strangely the Americans are more correct. The 'ize' spellings go back to at least the 15th century and went to America with the first settlers - it's the Brits that have changed. The OED tends to favour the 'ise' form because there are some words that are only spelt correctly with an 's' and hence use the 'ise' for consistency. I find the 'z' to be much more phonetic and will often use it when typing quickly (before patriotic pride makes me go back and change it...)
Anyway, it's a brilliant book about how we got here....
AFZ
*The irony being that Americanism is arugably itself an Americanism as the 'ism-isation' of words is from American English...
'Ought' as an auxiliary verb rhymes with 'taught'. It's very widely used here and is part of normal speech. Although he's from somewhere very distant from here, I'm with @Nick Tamen that they don't rhyme with 'snot' and 'not', though they do rhyme with each other.
What's more of a question is which vowel sound 'ought' is when it means the opposite of 'nought'. Unlike 'nought' which usually these days means a zero, it's slightly archaic or dialectic. In that sense it tends to rhyme with however you pronounce 'nought', i.e. RP to rhyme with 'aught' (also slightly archaic), Yorkshire 'owt' and 'nowt', the area in between RP and Yorkshire, 'ote' and 'note' to rhyme with 'note'.
'Mary' and 'marry' are most definitely not homophones in most, if not all, of England. 'Marry' rhymes with 'carry' and 'Mary' rhymes with 'fairy'.
'Slough', here, as a grubby pond or the conurbation west of London rhymes with 'bough' and 'sow'. 'Slough' as what a snake does with its skin rhymes with 'bluff'. A 'bluff' is usually a small hill with one steep side and other gradual sides. It may, or may not, have trees on it. There are quite a lot of different words that might be used for different varieties of small groups of trees, e.g. 'clump', 'copse, or even 'grove'.
'Mary' and 'marry' are most definitely not homophones in most, if not all, of England. 'Marry' rhymes with 'carry' and 'Mary' rhymes with 'fairy'.
Okay, all of those are homophones here. Marry, merry, Mary, fairy, also and most local people to this province, bury. People from others will not have bury and berry with the same vowel sound. They are identical to me.
Coupon and Tuesday are interesting. I'd say older people say Q or cue in coupon, and younger would say coo. Tuesday's vowel sound is either as in cue/Q or coo/too/2. People make fun of it sometimes and say Chews-day. The split in pronunciation is even within my family.
Spellings here tend to be centre for the noun, center if it is a verb. Other er/re words similar. One that is interesting is that some people seem to make decisions and others take them. I am probably inconsistent, depending who I am talking to, and the context. I have thought the influence was from French, Québec.
From ST, do you call the traffic light yellow or amber? The one between the red and the green? And what is the street crossing for pedestrians called? Here it is a crosswalk. All street corners, marked or not are actually legal crosswalks. Inconsistently enforced, but failure to stop for a pedestrian already in the roadway is $776. Which is about £500. I'm off topic but using a cell phone while driving unless the vehicle is in park costs the same, doubles with a second offence in the same year, and they suspend your driver's licence for 7 days, and also impound the vehicle for 7 days regardless of who owns it. The total cost with demerits and fees is apparently about $3000-4000 for a second distracted driving offence depending how far they tow the car.
But this leads to, is it a driver's license or a driving license? or something else where you are? Here is is officially a driver's licence.
On some British TV, I've heard "Marie" pronounced something like the US version of "Mary". It's been a while, but that may have been mostly which syllable was stressed.
Here, "Marie" is muh-RIE. What UK pronunciation I heard probably stressed the second syllable, or possibly both equally.
The one place I'm sure I heard it was on the Britcom "Keeping Up Appearances", when Hyacinth mentioned Marie Antoinette. But I think I've heard it elsewhere, too.
I do wish we still had the spot on each post where we could indicate where exactly we were located in the world (or elsewhere). Everybody keeps saying "here, we say it..." and I can never remember precisely where "here" is for everybody.
Comments
Is there a tendency to make A into ah in some areas? The first A in pajamas is a short one for us, turning into paw for some.
I heard "regulatory" said reg-you-LATE-erry by a newscaster. It's REG-g'you-luh-tory here.
Taco - not really part of the local diet here but I think usually pronounced tack-o, to rhyme with Macko.
Pajamas - Pǝjahmǝs, stress on middle syllable here, sometimes colloquially P.J.s or jim-jams.
Croissant - difficult to display this one. Something like cwassoƞ.
Bouillon - bweeyoƞ round here.
Regulatory - Four syllables Reg-ya-lǝ-tri.
Yoghurt (not under discussion this time) - Yǒgǝt, not yoe-gǝt, which I think is what it's called in Australia.
Jonathan - is the usual spelling here.
Thank you @Nick Tamen on Victoria.
In the UK the item is spelled Pyjamas and pronounced pidge-amas.
But pajamas is the American spelling, so that is not usual in the UK.
Yes, that was my query, as I couldn't work out what tah indicated. But the /h/ indicates the /a:/ vowel, I think, as in tar, not /æ/ as in clap.
Do you say the "h" on the word herb or herbal? Definitely said here, and noticeable when it's left off.
The first "a" in pajamas here is a schwa.
No it's just meant to indicate it's the same sound as in ah or father, rather than a short a as in bad.
Definitely left on by most people here (Somerset, England).
Yes, ta, I eventually worked that out. I've been struggling with the International Phonetic Alphabet, and I think that the long vowel is shown as/a:/.
Up ere, they tend ter keep i' on - but back ome, they leave i' owrf.
(that ' is a glo'awl stop, and not having access to the IPA I'll have to leave you to work out the awfuwl dipthongs on all the vowels. As my French teacher once noted, 'despite a reasonable grasp of grammar, M_in_M has no pretensions as a speaker of the language'. It's hard when you're from Essex. )
Nor PNW. Although the more rustic among us do make Warshington rhotic.
I agree with those that have said that pyjamas is normally with a 'y', by the way, but it had been spelt with an 'a' in previous posts. However spelt, though, in the UK the vowel is a schwa, ǝ.
This suggests I’m remembering correctly (assuming it’s correct, of course).
(US: /ˈtɑːkoʊ/, UK: /ˈtækoʊ/, Spanish: [ˈtako])
Once again my regionalect matches yours at this data point.
I haven't though discovered the nightwear I encountered in The States in the '60s - the all in one with feet. Do they still exist?
All these things you saw in your pyjamas
Are a long-range forecast for your farmers
rhyme perfectly with an RP accent, but simply did not rhyme at all with Canadians singing them. And I've observed Andrew Lloyd Webber's subsequent musicals have avoided that sort of rhyme.
Yes. As novelty wear and they go by the name of "Onesies"
Otherwise for infants only, "Babygro"
They're also known as "Dr. Denton's."
Spelling pronunciation.
Some local Saskatchewan usages, which we are told derive from 100 year ago Scottish terms, possibly true or false: a slough (said sloo/slew as in killed someone, Cain slew Abel) is a pond with marshy edges and reeds. It will be called a pothole if it is mostly round, as some of them are. There is another word slough, which is said "sluff" and spelling as sluff seems to be taking over with a short U, usually in the context of to "sluff off", which means "dog it" or not do the work, sluffing it off to someone else or to another day.
Rhyming with sluff, is bluff. Which means a bluff of trees in an otherwise treeless field. It does not usually mean a hill here, though that would be understood.
"Porch climber" means moonshine. I wondered if it was a misheard term and simply said as porch climber. Hootch is another word for it.
In England, I think "wort" rhymes with "yurt" and "Bert".
I used to tease children that the word work could be spelled with any vowel and come out sounding correct. "wark" as is Southwark or Newark, "werk", "wirk", "work and "wurk".
I was struck in eastern Canada, that Mary and marry were said differently. The second like the planet Mars.
For anyone interesting in our shared language, I would highly recommend Melvyn Bragg's book The Aventure of English, A Biography of a Language. It's brilliant - as is the accompanying TV series if you can find it.
For me the great joy was in understanding the story of English from being German with the arrival of the Angles and the Saxons to what we have today. There was a big Latin influence in the first millennium from missionary monks before the Vikings arrived bringing Danish words into English. The later Latin influence via French with the Norman conquest was more significant. What fascinates me most is how these geopolitical events still affect the language today. To cut a very long story short, the Saxons and the Danes basically fought to a high-scoring draw and England was divided diagonally. So in the North East Danish terms entered English. That is still seen today with words found in the North East dialect of modern speakers that derive from Danish. These words you'd never hear spoken in my part of the country. Similarly, when the conquering Normans arrived, they spoke French whilst the peasants continued speaking English. This is seen in modern English where there is a class difference in equivalent terms - the posher one will have a French root and the more common one Germanic.
In later chapters Bragg turns to how the Empire took English to the world but it evolved and diversified as a consequence. This is seen in the differences of expression here described. My favourite example is in South Africa whereby a traffic light (stop sign in USA) is called a robot... Always made me smile that one.
I think that to some extent what underlies this is a subconscious sense of ownership of the language - especially among Brits and Americans. I don't mean to be critical, I think this is a very natural way to feel about one's own language regardless of its origins (i.e. I suspect Austrians consider they own German). There is a friendly argument to be had here; us Brits tend to think of it as ours because 'we' invented it and we have Shakespear etc. Whilst in the 20th century there is no doubt that the dominance of the USA both economically and militarily as well as culturally is what took English to non-native speakers in a big way.
One of my favourite little quirks of English is the spelling of the suffice -ise / -ize. Such as Organise or Finalise. Most Brits would use the 'ise' form and consider 'ize' to be both wrong and an Americanism.* Strangely the Americans are more correct. The 'ize' spellings go back to at least the 15th century and went to America with the first settlers - it's the Brits that have changed. The OED tends to favour the 'ise' form because there are some words that are only spelt correctly with an 's' and hence use the 'ise' for consistency. I find the 'z' to be much more phonetic and will often use it when typing quickly (before patriotic pride makes me go back and change it...)
Anyway, it's a brilliant book about how we got here....
AFZ
*The irony being that Americanism is arugably itself an Americanism as the 'ism-isation' of words is from American English...
What's more of a question is which vowel sound 'ought' is when it means the opposite of 'nought'. Unlike 'nought' which usually these days means a zero, it's slightly archaic or dialectic. In that sense it tends to rhyme with however you pronounce 'nought', i.e. RP to rhyme with 'aught' (also slightly archaic), Yorkshire 'owt' and 'nowt', the area in between RP and Yorkshire, 'ote' and 'note' to rhyme with 'note'.
'Mary' and 'marry' are most definitely not homophones in most, if not all, of England. 'Marry' rhymes with 'carry' and 'Mary' rhymes with 'fairy'.
'Slough', here, as a grubby pond or the conurbation west of London rhymes with 'bough' and 'sow'. 'Slough' as what a snake does with its skin rhymes with 'bluff'. A 'bluff' is usually a small hill with one steep side and other gradual sides. It may, or may not, have trees on it. There are quite a lot of different words that might be used for different varieties of small groups of trees, e.g. 'clump', 'copse, or even 'grove'.
"Sow" the verb, as when you sow seed, or "Sow" the noun, meaning a female pig?
Okay, all of those are homophones here. Marry, merry, Mary, fairy, also and most local people to this province, bury. People from others will not have bury and berry with the same vowel sound. They are identical to me.
Coupon and Tuesday are interesting. I'd say older people say Q or cue in coupon, and younger would say coo. Tuesday's vowel sound is either as in cue/Q or coo/too/2. People make fun of it sometimes and say Chews-day. The split in pronunciation is even within my family.
Spellings here tend to be centre for the noun, center if it is a verb. Other er/re words similar. One that is interesting is that some people seem to make decisions and others take them. I am probably inconsistent, depending who I am talking to, and the context. I have thought the influence was from French, Québec.
From ST, do you call the traffic light yellow or amber? The one between the red and the green? And what is the street crossing for pedestrians called? Here it is a crosswalk. All street corners, marked or not are actually legal crosswalks. Inconsistently enforced, but failure to stop for a pedestrian already in the roadway is $776. Which is about £500. I'm off topic but using a cell phone while driving unless the vehicle is in park costs the same, doubles with a second offence in the same year, and they suspend your driver's licence for 7 days, and also impound the vehicle for 7 days regardless of who owns it. The total cost with demerits and fees is apparently about $3000-4000 for a second distracted driving offence depending how far they tow the car.
But this leads to, is it a driver's license or a driving license? or something else where you are? Here is is officially a driver's licence.
Re Mary:
On some British TV, I've heard "Marie" pronounced something like the US version of "Mary". It's been a while, but that may have been mostly which syllable was stressed.
Here, "Marie" is muh-RIE. What UK pronunciation I heard probably stressed the second syllable, or possibly both equally.
The one place I'm sure I heard it was on the Britcom "Keeping Up Appearances", when Hyacinth mentioned Marie Antoinette. But I think I've heard it elsewhere, too.
Keep it up, Chief. When a chap's right, he's correct.