Separated by a Common Language

Although sometimes spelt "chile", chili has nothing to do with the name of the country. The condiment exists in Chile, but its name is quite different: "ají". I pronounce Chile like "chilly" when talking with my relatives in England, but I pronounce it as in Spanish when talking to my (Chilean) wife or other Chilean people.

I grew up in the US and pronounce the country "chilly."

Ají is from Taíno, the language spoken on the islands where Columbus first landed. The Spanish learned that word first and it was established in colonial Spanish even before chili, which is why it's still used in South American and Caribbean Spanish.

Perhaps the spelling "chilli" is Welsh.

That would be even harder to pronounce than most of the Spanish ways to pronounce "chilli". In Mexican Spanish, and many other dialects, "ll" has eroded to a "y" sound. In Colombian Spanish, other Andean dialects, and some parts of Spain, the "ll" is still pronounced with an "ly" sound - "millon" sounds like English "million" with the accent moved. Pronouncing "chilli" would be something like "chilyi".

In Argentina, if you're over 45, "ll" is pronounced like English (not French!) "j"; if you're under 45, like "sh". So "chidji" or "chishi".

Athel, Anthony,

Your conclusions hold only if it's the case that Spanish never adopts spelling from other languages but always modifies the spelling to correspond to Spanish sounds.

I'm not suggesting that this isn't the case. I simply don't know. But it's worth making it explicit that Spanish differs from English and French in this regard.

David - in the case of "chili", the word was adopted from a non-alphabetic language, so the Spanish would have spelled the word to match the way they pronounced it. According to Wikipedia, the word comes from Nahuatl "chili", pronounced essentially the same way as in Spanish. Nahuatl doesn't have the phoneme corresponding to Spanish "ll", unlike some Andean languages, so it really wouldn't have made sense to use "ll" in "chili".

In general, Spanish is (or used to be) *extremely* conservative - Colombian prescriptivists would spell "quilometro" because 'k' isn't a Spanish letter. These days, they're becoming more lax, to the point of officially renaming "i griega". But generally words that aren't proper names tend to be assimilated to Spanish pronunciation and Spanish spelling based on the Spanish pronunciation. Very recent borrowings from English are less likely to undergo this transformation.

Anthony, when I looked it up in Wiktionary, I found the very opposite.

It's tucked away somewhere down the page, so here's a repeat of the relevant paragraph:

But no. According Wiktionary the Classical Nahuatl word was pronounced with a long L-sound. They offer two IPA transcriptions. One is tʃ͡iːlli but their preferred one is tʃ͡iːlːi which doesn't suggest a syllabic break between two L-sounds.

This explains why French and English have always used the -ll- spelling. English might have done so anyway, but French had no motivation to double the L: either spelling would be pronounced the same.

Yeah, I grew up (midwestern US, where black pepper is spicy, alas) calling them chili peppers, and was corrected enough upon moving out of the midwest that the peppers were "chile" and the dish was "chili" that I now also make that distinction.

Chili powder is the mixed seasoning used for convenience, containing ground hot peppers, cumin, oregano, etc. Chile powder is one particular chile, dried and ground, generally labeled with the actual type (ancho, pasilla, etc).

I associate "chilly" and "chilli" mildly with British English, but really I associate them with Indian English which I then tend to assume matches British, since it does a lot of the time.

(Also, I was near but not from the area where "chili" the dish is served as spaghetti sauce, so I also recognize that as chili.)

On its own, usually. There may be toppings, like cheese, sour cream, green onions, etc., but the chili itself is the main event, eaten like a soup with a spoon.

And it's probably worth noting here that 'eaten like soup' can mean that it's served with saltine crackers. (Crackers and soup don't go together in UK.)

I've always eaten it with chips (aka French fries) as that is the way I was first served it.

A friend of mine (from Arkansas) puts a bunch of saltine crackers in his bowl of chili, mixes it up, and calls it "spackle". :) (For non AmE speakers, spackle is quick setting plaster used to patch holes in walls.)
Also, most places I've lived (California and the Midwest), chili has beans in it. Texas chili snobs disdain this.

I'm not sure why, but decades ago I was introduced to chili served on rice by a girlfriend (American, despite her last name, which was -- no kidding -- English) who had lived for a while in New Mexico. It's how I prefer it, especially if the chili is spicy, as I like it. I also go for a healthy dollop of sour cream (it cuts the heat too) plus shredded cheddar cheese and chopped red onion on top. Tortilla chips on the side.

About saltine crackers crumbled on a naked bowl of chili: I'm certainly familiar with it. Indeed, once upon a time it seems to me that casual restaurants in the U.S. typically served most soups with a cellophane pair of saltines next to the bowl. Whether they were hastily crumbled on top was one of those ways of distinguishing the state of someone's table manners ... kind of like whether you'd (as the Three Stooges used to do) tuck a cloth napkin into the opening between unbuttoned shirt collar and neck -- instead of placing it in your lap.

By the by, the BrE for 'spackle' is 'polyfilla'.

And can someone if possible translate — or, failing that, describe — saltine crackers?

I've seen it here (London) served on a baked potato (is that a jacket potato in the USA? Can't remember).

It's a jacket potato in UK, not US. (Baked potato in US.)

There is no translation for saltine cracker. It's kinda like a salted cream cracker. Kinda. A bit lighter.

Bother, thought I had replied but evidently not. And why am I signed out of Google? Oh dear. Anyway, point is I (BrE) have always called it a baked potato, although obviously I recognise jacket potato as a synonym. A family shibboleth, I suppose?

I (BrE) have always called it a baked potato as well.

I wasn’t saying that BrE doesn’t have ‘baked’, but that ‘jacket potato’ is a BrEisn not found in US.

Thinking about it, for me, "jacket potato" is restaurant-menu-speak, like serving one with sour cream instead of butter. At home, I serve baked potatoes with butter (sometimes); in a restaurant I'd expect to be given a jacket potato with sour cream.

In my family (Southern NJ, USA), chilli was always served with rice. Always! I was shocked and disappointed the first time I had it without (in a restaurant). Chili needs rice, at least in my head. I just thought that (some) restaurants were weird. Or cheap (I always end up ordering a side dish of rice when it doesn't come with the chilli). And when one of my editors chastised me for bringing chilli and rice to the potluck, I assumed that my way was the norm and blamed his taste on his Texan homeland. Who knew he was the "normal" one?!?

I also tend to use the double-L spelling, so I guess I'm not really a good source. (I actually had to check the spelling on the fossilised bottle of chili powder in my cupboard to truly accept that we actually use only the one L!)

– AiNJ

In parts of the midwest, chile is served on spaghetti.

Saltine cracker = soda cracker (don't know if that helps)

Chili can also be served with cornbread in US. Delicious.

Sally, Looks like we were writing about "stew" at the same time. See my comment below. It's also worth noting that while in the US it's probably most common to have minced/ground meat in chili, it's also common to have big chunks of cut-up chuck steak as well (which, I would guess, is the same or very similar to what you call "stewing meat"). See the photos in this recipe: https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2011/11/real-texas-chili-con-carne.html. I think I'd be more likely to call this latter "stew" than a version with ground/minced meat for the reasons you describe.

Ha! I left my other comment before reading yours and am amused to see that we described chili in almost the same terms, down to the green onions.

Southern English here. I always thought that mince is often used for convenience and/or because it's cheape than chunks of beef. Having checked my Delia Smith (imho the definitive cookbook) from 30+ years ago, her recipe uses chuck steak cut into very small pieces.

Exactly what I was speculating, @Dru, when I saw the allusion to rice -- in Britain, the closest analog would be to curry, which takes rice, and I'm sure tortillas and tortilla chips were scarce when chili first arrived for y'all.

That's probably it. I think it'll be removed when they update it, because the meaning of 'pepper' has moved so much.

The "erroneous" label on "chili pepper" comes from the OED First Edition, in the entry pepper from 1905, which had a long list of types of pepper: African pepper, anise pepper, bitter pepper, etc. That was carried over unchanged into the Second Edition, but when they revised pepper in 2005, they moved all of those out to sub-entries under the first word, so "chili pepper" is now under chilli, "clove pepper" under clove, etc.

Many of those other peppers are not botanically in the genus Piper, but they're not marked "erroneous", so that doesn't explain why only "chili pepper" got the label. Maybe they just made a mistake.

Re your comment "it's interesting to see how recent it is to say chil(l)i pepper": the frequency of "chil(l)i pepper" has clearly increased over time (as you can also see in the Google ngram), but it isn't recent; Google Books and Hathitrust find plenty of hits on "chil(l)i pepper" in the 19th century, and even some before 1800. It just wasn't frequent enough back then to get into COHA's corpus.

Ah, I had meant to mention Chili, NY. Thanks! Yes, definitely a Rochester-area shibboleth.

I was going to ask how one can imagine pronouncing chili as anything other than a short "i". I guess I was proven wrong. "wifi" is pronounced the way it is because it descends from "hi-fi". Of course that doesn't explain why "hi-fi" is pronounced the way it is. When I first encountered it (in print, not spoken) I thought it was in fact pronounced pretty much with the same vowels as "high fidelity" which it is short for. I guess maybe rhyming has something to do with it. Still we've got "Siri" and nobody seems to mispronounce that.

It seems words ending with "i" are rare and usually of foreign origin. Still, if I see an unfamiliar word ending with "i", I assume it's a short "i" unless it's clearly a plural or a shortening of another word that has a long "i".

Boris, the sound I perceive inwardly as short i is the stressed vowel of KIT.

For me, the first vowel sound of chilli is a KIT sound. But the second vowel is and unstressed happY sound. In some accents these are identical sounds, but not in mine.

The simple reason that few 'native' English words are spelled with a final letter-I is that a very strong convention has virtually always substituted letter-Y.

Boris, I suspect a lot of us would pronounced siri differently if we encountered it exclusively in writing.

As you say, the two syllable of hi-fi are pronounced to rhyme (as with wi-fi). Partly this is an echo or high, but it's also a logical spelling pronunciation of stressed syllables in which the vowel letter is not 'checked' by a following consonant letter.

The hyphen underlines the importance of both syllables — leading to both of them carrying stress. Spellings hifi and wifi might invite
a more siri‑like spelling pronunciation.

Upstate and Western New York pronunciations are often unique and baffling. The wifi reference reminded me of Pulaski, NY, which is pronounced Puh-lass-SKY. Of course.

This comment was confusing in the font on my font. Glad to see on my PC it has a font that makes the capital I(i) distinct.

Exception with another vowel letter such as bury and women are very few.
Surely "bury" is pronounced with the DRESS vowel, not the KIT vowel? In my dialect of BrE, it is a homophone of "berry".

This comment has been removed by the author.

A typo that I failed to spot. The examples I had in mind were busy and women

Bury is a rare case in English where the spelling comes from one Middle English dialect (West Midlands, the ancestor of the standard) and the pronunciation from another (Kentish). Similar things happened to merry and knell, but in those cases the spelling adjusted to fit the pronunciation.

As a Scot, I would rhyme bury with furry, which does not rhyme with ferry.

The UK way is *on* rice, not rice in it. :)

First, it's still the same combination. Second, I did NOT say chili in rice. Rice in chili, not chili in rice.

That’s what I said ‘rice in it (chili)’. Didn’t mean to offend. Just noting tfst the experience is different.

Usually, the rice goes round the side of the plate with a dip in the middle into which the meat is ladled. Which confirms my suggestion earlier that we tend to see chilli con carne as a sort of curry, because that is how curry is often served.

By the way, in the US does chilli con carne also include red beans? They are more or less obligatory here.

How would one say "Chilli without carne"? I frequently make mine vegetarian, it's not a dish (I find) that wants meat.

Americans rarely if ever use the full phrase "chili con carne"; we just say "chili." So meatless chili is "vegetarian chili." The full phrase "vegetarian chili con carne" is facially absurd whereas "vegetarian chili" is only absurd is you know what "chili" is originally short for, which I would guess most Americans do not.

I would just usually just say chili, to be honest. I'm not sure I've ever had regular chili, as I was raised by a vegetarian and am mostly vegetarian myself, so it doesn't really occur to me to clarify. But yeah, vegetarian chili doesn't sound odd to me.

When I worked in a vegetarian cafe in the 1980s (Oxford, UK), we used to serve "chilli sin carne"

I like it!!

In a somewhat similar way, when I described here how in Greece I'd been served a very tasty fish moussaka, a Greek colleague said 'there's no such thing as a fish moussaka; such a thing cannot be', even though everything else about the ingredients and the way it was prepared was the same as a moussaka.

I frequently cook vegetarian chilli. I'd normally just call it chilli, but I like "chilli sin carne".

As I have a young daughter who doesn't like spicy food, I sometimes cook it with no chillies in at all: with lots of paprika instead, and the normal cumin, oregano and garlic, it is still recognisably a chilli. So, if I make a chilli con carne with no chillies and no meat, is it a con?

Paprika is a chile product; dried, ground, and sometimes smoked capsicum berries. So no, Chili with paprika is still chili.

The OED treatment of chilli pepper stresses that, botanically speaking, a chilli isn't a pepper. Conversely, the pepper that paprika is made from isn't a chilli.

I can easily taste the difference — when they're not too hot to disguise the flavour, that is.

In Sweden, a vegetarian chile con carne is called "chile sin carne". And we eat it with rice, of course.

jalapeno - yes. Or ancho, anaheim, serrano, poblano, and probably a dozen more. These days groceries also have green and red thai peppers (small, thin, hard, and hot). But chipotle is not a separate kind of pepper, it is a pepper that has been dried and smoked.

Is it? You see, I didn't know that! Okay, we do get more varieties of chilli peppers than we did 20 years ago, but the supermarkets still sell generic "chillis" and anything else is either bought in a shop catering to e.g. Jamaicans or else preserved. Oh, you co sometimes get jalapenos stuffed with cream cheese, and very good they are, too, but they are preserved, not fresh.

We call them bell peppers in the U.S. too. Though, I'm never sure if something is a southern thing (where I'm from) or if it applies to America as a whole.

Chili con carne in a Mexican restaurant? But it isn't a Mexican dish! It's Texan or at least Southwestern US. Yes,there are Mexican dishes made of meat and peppers: chile colorado, chile verde, chile de res, but they are not chili con carne. Here in California a Tex-Mex restaurant might have both chili con carne and tacos on the menu but it would almost certainly be advertising itself as Tex-Mex.

It's got to be an American thing. I'm from Connecticut and we say bell pepper. In fact, I've only ever heard sweet pepper out of an Englishman's mouth

Yes, I was unclear - I meant that what you call bell peppers are what we call sweet peppers, but I realise that I was ambiguous!

There was indeed a motivation.

I was beginning to wonder whether the Nahuatl dictionary had been written in French but by a British English speaker..

But no. According Wiktionary the Classical Nahuatl word was pronounced with a long L-sound. They offer two IPA transcriptions. One is tʃ͡iːlli but their preferred one is tʃ͡iːlːi which doesn't suggest a syllabic break between two L-sounds.

Well, 'definitive' has lots of meanings and the slogan is playing on that. Some of those meanings are definitely gradable.

And the sense they're probably most wanting to bring up is 'authoritative', and you can definitely be more or less authoritative--so I don't see a problem here.

The usual sorts of canned chili are typically found both with and without beans. The version without beans commonly has a very visible note to that effect on the front.

That said, I think that if I were to order a bowl of chili (and it's usually sold in bowls or cups) in a restaurant, I'd expect to see beans.

Again, this is for chili, not New Mexico red or green chile, which is an entirely different thing.

There is no definitive answer to the question of "beans in chili", as there are SIGNIFICANT differences in opinion based on where you live. This is similar to the differences in the definition of barbeque across the US (where it can mean anything from an outdoor gathering where food is cooked on a grill to chopped pork in a vinegar sauce to beef ribs cooked in a red sauce). There are as many types of chili (the soup/stew/sauce) as there are regions in the US.

So for me, I hate beans in my chili, but I suck it up because I live in a part of the country where beans are required (even if someone is making white chicken chili).

Agree with @Amanda -- you can fill a whole racks of cookbooks just on chili, with wildly disputing recipes. My mother's parents both grew up in the Texas panhandle, so we're pretty firmly of the meat, meat, and more meat school of chili making. Pinto peans are served on the side only (and I've never cared for them that much, but it's been too many years so my tastes may have changed). Oh, and cornbread's pretty much mandatory too, not the sicky-sweet Northern variety with far too much (wheat) flour in them. Preferably in stick form. Wow, typing this makes me remember.....

My understanding is that chile, or chili of you prefer, is a lot like barbecue. The recipe varies greatly according to region, and adherents to one variety have very strong opinions as to why their version is the most "authentic". Whete I grew up, chili always had not red beans, but red kidney beans. But I believe that beans in chili is abhorrent to some. From Texas, if I am not mistaken.

Another variation in serving, whuch I have not seen mentioned here is "chilimac", which is chili, usually leftover, mixed with elbow macaroni and sometimes cheddar or American cheese. It is often made as a way of stretching the leftover chili.

My grandmother, way back in the early 1970s or before, used to soak dried chillis in sherry for 3 weeks, before using the resultant liquid to flavour soups and stews. I still do - chilli sherry is very much a thing, and I really like it in cooking. You can top up the sherry a couple of times, too.

There's another food where we do depart from spelling pronunciation of letter-I plus double consonant. At least we do now.

I'm pretty sure that when pizza was still more of a novelty in Britain, some people pronounced it with a KIT vowel. I don't remember people using an English-type Z-sound. It would have been an easy matter to hear and adopt the extra T-sound. But many British ears were deaf to any other sort of I-sound.

But then pizza became popular and often spoken of, so pretty well everyone uses the FLEECE vowel.

Hi, Rachael -- AmE speaker here, and can attest that I've only ever heard the FLEECE vowel in one-t pita, among AmE speakers.

And in case you haven't seen it before, fil(l)et is discussed here: https://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2006/08/pronouncing-french-words-and-names.html.

I (BrE) spell it pita and pronounce it peeta. I first came across it over 30 years ago in Australia where some people called it "Lebanese bread"

The Italians don't say peetza; it is much more like pitza.

The Italians don't say peetza; it is much more like pitza.

I suppose it depends on how you say KIT and FLEECE in your accent. Personally, I don't think I've ever heard an Italian pronounce any word with the vowel that I use for KIT.

I am now reminded of an anecdote someone told in a programme on Radio many years ago. He was an Englishman at some sort of banquet in the US and the wait staff were going around the table asking a question. When they got to him, he heard the question as, "How do you like your flaming yonkurt?"

He was flummoxed. Was this some item from an exotic cuisine, Turkish perhaps, that he'd never come across before?

Finally, the person sitting next to him translated for him: "How do you like your filet mignon cooked?"

(And, in a similar vein, in 1981 I went with some friends to a Mexican restaurant in Denver and was asked a question that sounded like, "Do you want [some name]s mother?" This was finally explained to me as "Do you want your tacos smothered?" but as I had no previous experience of Mexican cuisine, I was still at a loss as to know what it meant.)

Contrary to the OED, I'd say the usual AmE pronunciation is peeta.

FWIW, Lynne covered "fillet/filet" and similar words some years ago now, here.

Paul, the last time I said 'Yes' to an incomprehensible offer like that I was in a Leningrad park in winter, queuing at an outdoor beer kiosk. (Draught beer was hard to find in the old USSR.)

The vending woman turned to a second tap and gave me a shot of heated foam to take the chill off the glass and the top of the beer — the sipping-from part.

It was good.

Oh, blast, of course there's a better comment further down in the thread, and by the estimable David Crosbie and Lynne herself. Agree with Lynne on AmE pronunciation; I don't ever recall hearing the flap in pita -- just FLEECE plus a fully-enunciated (almost over-enunciated, to AmE ears) T.

Yes, the OED sound file for the entry sounds like a FLEECE vowel. Two editors disagreeing? A typing error?

Upon reflection, this vowel sound association is strong enough in AmE that it also affects the pronunciation of PITA, the acronym, even though the "I" there stands for "in".

Sorry, Doug, you'll need to explain what PITA stands for, and how it's pronounced.

"Pain in the ass", or "arse" I suppose if you are that way inclined. Using the acronym reduces the chance that your interlocutor will take offense

Transcription as /ˈpɪdə/ must have been a mistake, which has since been corrected; the OED's page for pita (last modified March 2022) now shows the US pronunciation as /ˈpidə/. (Actually, the t in pita may or may not be flapped and voiced. You can hear both on Youglish. I would say both are normal American pronunciations.)

In most accents of England — and of some other chunks of Britain — the FLEECE vowel makes those words sound like Peter.

Come to think of it, I have a friend whose unusual name sounds like that even in 'rhotic' accents — accents that pronounce R-sounds even when there's no following vowel. But she's spelled Peta.

Oh yes! The organisation PETA is pronounced the same way — at least whenever I've heard it spoken.

But we do accept the foreign long-I before t in some names taken from other languages: Rita and Margaritaetc, and the more obviously foreign señorita.

I'm fascinating by a distinction: are FLEECE and "foreign-long-I" different is some dialects? To me they're the same: fleece, Lisa, Elise, pizza, Peter, pita, margarita (rocks and salt, please) -- oh, and "please" itself -- all take exactly the same vowel, including length.

(I omitted "Theresa" only because I didn't want to reopen that conversation...) ;-).

Christian, the historical association of KIT and PRICE with short I and long I respectively has not lost its potency in accents of British English.

This can affect our spelling pronunciations — the pronunciation of Lisa to rhyme with miser is still heard. But there's a long-ish history of foreign words spelled with letter-I and a single consonant letter but which are pronounced with something like our FLEECE vowel.

Ignoring exceptions — which is, of course exactly what we do — spelling~sound correspondences fall into three classes:
1. Letter-I followed by two consonant letters (or one final consonannt) corresponds to KIT.
2. Letter-I followed by one consonant corresponds to PRICE.
3. Letter-I followed by one consonant corresponds to FLEECE.

To me at least, both Class 2 and Class 3 are long I. The words covered by Class 3 are foreign and relativelyin origin, so I think of the sound — in relation to its spelling — as foreign long I.

in Accents of English, John Wells identifies three groups of words with the FLEECE vowel. Two had different E-sounds in Middle English, but then merged and changed to the modern sound. English spelling was largely regularised before the two sounds merged, so the former distinction is widely preserved in the spellings ee versus ea. The third, much smaller group is of recent borrowings from French and then other languages. Wells's example list is:

police, machine, prestige, elite, mosquito, casino, trio, ski, chic ...

Of your examples, Peter belongs to the same class as the ee words. And please is, of course, in the ea class. In Middle English the two words were pronounced with different vowels.

I think of both Peter and please as having a long E. But it's impossible to think that of machine. Hence the invented term foreign long I.

But, no, they're not different sounds in my accent or in any accent that I know of.

Leaving aside the word Theresa itself, there are foreign borrowings with E spelling and a FACE vowel, But they're not numerous and don't call out to be treated as a class. Wells lists only
crêpe, fête (often spelled just crepe, fete), bouquet ...

Also reasonably common: melee, melange

and if you allow final syllable FACE vowel sound (bouquet) then cafe, duvet, née, parquet, risqué are also reasonably common examples.

Ethan, you've almost persuaded me to invent a new category of foreign long E spelling correspondences. However, John Wells's examples and yours seem to constitute a narrower category — French words with approximations to French pronunciation.

I wouldn't myself pronounce melange with a FACE vowel, by the way.

OK, I'll renounce my some vows, and attempt a taxonomy on vowel spelling-to-sound correspondences with made-up categories.

I'll call the categories CHECKED, LONG and INTERNATIONAL.

There's a virtual pure system which doesn't exist even for RP-speakers, but seems to underlie what we actually do.

…..…CHECKED……..…..LONG……....INTERNATIONAL
A……TRAP……………....FACE…….….BATH
E……DRESS……………..FLEECE…….FACE
I…….KIT……………...…...PRICE……….FLEECE
O…...LOT………………….GOAT………..GOAT
U…..STRUT………………Y+GOOSE…..GOOSE
(Y…..KIT………………….PRICE)

Letter, by letter

A:
Between accents of England, BATH words are not consistently pronounced. RP speakers and some others consistently use a PALM vowel. But — depending (often but not always) on geography — many speakers use the TRAP vowel for INTERNATIONAL words. Amazingly, some Pakistanis hear this as an insult.

E:
The INTERNATIONAL correspondence seems to be largely confined to two groups of words:
• obvious French borrowings, some spelled (sometimes) with French accents
• women's names such as Theresa, Irena, Helena...
As discussed elsewhere, there is no consistency over the names.

I:
A long time ago, before American English could even exist, we started taking words from French like police with an INTERNATIONAL vowel correspondence. As already discussed, all dialects use INTERNATIONAL FLEECE for a number of words adopted from a number of languages. But AmE has been readier than BrE to do so with recent borrowings.

O:
American accents have destroyed the system. The LOT vowel is like the PALM vowel, so can't be categorised as distinctively CHECKED. The AmE GOAT vowel is close to the o sound in many languages — in which it can be CHECKED or not. Because there is no vestige of the old SHORT-LONG system, Americans tend to have a GOAT vowel in words ending in –os (see the Barbados thread). This extends to words from Classical Greek where they were spelled with omicron — the short vowel letter.

U:
In LONG correspondence RP and some other accents seem be consistent in inserting a Y-sound in words spelled with U — with the exception of words spelled with –LU- or –RU-. We don't do this with recent and obvious borrowings such as hula or sumo.

In AmE, mesa, beta, eta, zeta, and many other loanwords use that FACE vowel for the e. It's not just French loanwords. There is a variant pronunciation of "rodeo" that uses the FACE vowel as well, but it's not one that I use.

And I'd use the FACE vowel (or a fairly close approximation) for the vowel in melange as well.

My perception is that during the 19th century, AmE was very willing to Americanize pronunciation of loanwords (see the pronunciations of Cairo IL and Versailles IN for examples), but is much less willing to do that now. We seem to prefer a closer approximation of native pronunciation for loan words now, at least for words from languages that Americans commonly borrow from.

Doug, I know of Cairo Illinois only from Blues singers who (to my ear) pronounce it with a FACE vowel. That doesn't seem to me like Amercanising or any other Anglicising. Or is it actually a SQUARE vowel?

Your pronunciation of mesa is understandable. But beta, eta and theta must reflect a change from the long-E value of the time that your ancestors took to America. Eta itself was the long E of Classical Greek — distinct from the short-E epsilon.

And just how do you pronounces Versailles Indiana?

We too have opened up in the last century or so to pronunciations that run counter to English spelling patterns. Not so long ago, we pronounced Prague to rhyme with vague. And the Irish still do when referring to the Virgin Mary as Our Lady of Prague. But British and Irish alike now use the PALM vowel fro the Czech capital.

But our openness is much weaker than yours — which is somewhat ironic, as we like to pride ourselves on being more open than you to the outside world. Not so, apparently.

David, I think I've mentioned on these threads before that the local inhabitants of Bath pronounce the vowel in their city's name in a different way yet again, neither with the 'trap' vowel, nor the 'palm' one but as a longer version of the 'trap' vowel, a sound which I don't think exists in RP. It's closest to the sound in 'Baa' meant to represent the noise a sheep makes.

However, one also needs to be careful referring to the 'palm' vowel as such. It may surprise people from other dialect communities to be told that there are some dialects where the 'l' in 'palm' represents a sound that is pronounced. It's not the 'l' as in 'light' or 'love' but a sort of swallowed 'l'. I suspect that most of the places where this happens are also rhotic, but not all rhotic places do this.

"Is my family the only one that serves chili with corn bread? Regular unsweetened Southern-style cornbread for everyday, or fancy cornbread with cheese, green chilis, corn, and onions for Superbowl parties."

Nope, as a foreigner transplanted to Southern California, cornbread (fancified or otherwise) is the only accompaniment to bowl of chili I have ever experienced. The chili (con or sin carne) of course has the obligatory diced raw onion and grated cheese topping.

David,

The American city of Cairo, Illinois, is pronounced with the FACE vowel. The American pronunciation of the Egyptian city Cairo is with the vowel in PIE (or TIE, DIE, MY, etc.).

In many (most?) American dialects, the FACE vowel and the SQUARE vowel are the same phoneme (what nonlinguists call "long a", so most folks would't really understand your apparent distinguishing of them as different vowels. A coda R does color the vowel, though, so they are different allophones, if that's what you were asking about. In the case of Cairo, Ill., the R is the onset of the second syllable not the coda of the first, so it's a "pure" FACE allophone not the R-colored one. It's pronounced, with an initial K, of course, like "Hey, Row" not like "Hair, Oh." (And the Egyptian city is pronounced like "Tie, Row" not like "Tire, Oh.") Both pronunciations are a little unusual in that the stressed syllable (the first one for both) doesn't pull the R to be a coda as stressed syllables often do.)

Versailles, IN, also has the FACE vowel and is pronounced with the second syllable stressed and exactly like the noun "sales" (as in "Walmart and Target both got back-to-school sales going on right now").

Dru, John Wells's lexical sets were complied to establish a basis in two reference accents: RP and General American. For the most part, vowel sounds in individual accents can be described quite simply in terms of sound values for words in each set. It's simple as long as all the words belong in the usual lexical set. But if someone pronounced a word — the city Bath, say — in a different way to the other words in the set, then it not too difficult to describe it j=in terms of belonging in a different set.

When it comes to local variation such as pronouncing an L-sound in palm say, it's still straightforward to speak in terms of difference from the reference accents.

Wells allowed himself just under two pages to discuss BATH/TRAP/PALM/START vowel sounds in West Country accents. But that's a big geographical area with many local differences. And there are class-based differences too. So there's a lot of detail, but not enough to pin down what he thinks of the accent(s) of Bath (the city).

He does recognise three A-sounds in some middle-class Southampton speakers, for example. At this level of detail he has to use IPA notation
[æː] ~ [æ] ~[ɑː]
hand ~ land ~ command
Sam ~ Spam ~ psalm

But often it's possible to speak of, for example, a lengthened TRAP vowel — a process that can happen in different accents with different actual sounds produced.

PALM was chosen as a label for its lexical set because the 'native' core members are very few indeed — fourteen words, he thought. The spelling of palm (like calm and psalm) is eye-catchingly easy to remember — unlike bra or blah. It's no big deal to explain that in a certain accent the three words spelled with -alm — plus geographical names such as Calne — are pronounced differently from the expected.

Cairo, IL is pronounced with the FACE vowel. Cairo, Egypt is pronounced with the EYE vowel (approximately). Or at least that's the case with all the news presenters and Arabic speakers that I've listened to or talked to. I'd call that an Americanization, though it's possible that was the common pronunciation in all dialects of English at the time the city was established.

Versailles, IN is pronounced with the FACE vowel and a voiced 'L' (rhyme with "fur sales", though the stress is on the second syllable in 'Versailles').

Those Greek letters are universally pronounced with a European "long-E" (FACE, see, for instance the article "dem" in German, which has a very similar value for the 'e') in AmE.

As to openness, we've been doing mass immigration for quite a long time, so for the average person in the US, direct exposure (non-native-English-speaking neighbors, for instance) to many languages is more common than is my perception of the case in the UK until pretty recently.

Joel


In many (most?) American dialects, the FACE vowel and the SQUARE vowel are the same phoneme (what nonlinguists call "long a", so most folks would't really understand your apparent distinguishing of them as different vowels.

That's the beauty of John Wells's LEXICAL SET idea. The notion of a phoneme becomes irrelevant. Only for the purpose of comparing accents, of course. It remains vital in any understanding of a single speaker , accent, dialect, language.

The FACE and SQUARE lexical sets are distinct sets of words, irrespective of whether a speakers perceives them as two phonemes or one. As it happens, the sound values in my near-RP accent sound hugely different, and that's true for most of the accents I'm used to hearing. My ear wasn't attuned to equivalence or near equivalence in American accents. I always understood what you meant, so it didn't jar.

Here in Britain, non-linguists are likely to identify their FACE vowel as long-A — if only because of the way they've been taught to read and spell. My contention is that it remains a psychological reality because in accents of my type the system of the vowel-sound inventory has (in large part) remained unchanged while the values changed dramatically.

The SQUARE lexical set is a Johnny-come lately, the result of a historic R-sound influencing some sort of historic A-sound. In RP (and, I think, in most British accents) it's a stable set of words pronounced with a diphthong which starts like your DRESS vowel or a lengthened 'pure' vowel which starts and stops there. In American accents, I now read, it isn't a very stable set. And it's by no means a distinct one. Outside North America, Wells write, accents (all accents?) make a three-way distinction Mary ~ merry ~ marry.

When I wrote 'Or is it actually a SQUARE vowel?' I wasn't aware how little the idea of a SQUARE lexical set is to North American accents.

So I would say that answer to my question is that the first syllable of Cairo Illinois has a DRESS vowel.

Doug

Cairo, IL is pronounced with the FACE vowel.

In my answer to Joel T Luber, I argued that it's pronounced with a DRESS vowel. This was based on his assertion that the FACE and SQUARE vowels are identical. So let's dismiss this idea and divide our sounds into three sets: DRESS, FACE and SQUARE.

In all the North American accents (except Newfoundland) that John Wells makes inventories for in Accents of English, words in the FACE lexical set are pronounced with a diphthong that is clearly distinct from the vowel shared by words in the DRESS set. He uses the same notation as for British RP — namely eɪ. I agree that this is reasonably close to e in German and other languages. I assume that — unless we were trying to speak German — we could both use a FACE vowel for the town of Bremen.

The SQUARE lexical set doesn't really exist in North American accents, but In British accents it's stable and distinct. Even in the odd accent where the vowel is a longer version of that accent's DRESS vowel, it still sounds to the hearer as clearly distinct. Wells represents the value as ɛə or in some accents ɛː.

Now when 'restored' Classical Greek pronunciation was explained to me, three facts made an impression:
• Eta (Ηη) makes a syllable metrically long.
• In dialects other than Attic the spelling Αα is used instead — again in metrically long syllables.
• The sound that a sheep makes involved the spelling βη- (Attic) or βα- (other dialects).

This was evidence for something like aː or ɑː for long alpha and ɛː for eta.

Now the symbol ɛ represents something with a lower tongue and more open mouth than what is represented by the symbol e. The sound in British accents which is closest to the long version ɛː is the sound we use in SQUARE words. So when we accepted the 'restored pronunciation', that's the value we assigned to eta. To the short epsilon sound we continues to assign the value of the DRESS vowel, which is closer to e in many accents, and in any case is distinctly shorter than and SQUARE sound.

After all, sheep don't go Bay! — any more than they went 'Bee!' before.

Before the reform — in the nineteenth or early twentieth century, depending on the school or university where Greek was being taught — British and American pronunciation would have been identical:

Εε epsilon — DRESS
Ηη eta — FLEECE
Οο omicron — LOT
Ωω omega — GOAT

British schools and universities still use four different sounds

Εε epsilon — DRESS
Ηη eta — SQUARE
Οο omicron — LOT
Ωω omega — GOAT

I get the impression that American schools and colleges use only two.

[Coincidentally, the value of eta in Greek has shifted to something very like the FLEECE value we use in British pronunciation of Classical Greek. This shift had already happened when eta was adapted for the Cyrillic alphabet, where it appears as Ии with a value not unlike our FLEECE.]

Returning to Cairo Illinois. If indeed it is and always has been pronounced with the vowel shares by words such as tape, wait, break, then it looks like a one-off. The nearest spelling similarities I can think of are words like hair, hairy, dairy, fair, fairy, prairie. Are any of those pronounced anywhere with a FACE vowel?

Where I think both colonials and stay-at-homes would have agreed is in assigning the FACE value of the time and place to the spelling ae as in Israel, Ishmael

David,

I started writing up a big reply about lexical sets vs. phonemes, but I think we're mostly on the same page, just you're more interested in phonetics and I'm more interested in phonology.

Here's my take on the phonemes and allophones for the FACE and SQUARE vowel(s) in General American:

'face'
phoneme: /e/
allophone: [eɪ]

'square'
phonemes: /e/ + /r/
allophone: [eər] or [ɛər]

The last of these is what you're getting at when you talk about the DRESS vowel, right? I agree that the actual pronunciation of "square" in Gen. Am. may have [ɛ], but we don't think of "square" being in the DRESS vowel set because that's not the underlying phoneme. (I can't think of any words with the phonemic DRESS vowel followed by "r," so I wonder if any words that historically had that phoneme cluster merged into the FACE/SQUARE set.)

I did some more digging into the pronunciation of Cairo, Ill., and it seems that locals do pronounce it with the R-colored DRESS vowel allophone (Care-Oh, [kɛr oʊ]) but I've mostly heard it pronounced elsewhere as Kay-Row ([keɪ roʊ]) with the R as onset of the second syllable (as I claimed in my earlier comment). I think both are probably pretty common in various parts of the US. See the discussion here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3ACairo,_Illinois#Pronunciation

Here's a video that includes both pronunciations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuV9_sYmw3U. The narrator uses the Kay-Row pronunciation but all of the interviewees use the Care-Oh pronunciation (see also other videos from this film at http://www.betweentworivers.net/video.htm).

I neglected to finish the story.

When the old pronunciation of eta was abandoned, here in Britain it only affected how we declaimed or cited Classical Greek. The pronunciation of the names of Greek letters remained unchanged. So it's still the FLEECE vowel for the names beta, eta, theta.

But in America the new FACE pronunciation spilled out from the sound of eta to the name of eta — along with beta and theta.

Joel

'square'
phonemes: /e/ + /r/
allophone: [eər] or [ɛər]

The last of these is what you're getting at when you talk about the DRESS vowel, right?

No, Joel. In my accent and many like it /ɛ/, /ei/ and /ɛə/ are three distinct phonemes. The third of these has the two allophones [ɛə] and [ɛəɹ]. However,
• Some broadly similar accents may have [e] where I have [ɛ].
• Some broadly accents may have [ʌɪ] or [æɪ] where I have [ei].
• Some may have [ɛː] and [ɛːɹ] where I have [ɛə] and [ɛəɹ]. Some (the rhotic ones) may have only [ɛːɹ] or [ɛəɹ].
[Clearly, we needn't worry about allophones of /r/.]

What the lexical set concept does is to disregard the phonetic differences that don't matter when comparing accents, and focus on the phonetic and phonemic differences that do matter.

Depending on how you want to look at it, either I have one /ɔː/ phoneme with allophones [ɔː] and [ɔːr] or I have two phomemes: one which is always [ɔː] and the other with allophones [ɔː] and [ɔːr]. Complicated, and unnecessarily so. What lexical sets do is to single out words where my sound corresponds to that of a speaker with a different accent.
• For me FORCE and NORTH are a single set, but that's not true of some other accents.
• In the absence of a following R-sound, my THOUGHT words share the same /ɔː/ phoneme with FORCE and NORTH. This is so obviously not true for yours that there's a widely used term — rhotic — for this difference between accents.

I find it interesting that of the non-rhotic allophones of the vowels in the sets NURSE, NEAR, SQUARE, START, NORTH, FORCE, CURE, two have values that don't exist elsewhere (in at least one accent). These are
• ɜː in NURSE (in many accents)
• ɛ in SQUARE. (in accents with e for DRESS words)

Does that mean that they are extra phonemes in the speaker's inventory? I find it hard to answer, and I don't really care all that much.

So if DRESS, FACE and SQUARE don't refer to phonemes or allophones, what do they signify? They apply to sets of words which share the same sound — whether phonemically distinct or just allophonic — within a given accent.

Some selections from Wells's lists:

DRESS step, edge, bell, threat, many, friend, said, bury
FACE tape, bacon, April, bass (in music), gaol, gage, fête, bouquet, wait, veil, they, weigh, campaign, great
SQUARE care, air, bear, heir, their, prayer, scarce, vary, dairy, aerial (in RP but not in General American)

That last word illustrates how to mark an unusual difference between accents: in mine, aerial belongs in the SQUARE set; in your it belongs in the FACE set. It seems that the same can be said for Cairo Illinois. For the locals, Cairo belongs in the SQUARE set. For outsiders, it belongs in the FACE set.

Joel

I can't think of any words with the phonemic DRESS vowel followed by "r,"

The DRESS vowel may or may not be 'phonemic' in the sense you're using, but it can certainly be followed by an R-sound. Examples: very, ferry, bury, and many, many more.

Historically, this combination goes back to stressed short-E followed by R followed by a vowel sound. When followed by a consonant, the result was the NURSE vowel.

By contrast, the SQUARE vowel derives from long-A (or diphthong AI) followed by R — as is so often suggested by the spelling.

P.S. Wells doesn't usually write in terms of phonemes, but he does use the concept in this instance. He concludes that the SQUARE vowel is diphthongal and phonemic in RP and in the New York accent — but not in other American accents.

Having grown up less than 50 miles from Cairo, IL, the challenge is that the "ai" has a twist that I can't put in writing. It's a split between Care-oh and Kay-row. Regardless of the actual phonemic spelling, Cairo, IL is pronounced more like Karo Syrup and much less like Cairo, Egypt.

Also in Illinois: New Berlin (New BER-lin) and New Athens (New AA-thins), as well as my favorite, Beaucoup creek (buck-up creek)

Reminds me that many years ago I was working on a computer program with a Bulgarian programmer. He had written the spec (in English) and I was asked to review it as it involved some complicated trigonometry that our boss thought Id be able understand.

I kept on coming across the word "tita" which I didn't recognise so I asked him about it. He was, as is conventional in trig, using Greek letters to denote angles. It seems that theta is pronounced tita in Bulgarian.

Just to confuse things further, I believe the Greeks themselves pronounce both Classical Greek and Biblical Greek (Koine) as though they were Modern Greek. That includes ευ and αυ as ev and av.

Dru, most interesting comment about "Bath" as pronounced by locals. I lived nearby in Wiltshire; Bath was pronounced as you describe. Calne, a nearby town, was pronounced with a short A and the L was sounded, whereas posher people said "Carn". Similarly with psalm, palm, etc..

AmandaP
We also havs a New Berlin in Wisconsin. Pronounced the same as in Illinois. We also have a Rio (Rye-o), and my favorite, Lac Courte Orielles, pronounced LaCooderay.

Paul, your Bulgarian tita reminds me that the letter theta θ was transferred from Greek to the Cyrillic alphabet. So it must have once been used to write Bulgarian.

I'm not sure what happened in Bulgarian, but in Russian the sound merged with the sound of phi ф. Both letters came to represent the same sound, so theta was only used in words and names taken from Greek. The name Theodor sounded like Feodor in Russian — so that's the way we usually spell Dostoevsky's first name.

Letter fita ѳѲ was dropped from the Russian Cyrillic alphabet after 1917 — which left some Russians with two ways of spelling their surnames. One such was called Ферамин when he was in Russia, but Ѳерамин when he was in America. That's why the musical instrument he invented is sometimes called a feramin and sometimes called a theramin.

Cincinnati chili was mentioned obliquely ("Midwest") but not by name. I'm from that area but I didn't bring it up because I thought it would confuse the issue of defining actual Chili.

BTW, chili cheese baked potatoes are on the menu at Wendy's (https://menu.wendys.com/en_US/product/chili-cheese-baked-potato/) and lots of recipes for "baked potato bar" include chili.

Shy-reply, you wrote

And so to FACE and SQUARE. A Scot hears these as the same.

This reflects a difference between Scottish accents and most others.

When English spelling was standardised, both words were pronounced with long a. Only the length distinguished them from the similarly spelled fast and farm. The sounds changed, but the spellings didn't.

As part of what's called the Great Vowel Shift, long a changed in quality to something quite different from short a.

First,long a changed to the sort of value it has in Scottish accents.

Then in England it changed to two different sounds:
1. a diphthong ending in a Y-sound in most words
2. a diphthong ending in little grunt before R-sounds

The first part of the two diphthongs was the same at first. But then it changed in the first part of the second diphthong. For a Scottish speaker, it's like the difference between face and dress. In the phonetician's alphabet IPA it's represented as a change from eə to ɛə.

After this, the second diphthong — the SQUARE sound — changed in some regions.
* In most accents of England and other countries, but not in North America, it lost the R-sound.
* In most accents of North America, the R-sound was lost, and the diphthong was simplified to a vowel sound — a different vowel in different accents.

If you're interested, there's a full account in Accents of English by John Wells.

You also wrote

When I was younger, I was often told by Europeans that my pronunciation was easier to understand than that of those using RP.

I've also heard that. I think the reason is that some Europeans are unhappy with the non-Scottish pronunciation of words spelled with ar, er, ir, or, ur. This unhappiness may have been stronger in the past when people relied much more on written texts and the Scottish pronunciation of these words was closer to what they expected. Nowadays, learners hear words from the start — often before they read them. So the problem is remembering the spelling rather than recognising the pronunciation.