I'll be off-line for a few days, so here's something to discuss amongst yourselves.
Fatherhood has made Better Half go all musical--he's constantly making up songs to sing to little Grover. I've been keeping track of some of the rhymes that he makes that wouldn't rhyme at all if I were to say them:
Incidentally, all this seems related to the reason [or one of the reasons] that Grover isn't named Frances, though we both like that name (that, and the fact that we like the name we gave her that much better). Our pronunciations of the 'a' make Frances sound like two different names, and we were afraid that would cause a personality disorder in our child. (Unfortunately, there are no 'a'+/ns/ words on Sound Comparisons, so again, you'll have to extrapolate from the difference in bath.) Somehow the fact that we've given her a name (yes, her real-life name, as well as her pseudonym) with a post-vocalic /r/ didn't seem like as much of a problem. I have no idea whether she's figured out yet that what Daddy says and what (BrE) Mummy says are both the same word, and her name. They say that a baby can recogni{s/z}e her/his name at four months old, but Grover doesn't particularly take notice when I call her name, so perhaps we've already done what Larkin said we'd do.
So, over to you, what rhymes have come between you and a speaker of another dialect?
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Fatherhood has made Better Half go all musical--he's constantly making up songs to sing to little Grover. I've been keeping track of some of the rhymes that he makes that wouldn't rhyme at all if I were to say them:
garden - Baden-BadenAll three of the so-called rhymes are scuppered by our different rhoticity (BH being non-rhotic and me rhotic), but we also have different vowels in banana and naughty. (We both approximate the German Baden-Baden in roughly the same way.) His banana has low, back vowels in both the last two syllables; mine has an [ae] (imagine that as a single symbol) in the middle. Thus, the middle syllable differs in much the same way as our pronunciations of bath differ--so check out bath on the Sound Comparisons website, if you'd like to hear that difference. The first vowel in naughty is much rounder in BH's dialect than in mine--see daughter on the Sound Comparisons site. In both cases on that site, my pronunciation is more like Ohio than 'Standard American' (the Standard American guy has a really annoying uptalk thing going on) and his is close enough to RP.
banana - James Garner
snorty - naughty
Incidentally, all this seems related to the reason [or one of the reasons] that Grover isn't named Frances, though we both like that name (that, and the fact that we like the name we gave her that much better). Our pronunciations of the 'a' make Frances sound like two different names, and we were afraid that would cause a personality disorder in our child. (Unfortunately, there are no 'a'+/ns/ words on Sound Comparisons, so again, you'll have to extrapolate from the difference in bath.) Somehow the fact that we've given her a name (yes, her real-life name, as well as her pseudonym) with a post-vocalic /r/ didn't seem like as much of a problem. I have no idea whether she's figured out yet that what Daddy says and what (BrE) Mummy says are both the same word, and her name. They say that a baby can recogni{s/z}e her/his name at four months old, but Grover doesn't particularly take notice when I call her name, so perhaps we've already done what Larkin said we'd do.
So, over to you, what rhymes have come between you and a speaker of another dialect?