this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
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the "au" makes a sound like 'oar' like in "pause"
Wait.. if "sauce" is "sorse", how is "source" pronounced?
Those are homophones. If I told you about the source of the Nile I could be talking about something Egyptians put on their chips.
All occurrences of "au"? Audience? Cautious? Daughter? Or is there some kind of restraint like only if the proceeding consonant is hard or soft?
I have posted an audio clip up there ↑ in this very thread!
All those examples are the same sounds to me. With how English spelling is, there are 'au' words I say differently (I say "because" like "b'cuzz"), but I can't think of any that would rhyme with cross
I've also heard giraffe pronounced "girarffe" by a Brit. (Or at least implied since it was rhymed with "scarf" in a Julie Donaldson book.) Maybe there's some rule regarding "R" sounds on the ends of certain vowel sounds.
Aha! You have discovered the non-rhotic accent. Most, but not all Brits (along with Aussies and some rural Americans) do not usually sound out r's unless they're followed by a vowel. In my northern England accent, giraffe and scarf have different a sounds, but also scarf has no audible r. I'd guess Julia Donaldson speaks more Southern or RP so giraffe would rhyme with scarf would rhyme with half.
Aww, you silly Brits.
My buddy (we're from Canada) went to Australia for some time. He was a smoker, and lived with a bunch of other smokers. In Canada, if you want to ask someone for a smoke, you say "Can I bum a smoke?". In Australia, it's "Can I get a fag?" In the spirit of international cooperation, the expression soon became: "Can I bum a fag?" Much maturity.
I thought about this a little and I agree that I don't think there's any English words other than "because" that have the ɒ sound for "au". They're basically all ɔː.
You can look up the pronunciations for those symbols by searching for "IPA English". It helps for describing vocal sounds.
That's not an English thing that's an "English" thing.
Exactly the same way. Sauce and source are the same for us in England.
So to us, it's like OP is saying "criss cross apple source", which just sounds silly.
In the US, it really doesn't.
The proper American phonetic for sauce is "saas". The proper american phonetic for cross is "craas".
I think you MIGHT be able to defend it for British English, which use phonetics "kros" and "haws" and "saws" for above words. But I would say "aws" and "os" phonetics are close enough to to count as rhyming by most standards, and classical poetry uses far less clear rhymes commonly.
I (Brit) didn't even recognise it as intended as a rhyme until I read this comment section
That's really interesting. I ran it through a british tts and it sounded closer than a lot of classic poetry rhymes.. Yeah, it's not exactly the same, but it's similar.
Run that string through an American English TTS, and you'll see exactly how perfect it rhymes.
"Cross" is very short in British English dialects, meanwhile "sauce" is much closer to "source", to the point that they're almost indistinguishable. American English dialects tend to elongate the "ahh" sounds.
Sauce: I used to speak in American, but now I speak in bastardised English where I trip off the path and whipe my ass on the grass, but no one ever knows how I might pronounce those words.
If you check back on this thread, I've posted audio of how I say it. I think it's 'cross' that's really different - US doesn't really have that short o sound but has an 'aw' instead. If I say 'criss craws applesauce' then the intended rhyme makes itself clear.
Have you ever been to Bristol? The way they pronounce "half" reminds me of American accents. Not "half" like the Queen's English, not "haff" like some places oop norff, but "haaaff" said with kind of a wide mouth. It perhaps makes sense, as Bristol was a port town that a lot of early immigrants to America started from.
That and Scottish kids. I think they watch so much YouTube these days (particularly up in the middle of nowhere) that they pick up a twang of American.
I wanted to say something about the influence of West Indian immigrants on Bristol culture, but I don't know enough about it to be confident of not putting my foot in my mouth. It's an interesting place, for sure.