Hey, are there any rhymes for "yeah" in rhotic accents?

[conuly]

I can't think of any, but that can't be right, can it?

Comments

[angelofthenorth]

Tare

[conuly]

Nope. Not for me. Remember - rhotic accent. Assume anything that ends with -r or -re will not rhyme with yeah.

[cactuswatcher]

Only 'nah,' and only with the right pronunciation.

[conuly]

Not that one to me either.

Huh. Here I thought all the unrhymable words were like "purple" or "silver" or "orange", you know, colors.

[redbird]

month

[darkoshi]

The closest I can come up with so far is "waaah" like the sound of a baby crying, which I can't find in the dictionary. Other than that, nah and baa (sheep bleat) for only the final sound of the diphong, but that depends on if you pronounce that part more like a short 'a' rather than 'uh'.

[redbird]

That was from memory. Wikipedia has a fair-sized list: a lot of the things on the list are obscure, but it also includes ordinary words like bulb, false, worlds, and a whole collection of ordinal numbers: fifth, sixth, eighth, ninth, twelfth.

It occurs to me that a songwriter is a lot more likely to want a rhyme for "silver" or "wolf" than for "ninth" or "borscht."

(Like kaberett's post yesterday about etymology, this has given me some pleasant distraction.)

[conuly]

I visit her every month
In Scunth-
orpe.

[conuly]

Her borscht
Is the worsht.

I feel intuitively that ninth ought to rhyme with plinth, but I guess not.

[conuly]

I'm not even sure how to accurately transcribe it, honestly.

[steorra]

I don't think there are - unless maybe "baa" and "waah" and "nah" as others already pointed out. All kind of weird interjectiony words.

It's phonologically weird because it ends in /æ/, which normally can't be "final" in rhotic English, like /ɛ/ and /ʊ/ can't either. (Definition of "final" here is a bit hard to pin down, but includes both word-final and syllable-final-before-vowels).

It does tend to be interjectiony words that do weird phonological stuff.

[darkoshi]

Another similar one, the "nyah, nyah!" taunt.

But definitely not when pronounced like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gP9pd0IvVIc

[fred_mouse]

sadly, having an entirely non-rhotic accent means that I can find lots of unhelpful rhymes. However, I completely disagree with the above suggestions, the vowels are completely different between yeah and any of baa, wah, etc. ('eh' vs 'ah' is the easy approximation)

[nostalgia]

"meh"?

[oloriel]

Pronounce it the old-fashioned way so it rhymes with, well, "way"? :/

[conuly]

Okay, time for some truth: I cannot stand it when people spell "yeah" as "yea", because to my mind those are two different words, as different as "yeah" and "yes".

[conuly]

Agreed on the second sentence.

[conuly]

I thought of that, but it's like yeah almost has a diphthong. Or maybe it does have a diphthong?

[oloriel]

They feel like different words with distinct usages, too! But if you desperately need something that rhymes... >_>

[conuly]

I would die first rather than using yea for yeah, no matter how many rhymes that opens up.

[oloriel]

In that case, I take it back!

[wolby]

*wild applause*

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

How about "feh!"? I know, I know; technically it's Yiddish, but plenty of native English speakers say it, including me (a lingering effect of my years in New Jersey) - and it's a slightly false rhyme, but probably the closest you'll get.

"First we will paint the door orange
And then hang the door on a door-hinge."

[conuly]

1. Feh rhymes with meh, but neither really rhymes with yeah as I think you know.

2. In my dialect, the first vowel in orange and sorry is the same vowel as in car or star. So that doesn't work either.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

1. I do know, but it's the best I could find, and it does rhyme with 'yeh', which is a common variant of 'yeah'.

2. Well, there's that. I don't know if I have 'a' dialect - I lived too many different places while growing up - but to my personal ear, the first syllable of 'orange' rhymes with 'more' and 'store', not with 'moor', 'spoor', or 'door'.

I don't recall the title, but just recently I read some poem by Siegfried Sassoon, who had the non-rhotic upper-class British accent from the time of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee. Astonishing, the words he considered to rhyme with each other - much more so than, say, Kipling, who was older, but more traveled, and less of a toff.

[conuly]

2. You certainly have an idiolect.

And to me, more and moor are homophones!

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

I had not seen the word 'idiolect' before; interesting.

So, I guess 'pore' and 'poor' are too? To me, -ore and -oor are distincly different. See, this is the big reason why 'simplified spelling' can never work: English pronunciation has far too many regional and cultural variants. If we went with the non-rhotic, all those terminal r's would be out of a job. On the plus side, there'd be plenty of rhymes for 'yeah'.

[conuly]

Pore, pour, and poor are perfect homophones for me, yes.

See, this is the big reason why 'simplified spelling' can never work: English pronunciation has far too many regional and cultural variants.

I have given serious thought to this, and that's greatly exaggerated. It's true that we'd have to deal with splits and mergers, but we could at least have a consistent system for each split/merger rather than the haphazard mess we have now.

If we went with the non-rhotic, all those terminal r's would be out of a job.

No, I don't think so. We could continue to write those words because rhotic speakers also perceive an /r/ at the end of them - they just don't say it the same way! That's why Brits say er and erm instead of uh and um. That's just how they write those sounds.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Wow. All three of them are different to me, though not everybody pronounces them differently. All my life, people have been asking if I'm British - which has always seemed absurd, because i don't drop either initial h or terminal r, so I dunno. Good point about er and erm - the Brits I talk to and the Brits I type to are two different groups, so I hadn't noticed that.

[conuly]

All my life, people have been asking if I'm British - which has always seemed absurd, because i don't drop either initial h or terminal r, so I dunno.

Foreign accent syndrome?

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

.... possibly? I did have a serious concussion when I was ten, and had migraine from puberty to menopause. I don't really think it's that, though; I think it's that my parents were Nebraskans from a tiny town of German and Scandinavian immigrants, and that they brought us up to use very precise grammar. My daughter gets asked if she's British too; sometimes even by British people. She doesn't sound British to me though; she sounds like my eldest sister Claire.

At my aunt's funeral at Tahoma National Cemetary, I was afraid I wouldn't recognize my relatives, because I hadn't seen them for so long. Then I heard my cousin Karen's voice, and recognized her because when she said the word comfortable, she pronounced it just like Claire does - three syllables, 'comf-ter-bul'. Karen was adopted as a baby, so she's not a blood relation; therefore her 'family accent' must be nurture rather than nature.

[conuly]

I mean, elenbarathi, you're also autistic and developmental foreign accent syndrome is a thing that overlaps there.

Eva and my mom and I also share the "are you British?" curse, and my mother used to chalk it up to years of orthodontics for both her and me, but I just don't think that tracks either.

...with that said, how do you think most people say comfortable?

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

It could be so. What I mostly notice in my own accent is the ten years I spent in Ohio, which doesn't jibe with a Brit accent.

I think most people say it in four syllables, 'com-fort-a-bul', though somewhat elided depending on regional and individual variations (and the second o is a schwa rather than a proper short o.) That's why I could identify my cousin across the parking lot by her pronunciation of it: 'comf-ter-bul' is an unusual pronunciation - the r is on the wrong side of the t; the root word is comfort, not comfter.

Why? Do people say 'comfterbul' in your neck of the woods?

[conuly]

I've never heard it with four syllables! That's like lab OR a tory, sure, people probably say it, but who?

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

I've never heard anyone in real life say 'lab-OR-a-tory', but that word does have five syllables; accent on the first, and the o in the second syllable is a schwa, so it comes out as 'LAB-erra-tory'.

'Cumfterbul' and 'labratory' sound like baby-talk to my ear - like 'liberry' or 'Feb-yoo-ary' - or like the people who say 'warshed' instead of 'washed'; definitely non-U. We moved to New Jersey from California when I was nine, and I had a terrible time learning to understand the kids there, because not only did they talk really fast, but their pronunciation was all over the map - letters dropped or added, whole syllables left out, distorted vowels.

Funny thing; a few nights ago I talked on the phone with my best friend from grade school, who was born and raised in New Jersey, but moved to Florida when she married. I'd estimate she talks half-again as fast as I do, to the point where it's sometimes hard to catch all the words. I surmise it's the rate of speech that causes letters and syllables to get left out - although that doesn't explain 'cumfterbul', because Nebraskan speech is fairly slow. It may just be an idiosyncrasy of my mother's - or of HER mother, who knows? My Mom also pronounced pizza as 'peensa'; I've never heard anyone else say it that way.