Sorry for the late reply. The past couple of weeks have been hectic!
> The vowel in "discover" matches whatever vowel is > used in that regional > accent for guts, ugly, jumble, bug, love, mother and > bubble.* >
Same for me (except for love, which is slightly more back).
> The vowel in "hover" matches the vowel in got, > fondle, off, moth, swan, > John and hotpot (twice) >
How interesting. All of those words are pronounced with the same vowel for me except hover.
> The vowel in "hover" > matches that in "wander". Now, the folk song/carol > "I wonder as I > wander" has been attributed to various places, but > I'm sure one version > I've seen said it came from Canada. So, do you > pronounce those two words > identically?
Nope. Wonder and wander are pronounced differently in my neck of the woods.
> What _is_ interesting is when you have grown up > understanding one vowel > to be identical in hundreds of words, and then find > in one region that > there are two distinct groups. I found this during > my one sojourn in the > US, in Massachusetts.
Actually, there are many different pronunciations of English. Go to different areas of England, or the US, or Canada (yes, even in Canada there's west coast English, Toronto English, Newfie English, and several others), and you'll hear a wide variety of English accents. I took a linguistics class where we discussed the many different variations in English pronunciation, and the conclusion was that there can be any number of correct ways to say a given word, as long as there are at least several people who say it that way.
The question this raises for me, however, is when singing an English song or aria, should I use my own dialect, or a generic version of British English, or try to figure out how the original poet would have said it (especially difficult if the poem was written centuries ago!)? I made a recording a couple of days ago (why I was so busy), and in listening to it I noticed a couple of glaring examples of my own regional diction coming through that really didn't sound very good. I'm not sure if that's because they had an effect on my technique (although I don't think so), or because I'm so used to hearing singers using British English, or because I didn't realize I was doing it...
Anyway, I find this whole topic fascinating. Ever since I took that linguistics class I've been listening to people's accents and trying to figure out the differences and how to imitate them. I love the sound of language - must be why I like singing so much!
Jennifer
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