gobble_ghoul

Hey Russia, you're all out of teenagers

Nope, butterflies are moths on day shift from an evolutionary perspective.

Maybe because in American accents, most of the schwas are R-colo(u)red or literally a syllabic /r/, while in most British accents they are plain schwas or schwa with an /r/ inserted after if the next sound is a vowel as in Panda-r-Express.

From an etymology standpoint, flower=flour.

Respectively, those words would be /kʌlə(r)/, /fleɪvə(r)/, /lɔː(r)/, /vəreɪʃəs/, /haʊs/. Sometimes “voracious” has the same first vowel as “lore”, but usually it gets a schwa. AFAIK “flavour” and “colour” always have schwa in the second syllable. All the words have roughly the same variations in pronunciation in both the UK and US.

I’m not aware of an accent where they would be pronounced the same tbh.

It’s pronounced to rhyme with “good” in Northern England, but then so are words like “mud” and “bud” as well. The distinction between /ʌ/ (as in “blood”, “luck”, “putt”, “bugger”) and /ʊ/ (as in “good”, “look”, “put”, “booger”) is called the foot-strut split. It developed in Southern England and was exported across most of the rest of the English speaking world without a consistent spelling between the two vowels having developed.

English used to have two vowels, /u:/ (as in “food”, “moon”, “loose”) and /ʊ/, which were usually respectively spelled and , but /ʌ/ did not yet exist. At some point, people began to develop two different pronunciations of what used to be /ʊ/ - if the preceding consonant involved the lips and the following consonant involved the front of the tongue, it stayed /ʊ/, as in “put”, “pudding”, “wool” (which used to be spelled “wull”). Elsewhere, it shifted from /ʊ/ to /ʌ/, as in “luck”, “pup”, and “hull”. Both before and after this split occurred, some words which had /u:/ were prone to irregularly shifting to have /ʊ/ instead, including words like “look” and “foot” (ironically meaning that the foot-strut split is a misnomer since “foot” had /u:/ when /ʊ/ was undergoing the split). For those /u:/ words that shifted early enough, like “blood” and “flood”, they were actually eligible to undergo the foot-strut split, and ended up on the /ʌ/ side of things despite the spelling.

Variation between /u:/ and /ʊ/ continues to this day. In some dialects without the foot-strut split (and thus no /ʌ/), words like “foot” and “look” can still have /u:/. In dialects with the foot-strut split, some words like “room”, “broom”, “roof”, “root”, and “soot” can have either /u:/ or /ʊ/.

The spelling is bad mostly due to internal pronunciation changes in the language which weren’t reflected by updates to the spelling. That foreign spelling aren’t changed to match the native ones is largely due to the fact that the native ones had already become detached from pronunciation and speakers had developed a tolerance for ambiguity.

Doesn’t detract from your point, but I think you’re meaning “anthropocentric” lol.

Is that meant to be /æ/ as in “dad” or /ɑː/ as in “spa”? I find people do not agree on which sound the spelling indicates.

There are three variants I’m aware of: /eɪ/ as in “day”, /æ/ as in “dad”, and /ɑː/ as in “spa”. I personally say it with /æ/.

I still like Weavile, but Sneasel is peak. Sneasler is an abomination.