Rhymes talk:English/ɑː(ɹ)b

This page should contain the words which rhyme in non-rhotic accents and have links to the two equivalents in rhotic accents: /-ɑːb/ and /-ɑːrb/ - no parentheses since the "r" is not optional in rhotic accents. In other words, this page should contain all words that are in both /-ɑːb/ and /-ɑːrb/ since most people likely to use this aren't aware of things like mergers and rhoticity, they only know where they live and which words rhyme for them.

At the top we could put "These words usually rhyme in these accents: England, Australia, New Zealand, Boston?, New York?"

At the link to the two rhotic pages we could put "These words usually rhyme in these accents: USA, Canadia, Scotland, Ireland, India"

— Hippietrail 00:54, 8 May 2004 (UTC)

(I wrote a bunch here, then removed it once I saw you meant something different...)

I don't see the need for an -ɑː(r)b page at all—I think it should be the way it is now, except that this page should be moved to -ɑrb (no parentheses, and probably no length mark) and retain the link to the non-rhotic -ɑːb page. Maybe I think all the words on one page should rhyme for everybody, but some people will also have rhymes on other pages.

But then, as I mentioned on Rhymes talk:English:-ɑːb, it would make it more difficult to contribute to. Conversely we could do it the way you propose, but if so we should carry it further and include separate pages for cot-caught–merged rhymes and possibly writer-rider–merged rhymes (but under what title should these be put? unlike the rhotic situation these merge to a pronunciation that already exists). —Muke Tever 02:01, 8 May 2004 (UTC)

Hopefully there's always a way to be nonambiguous when needed in IPA but I can't forsee all cases. If we can't we can always resort to page titles that have "with cot-caught merger" or "rhotic" in their titles - but that seems quite ugly so hopefully we can avoid it. What IPA symbol would you choose for "writer/rider" - is it a flap? We could then use "t" and "d" on non-merged pages, and the IPA flap symbol on merged pages... — Hippietrail 02:25, 8 May 2004 (UTC)

The phoneme is /d/ which is the simplest way to symbolize it, but if a separate symbol is necessary its phonetic realization [ɾ] (alveolar tap, X-SAMPA [4]) could be used. —Muke Tever 03:45, 8 May 2004 (UTC)