I was putting the question mark because Tom Hanks affects a Mississippi accent, which would not pronounce all of these words with a schwa.
“Ermahgerd” uses two vowel sounds, the repeated sound at the beginning and end is more akin to a Ɵ than ə (schwa).
Given all three of these items–XKCD, Forrest Gump, and the meme–are from the United States, it makes sense to think of them in that context. I realize that you’re Australian, and that accent perhaps doesn’t pronounce these words with a schwa, but it’s important to remember that the entire population of Australia is roughly equivalent to the metro area of New York City.
As of 2022, there were roughly 400 million native English speakers in the world, of which roughly 306 million are in the United States, so I’m not sure about your “most English accents” comment either.
Ookami38@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Out of curiosity, what words does your accent pronounce without a schwa? Every single vowel sound in that is a schwa sound in those sentences sounds perfectly natural to me with a schwa sound.
TheBananaKing@lemmy.world 6 months ago
/wɒts ʌp? wʌz dʌg gənə kʌm? dʌg lʌvz bɹʌntʃ. nʌʔʌ dʌgz stʌk kɒz ɒv ə tʌnəl ɒbstɹʌkʃən. ə tɹʌk dʌmpt ə tʌn ɒv ʌnjənz. əχ./
Deebster@programming.dev 6 months ago
For me it’s more like
/wɒts ʌp? wɒz dʌg gənə kʌm? dʌg lʌvz brʌnʧ. nɜːʔɜː dʌgz stʌk kʌz ɒv ə tʌnəl əbstrʌkʃən. ə trʌk dʌmpt ə tʌn ɒv ʌnjənz. əχ./
(Gimsonian, anyway, I like the newer, more logical style that would have nurse be /nəːs/)
WoahWoah@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Interestingly, “ʌ” is not used in many American linguistics sources, from Merriam Webster to Google Translate. In American English and many dialects of British English (and many others), there is little to no difference between ‘ʌ’ and ‘ə.’ It’s called the comma-strut split (referenced in the xkcd explainer), and occurs in a minority of English dialects apparently. I didn’t realize Australian English was one of them! Interesting.