Caramel and Syrup

This has probably been asked before, but how do you pronounce the words "caramel" and "syrup"?

For caramel, I use the three-syllable pronunciation. "Car" sounds more like "care", "a" is "ah", and mel is [mEl].

Syrup is "sear-up", not "sir-up".

It seems that most people on the West Coast pronounce caramel with two syllables, and use the same vowel in the actual word "car". I have also noticed that most say "sir-up" instead of "sear-up".

Are these two sets of pronunciations tied to a certain geographical region, or is it simply just a matter of personal choice?

I like syrup on ice-cream, on my chest, bed, cock and whatever rocks your boat Shatnerian. Uh-huh

I'm betting it's more a matter of personal choice, or something that people pick up, like pronouncing "aunt" as [Ant], or the variation between route and root for "route", etc.

I pronounce them /kArml=/ and /sr\=@p/, like I imagine most people do. But since I have a weird, non-standard, regional dialect, that includes such horrible mispronunciations such as /gIt/, so of course I must be wrong, and in General American it must be /sIr@p/ and /kær\@mEl/. I'll have to wait for someone from the South or the Midwest, or New York, or somewhere to tell me what it is in real General American English.

Sarcastic Northwesterner, is that hint of...*sarcasm* in your post? Actually it seems that neither side can muster a solid majority on this issue: according to the Dialect Survey ( http://cfprod01.imt.uwm.edu/Dept/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/q_4.html ), 38.0% use "carmel", 37.7% use "carramel", and 17.2% use both interchangeably.

(Note that the pronunciation "carramel" itself comes in two sub-varieties: 3M-merged and 3M-unmerged.)

For "caramel", I have ["k_h{r\@m5=]. For "syrup", I have neither "sear-up" nor "sir-up", but rather ["sIr\@p] or "sih-rup", which is the proper serious-Sirius-unmerged way to say it. ;-)

(This reflects the fact that "syrup", much like "caramel", comes in two principal varieties: diaphonemic /"sIr\@p/ and /"sr\=@p/, the former of which is realized as serious-Sirius-merged /"sir\@p/ and serious-Sirius-unmerged /"sIr\@p/. No modern definition of General American could reasonably include the serious-Sirius distinction, so my pronunciation of "syrup" is quite definitely a Northeastern regionalism.)

Regarding General American, I would define General American in the context of broad phonological processes and leave matters like these up to personal choice. (Look at that, we can agree on something!)

Actually I neglected to report the Dialect Survey's findings for "syrup". (My apologies.) According to them, 49.9% use diaphonemic /"sr\=@p/ and 47.5% use diaphonemic /"sIr\@p/.

I myself have ["k_hA:RmM:] for "caramel" and ["sR=:@p] for "syrup". If I am speaking rather carefully I just might say ["sI:R@p], but saying ["k_he:R@~:mE:M] (/"ker@mEl/ pronounced with my dialect's phonology) subjectively comes off as just horribly affected to me.

>>I pronounce them /kArml=/ and /sr\=@p/, like I imagine most people do.<<

Heh - my own dialect has practically the same exact pronunciations phonemically (except that I would not consider those to be /l=/ and /r\=/ but rather /@l/ and /@r\/), but just with a different phonology being used to realize them (having different rhotics and having l-vocalization).

>>But since I have a weird, non-standard, regional dialect, that includes such horrible mispronunciations such as /gIt/, so of course I must be wrong, and in General American it must be /sIr@p/ and /kær\@mEl/. I'll have to wait for someone from the South or the Midwest, or New York, or somewhere to tell me what it is in real General American English.<<

Either you are being horribly sarcastic or took what has been said about General American far too personally here. There is absolutely nothing wrong with speaking a dialect that is outside of General American proper, and few North Americans probably actually speak exactly such. Just because you have /gIt/ rather than /gEt/ does not make your dialect "weird", it just means it happens to have a particular feature (the shifting of /E/ to /I/ in stressed syllables in many words) which happens to not be part of General American proper, that's all.

And really - I seriously doubt that most individuals from the South, or the Upper Midwest, or New York (and are actually native to there) really speak General American proper. Here in Wisconsin at least (part of the Midwest, of course) we most definitely do not speak General American, even if many words may still be phonemically *analogous* to their GA counterparts.

And as for /kær\@mEl/, that is a conservative GA pronunciation, as GA usually has the full Mary-merry-marry merger these days.

I pronounce "caramel" as "KER-uh-mel" (where both "e"s are the same sound as in "bell", and "uh" is a schwa).

However, I know other people, including my mother, who say "KAR-muhl" (the "kar" sounding the same as the word "car", and the "uh" again being a schwa). The reason for that pronunciation eludes me. It's not etymologically justified, saying it with three syllables isn't significantly harder, and I can't think of any other words with an analogous elision.

- Kef

/k{r@ml=/ & /sIr@p/ i.e. I pronounce the "ca"s in "caramel" & "cat" and the "sy"s in "syrup" & "symptom" the same.

>>There is absolutely nothing wrong with speaking a dialect that is outside of General American proper, and few North Americans probably actually speak exactly such.<<

I agree with Travis. Honestly, I am something of a General American skeptic myself; therefore, I certainly do not believe that I speak it--despite using the Conservative GA pronunciation for "caramel". Perhaps something called General American does exist, but in my opinion, there are far too many disagreements about what it does and does not contain.

What irks me is when people say, "I don't have an accent" or "Oh, you're from (insert random state)? You aren't supposed to have an accent!" EVERYONE has an accent, but as to whether or not it is tied to a specific region of your country is a different story entirely.

Sarcastic Northwesterner: There is probably something in everyone's dialect that someone finds odd. I am sure that very Conservative RP speakers laugh at some of the standard pronunciations in the United States and Canada. In turn, many people who grew up being fully rhotic cannot comprehend how non-rhoticism could be the standard in any English speaking country. Every dialect, including the ones that are considered "standard", has features that someone from somewhere is going to criticize.

>>What irks me is when people say, "I don't have an accent" or "Oh, you're from (insert random state)? You aren't supposed to have an accent!" EVERYONE has an accent, but as to whether or not it is tied to a specific region of your country is a different story entirely.<<

To me at least, dialects which are very close to or for all practical purposes identical to General American, the cot-caught merger aside, generally come off as "accented" subjectively. Standardness does *not* actually correspond to whether or not one perceives something as accented or not.

I agree with Travis: General American does strike me as accented. For example, General American would be serious-Sirius merged, hurry-furry merged, and nowadays fully Mary-merry-marry merged, and the merged pronunciations definitely sound accented to me.

<<If I am speaking rather carefully I just might say ["sI:R@p], but saying ["k_he:R@~:mE:M] (/"ker@mEl/ pronounced with my dialect's phonology) subjectively comes off as just horribly affected to me.>>

Well, if I heard an unreduced [E] in the final syllable I think it would likewise strike me as somewhat affected, but the trisyllabic pronunciation that I use, ["k_h{r\@m5=], sounds perfectly natural to me. ;-)

>>I agree with Travis. Honestly, I am something of a General American skeptic myself; therefore, I certainly do not believe that I speak it--despite using the Conservative GA pronunciation for "caramel". Perhaps something called General American does exist, but in my opinion, there are far too many disagreements about what it does and does not contain.<<

The thing to me is that, to a good extent, General American, disagreement about what it exact is aside, is idealized in nature and is not any particular extant dialect even though there are most definitely extant dialects that are very close to it (and especially if one disregards the cot-caught merger). Yet at the same time, the idealized conception of it still allows a large amount of room for variation compared to, say, Received Pronunciation.

One way or another, though, I would not speak of people who speak it and people who don't. Rather I would speak of dialects which are closer to it and dialects which are further from it, of dialects which have certain features of it and of dialects which lack certain features of it.

>>Well, if I heard an unreduced [E] in the final syllable I think it would likewise strike me as somewhat affected, but the trisyllabic pronunciation that I use, ["k_h{r\@m5=], sounds perfectly natural to me. ;-)<<

The matter is that the trisyllabic pronunciation I indicated as sounding affected to me is actually more natural than a pronunciation with a reduced vowel in the final syllable, as allophonic vowel reduction in my dialect outside of unstressed grammar words primarily takes the pattern of alternating unreduced and reduced syllables (with some exceptions related to some things such as certain suffixes which are not reduced), with whether the word starts with a reduced vowel or not being determined by the position of the primary stress. If [I] or [@] shows up in an unreduced position they correspond to actual phonemic /I/ and /@/ (even if such originally derived from historical vowel reduction). Consequently, reducing historical /E/ in the final syllable of trisyllabic "caramel" is not something that would naturally occur in my dialect.

I have caramel ["kE_r.r\@.mEo] and syrup ["sI_o.r/Vp]. I haven't figured out the exact phonetic realisations of my SQUARE and NEAR yet, but these words fall into those sets for me, rather than START or NURSE.
As for General American, I'm not sure either whether there's anyone that natively speaks it, but it is useful as an abstraction of non-regional American speech. It was traditionally defined as "not Southern and not Northeastern", but I think the prevalence of the cot-caught merger, the California Vowel Shift, and the NCVS mean that it must be defined as "not Western or Northern" as well.