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angelabroc t1_j1dad1a wrote

Reply to comment by officepolicy in Does anyone else know someone that pronounces Cambridge with a soft "A" like jam? by officepolicy

I’m in the field of speech pathology so I’m just gonna jump in here, the a in “jam” is not 100% a short vowel (like in “hat”) or a long vowel (where the vowel says its name, like in “same”). It’s actually a nasalized vowel (influenced by an n or m after it, like “ran/man” as opposed to “rat/mat”.) So that might be why it’s a little hard to identify the sound in “jam” 🙃

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officepolicy OP t1_j1daxyb wrote

That’s really interesting, makes sense that it’s not just a binary between long/short. Do you prefer using long/short or hard/soft? Or do you just compare to other words to disambiguate? Thanks so much for the expert opinion, häts off to you 😉

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angelabroc t1_j1dblgp wrote

Haha i have to agree with other posters that its definitely typically long/short for vowels, and then hard/soft for consonants (hard g in gate vs soft g in giraffe, same goes for the letter c in cage vs. cent). There are a ton of technical terms/specifics for each sound that can be made/used in a language, but if you aren’t a speech pathologist or a linguist it really doesn’t matter too much! Rule of thumb for vowels though is if the vowel “says its name” in the word, it’s a long vowel.

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officepolicy OP t1_j1dc2rp wrote

Ah gotcha, thanks! When I originally wrote the post I had just quickly googled “hard and soft vowels” and some results came up so I used that, didn’t realize it wasn’t the typical terms

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