Americans dipthongize repeated vowels in foreign words even they aren’t 🤔
Like beer is beeyur but kheer (Hindi for milk puddings) is not kheeyur, it’s just a long ee
To get a long vowel in English you typically use two different vowels. To get the meen sound you write mean 🤔
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Though you do have words like reek, seek, seed that are not diphthongs. I guess it’s the r ending that causes particular trouble for English speakers.
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Arabic/Persian origin words are interesting. Like Mir, Pir, Amir, where pronounced non-diphthong-long in Hindi. Meer, Peer, Amir. Iirc Arabs natively pronounce it the same, but English speakers tend to convert them. So the name Amir becomes Ameeyur rather than Ameer.
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Pir (Sufi saint) is pronounced peer non-diphthong, but I suspect English speakers will have trouble saying it different from the English word peer.
Hmm is the Russian Mir natively pronounced like Meer non-diphthong or Meeyur? 🤔
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Also while on the subject, why do Americans in particular turn Iraq and Iran into Eyeraq and Eyeran instead of Eraq/Eran?
I don’t think Brits do that. It’s a weird American thing.
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It’s amazing how hard it is to shake native language phonetic defaults. Mouth shape muscle memory is very strong.
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The variety in English/American accents is nearly all in the vowels. In the 1600s there was a partial consolidation to London English. Since then it fragmented again wildly, with another partial sweep up at the advent of national radio broadcasts.
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Now imagine the local pronunciations of Des Plaines IL and Versailles KY.



