I have spent the morning tromping around checking out possible volunteer activities, as its essential for me to find something to do outside the walls of academia, and with my flexible schedule, I thought why not check out volunteer opportunities? There are so many to choose from, the ones that appeal to me most are working with animals, from helping the elderly or shut in walk their dogs, to work in a kennel or cattery with rescue animals.

But when I go to spell my name over the phone or in person, people have a really hard time with my American pronounciation of vowels. When I say A, they repeat back really puzzled, E?

How do British people pronounce the vowel letters of the alphabet?

Me:

A--its very broad, said like well...A

E---very long sound like you have been scared by a mouse ---EEEE

I--as in AYE

O--as in hmmm...O

U--as in yew

Is it a human or a robot? Robots (hello, Agilent) have real trouble undertstanding my voice, and I've a British accent.

Its humans...I have not even dared to try with robots...I am always left flummoxed, thinking, how odd I must sound given the level of perplexity I raise! And I have the most generic American accent, its not like a Southern accent or a New York accent...its the kind that the news broadcasters have, where its so generic, you think you do not have an accent! Indeed growing up I was told I had no accent, so that is what I thought, only to be shocked later to learn that everyone has an accent! Its just weird things that crop up in how people say the vowel letters...

The way that this words are said throws me

Bath--said in Britain, with the short a that Americans use in the world mall

Pall Mall--said in Britain with the broader a that Americans would use in the word bath8-)

This is a tough one really.. I have a yorkshire accent so the way I say vowels will be different than someone from say the home counties or the west country.

For example i would pronouce the words bath, glass and grass with a harder short 'a' .. but then someone with an RP accent would have a softer long 'a' sounding a bit like 'ahh'.

the best way to get round this is to use the phonetic alphabet so say A for alpha, E for echo, I for igloo etc. that way you can save the confusion.
http://www.dynamoo.com/technical/phonetic.htm

I think the Northern English ( North of England? not sure how to say it) accents sound really lovely. I remember seeing a poll once where Americans voted the "Geordie" accent as the most pleasant to listen to, with the RP accents coming in very low.

yeah northern accents are the best (not that I am bias in any way) :p

I have a west country accent so would probably say "olivierrrrrrrr" :-)

He he...Sneaks, I just got a vision of that fisherman bloke off The Simpsons: Oliviaaaaargh!

There is a delightful way I hear some people pronounce the word "no"--I could never imitate it in a million years, but its something like the O sound being lifted up underneath with a small e sound...it does not add an extra syllable to the word, but the O/e sound is stretched out a bit somehow. This sounds daft, but its how the only way I can think of to describe it. Does this sound familiar to anyone?:$

Yup. Being from Lancashire, I find the Yorkshire way of saying "no" quite bizarre. It sounds like "Neeeeeeer" to me.