Interestingly, this question appeared as number 15 on the Harvard Dialect Survey, so it is possible to give a good summary of the pronunciation differences in these three words as they are …

The source of Stephen is the Greek name Stephanos. This name was borrowed into English long enough ago that the intervocalic [f] sound was voiced to become [v]. This is a regular sound …

The Nato Phonetic Alphabet (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta and so on) would be familiar to some, but not to all — my mother would probably think me pretentious for using it. But that is what …

In America phonetic notation has had a curious history. Bloomfield used IPA notation in his early book An Introduction to the Study of Language, 1914, and in the English edition of his more …

Thanks for the great practical mnemonic, though the claim that "of", "must", and "learn" contain three different vowels deserves discussion; the first two may simply be the unstressed versus …

Say you need to read someone their password over the phone and you spell it phonetically so that there is no confusion between M and N etc. Now that is straight forward but what if the …

It would be great if this answer were correct, because it at least presents some consistent rules. It also explains why a cutting router is pronounced router instead of rooter. But this answer …

Since he indicates no such awareness, I think the likelier explanation is that the objection to "So for Sew" in the 1839 Vermont newspaper isn't objection to pronunciation at all, but to phonetic …

The International Phonetic Alphabet is a single "standard" in the sense that there is a single inventory of symbols and a single officially defined "cardinal" value given to each of these …

Phonemics, or Phonology, is the study of the distribution of sound systems in human languages. A Phoneme is a particular set of sounds produced in a particular language and distinguishable …