At least in an American accent, the TRAP vowel is much higher and fronter than the Spanish /a/, it’s in between Spanish /a/ and Spanish /e/ (which is why it’s written in IPA as /æ/). This can be tricky for Spanish speakers. My husband is native Mexican and he pronounces “iPod” and “iPad” identically.”, which sometimes…

Essentially, RP TRAP is much lower than GenAm TRAP so it makes sense that the phoneme replacement effect causes them to hear the Italian low vowel as being TRAP-like. Americans will hear it as being PALM-like and not particularly TRAP-like at all. Of course no two vowels will be exactly the same cross-linguistically,…

How do you pronounce “honest”? In any event it’s an odd criticism because English accents tend to drop word-initial “h” more than American accents do. The English pronunciation of “herb” can be traced back to what is essentially a hypercorrection - not dropping h was seen as a class marker so people from h dropping…

The Italian vowel can’t be meaningfully identified with either both because it doesn’t exactly match either in any accent and because their phonetic values in English vary with accent.

“But it is a short “o”. Americans tend to say a heavy “oh”, which isn’t authentic to Italian.”

It’s not at all clear what difference in pronunciation you are trying to indicate with that contrastive spelling. In GenAm the LOT and PALM vowels are merged.

Yes, this is because of a phonological merger that causes “father” and “farther” to be homophones in an RP and other non-rhotic accents.

It depends on which dialect of English you’re speaking. There’s no real meaningful way to identify the Italian vowel with one or the other.

You thinking those videos support your position only shows your ignorance of phonology. The Italian vowel is between GenAm PALM than GenAm TRAP. You are confused because RP TRAP is much lower than it was about 100 years ago and the phoneme replacement effect is doing the rest to make you perceive it as a TRAP vowel.

“Twat” as a vulgar term for vagina isn’t a recent import into the US and the difference in pronunciation isn’t meaningfully different than the difference in pronunciation in words like “bath”, “dance”, or “ass/arse”, except that “twat” has the vowels switched in the opposite direction from what is more common.

Apple cider is not the same as apple cider vinegar. Seriously, buy some apple cider vinegar and take a whiff of it (if you hate your nose).

I think you meant “half as poorly”.

“Yep, it just looks like NYP is changing headlines and attributing them to the original publications. That’s messed up.”

Your screenshots provide no evidence that the AP ever gave it that headline. The screenshot with that headline is from the NY post.

Headlines are usually chosen by the newspaper’s editorial staff, not the author. The by-line only credits the author of the article, not the headline. This is standard in newspapers.

“why no sexual assault charge?”

Shoving something into a man’s ass is only sinful if he consents to it, otherwise it’s just horseplay.

I’m annoyed when people call jurisdiction a “technicality”.

She can prove causation but proving a duty of care is much more iffy.

The question was why she didn’t go to the police instead of reporting to HR, not about the subsequent lawsuit.