# Winnie-ther-Pooh



## RusEng

Childish questions, well, but I really want to know:

When I first heard his name, I said, just as you are going to say, "But I thought he was a boy?"​< ---- >​"Then you can't call him Winnie?"​< ---- >​"*He's Winnie-ther-Pooh.* Don't you know what 'ther' means?"​"Ah, yes, now I do," I said quickly; and I hope you do too, because it is all the explanation you are going to get.​
Can someone, please, explain me what's happening here? Is Winnie a feminine name, or what? And how ther makes the situation different?

< Edited to comply with Rule 4. Cagey, moderator >


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## jmichaelm

Winnie *is *a female name; "-ther-" is not standard English.

I believe what's happening has a lot to do with storytelling. The narrator is acceding to Christopher's child-like logic wherein Winnie-ther-Pooh is one long name and therefore the bear is not constrained by traditional gender rules that would have any creature named "Winnie" be female. It's a playfulness in the language that mirrors the playfulness of a child's mind.


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## ewie

Yes, Winnie is usually a feminine name, short for Winifred (these days a very old-fashioned name).

I'm not sure about _ther_-rather-than-_the_.  I expect it's just a way of emphasizing that his name isn't 'Winnie' ~ it's 'Winnie-the-Pooh': you can't separate the parts.


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## Parla

"Ther"? I never saw that before. Here, it's always been *the*.


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## ewie

Parla said:


> "Ther"? I never saw that before. Here, it's always been *the*.


We (i.e. we in the UK) would say _Winnie-*theeee*-Pooh_ these days


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## RusEng

Funny, in Russian translation it is written something like, "You are probably surpised why he has such name, and if you knew English you would be even more surprised".

Thanks for your good answers.


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## pwmeek

This is the only place (by a quick check) where the extraneous "r" is found. I believe it is to stress how a listener from other parts of the English-speaking world would have heard Christopher Robin's pronunciation of the word "the", especially when included in the name Winnie-the-Pooh.

I think I pronounce it "th<schwa>" when speaking this name. In normal use, I say "th<schwa>" and "theeee" in different situations. Using the wrong one sounds incorrect to me, so I must have a system for determining which to use, but I can't formulate it.


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## rhitagawr

ewie said:


> We (i.e. we in the UK) would say _Winnie-*theeee*-Pooh_ these days


I wouldn't.


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## George French

ewie said:


> We (i.e. we in the UK) would say Winnie-theeee-Pooh these days



All I can say to your post ewie is that I'm glad that I don't live in the UK any more if that is happening to the pronunciation.... 

GF..

I must 'learn' phoenetics.....


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## DocPenfro

"Winnie" a feminine name?  Winston Churchill was known to his friends as "Winnie".


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## George French

DocPenfro said:


> "Winnie" a feminine name?  Winston Churchill was known to his friends as "Winnie".



Nevertheless it is still a name normally used for females...

GF..


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## Kevin Beach

ewie said:


> We (i.e. we in the UK) would say _Winnie-*theeee*-Pooh_ these days



Speak fer thisen!

Down hear, we say _thuh_ before consonants and _thee_ before vowels.


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## Loob

There's a linguistic discussion of this "ther" here.  Essentially, it makes three points:
~ Christopher Robin is arguing that the "the" in Winnie-the-Pooh makes the whole name masculine, so he wants to stress the word "the"
~ italicising "the" would indicate a pronunciation with /i:/, not a stressed schwa, so Milne writes "ther" to represent "the with a stressed schwa" 
~ "-er" is, for [non-rhotic] BrE speakers, a natural representation of a stressed schwa (compare the frequent respresentation of the hesitation particle as "erm"), but this use of "-er" to represent stressed schwa may well puzzle [rhotic] AmE speakers. (I recall that we had a thread about "erm" raising just that issue.)

Parla's comment in post 4 above makes me wonder if the "Winnie-*ther*-Pooh" at this point in the original text was edited in US editions: does anyone know?  

(Oh, and I read ewie's comment at  post 5 as saying that a present-day Christopher Robin might well have stressed the "the" by using an /i:/.)


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## Man_from_India

Loob said:


> There's a linguistic discussion of this "ther" here.  Essentially, it makes three points:
> ~ Christopher Robin is arguing that the "the" in Winnie-the-Pooh makes the whole name masculine, so he wants to stress the word "the"


I really didn't get the point of making it decide the gender. How can 'the" make it masculine? Can anyone please explain?


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## Loob

It's not that the "the" decides the gender, ManfI.  It's just that the speaker is saying that the bear's name is not *Winnie* (usually a girl's name) but *Winnie-the-Pooh*.


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## Man_from_India

Ohh I see. And I love that cartoon.


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## Keith Bradford

Winnie Pooh (if such a name existed) would probably be feminine; at least the narrator of this story thinks so.

However, names with "the" in the middle (William the Conqueror, Alfred the Great, etc.) are mostly titles rather than names, and mostly masculine.  In the child's imagination, adding "the" transforms the feminine name into a masculine title.  In order to explain this, he stresses the word "the", lengthening (but not altering) the sound of the schwa.  In print, in the absence of a phonetic alphabet (such is my case now), he writes _the _as _ther_.

Oh, dear, I'm a bear of very little brain and phonetics bothers me...


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## ewie

Indeed I didn't mean that these days we'd pronounce _Winnie-the-Pooh_ as *Winnie-theeee-Pooh* in ordinary circumstances.
What I meant was that those of us who habitually pronounce the word _a_ as *ay* would oh forget it.


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## panjandrum

As a life-long fan of Winnie-the-Pooh, owner of many Pooh books, and one who (please don't spread this about) was nicknamed Pooh as a child, I think I can speak with some authority here.

Whatever the precedents, Pooh is most certainly male.
I quote from the introduction to Winnie-the-Pooh, the first book.


> Well, when Edward Bear said that he would like an exciting name all to himself, Christopher Robin said at once, without stopping to think, that he was Winnie-the-Pooh.  And so he was.



As for the pronunciation of "ther", it seems to me indisputable that the purpose in making this point, in chapter 1, page 1, is to make clear to us that we must pronounce Winnie-the-Pooh using the kind of "the" we would expect.  Winnie-the-Pooh has a "the" with a schwa.  I have never, ever, heard it said any differently.


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## JulianStuart

I think it would have been better to write it thuh, not ther, if the schwa pronunciation was being emphasized.

(The first album I have of a female recording artist Sade indicated how to pronounce her name as "Shar-day"; for a long time , all the AmE speakers added the R sound in the middle of her name   Of course, the pronunciation "aid" was written by a non-rhotic speaker who never dreamt anyone would actually pronounce the R!)


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## natkretep

Milne was probably envisaging a British reader, and rhotic BrE speakers will no doubt also be familiar with the hesitation marker written _er_ and not attempt to pronounce the 'r'. << off-topic point removed >>


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## wandle

Speaking from memory, the canonical written name of the decrepit plantigrade is 'Winnie-the-Pooh'.
When Christopher Robin wishes to make the point that this is a unitary name of masculine gender, he pronounces it with a stress on 'the' which the author represents by adding on the letter 'r'.
The explanation of _why_ he represents stress by adding that letter is given by *Loob* (post 13) and *Keith Bradford* (post 17).


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## JulianStuart

natkretep said:


> Milne was probably envisaging a British reader, and rhotic BrE speakers will no doubt also be familiar with the hesitation marker written _er_ and not attempt to pronounce the 'r'. << off-topic point removed >>



I agree - I suspect a wide American/rhotic readership was _not_ something Milne had in mind during the writing of the work


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## pob14

In When We Were Very Young, a book of poems by A. A. Milne, a swan named Pooh was mentioned.  As a child, I had always guessed that "Winnie-ther-Pooh" was Christopher's mispronunciation of "_Another_ Pooh," but I see from Wikipedia that there was a bear named Winnie that was at the London Zoo.

I think it's clear from the last sentences of the quote in the first post that A. A. Milne didn't know either.


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## JulianStuart

But the r would be present (by "re-insertion" "re-intrusion"?*) in the phrase "Eeyore is upset" because of the following vowel 

*Edit: this would be known as a "linking R" - pronounced only when linked to a following vowel.

if Winne had been "Winne-the-Ooh", Milne would not have used the r in "ther" because even in a non-rhotic accent, the r would probably have been pronounced by many readers.


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## Cenzontle

A modern-day female Winnie is Winnie Mandela.
It just now occurs to me that in A. A. Milne's (probably) R-less English, "ther" was probably not much different from "the" (with schwa).


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## Alexsirpooh

It sounds to me as if Christopher Robin was trying to say Winnie-Sir-Pooh, but his lisp makes it sound Winnie-Ther-Pooh. "Don't you know what ther (sir) means?". It seems as though Pooh should have always been referred to as Winnie-Sir-Pooh, but translated by an adult listening to Christopher Robin introduce the bear, it sounded like Winnie-the-Pooh.


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## pob14

"Winnie-Sir-Pooh" makes no more sense to me than "Winnie-ther-Pooh," though.


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## wandle

Written in modern style, I expect the expression delivered by Christopher Robin would appear simply as:

'He's Winnie-_the_-Pooh. Don't you know what "_the_" means?'

In other words, italics would have been used for the emphasis instead of the clumsy 'ther'.


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## JulianStuart

wandle said:


> Written in modern style, I expect the expression delivered by Christopher Robin would appear simply as:
> 
> 'He's Winnie-_the_-Pooh. Don't you know what "_the_" means?'
> 
> In other words, italics would have been used for the emphasis instead of the clumsy 'ther'.



But see post # 13.  When "the" is pronounced with an emphasis, it is usually pronounced "thee" and that was not the intent here, it seems - the goal was a stressed schwa sound (with no terminal rhoticity)


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## wandle

Well, there are two regular ways of stressing 'the', which correspond to the two regular ways of pronouncing 'the'.

The pronunciation as 'thee' is standard before a word beginning with a vowel, while the pronunciation as schwa is standard before an initial consonant.

In the present instance, 'Pooh' begins with a consonant, so the pronunciation as schwa is natural. 
This remains the case, in my submission, when it is stressed.


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## RM1(SS)

wandle said:


> Well, there are two regular ways of stressing 'the', which correspond to the two regular ways of pronouncing 'the'.
> 
> The pronunciation as 'thee' is standard before a word beginning with a vowel, while the pronunciation as schwa is standard before an initial consonant.
> 
> In the present instance, 'Pooh' begins with a consonant, so the pronunciation as schwa is natural.
> This remains the case, in my submission, when it is stressed.


In my case as well.


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## brianleung

Same here.


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## JulianStuart

My comment was based on my personal use and it is also in the WRF dictionary entry - that's not to say others don't use a schwa form for emphasis, but the entry uses the same thee whether before vowel or consonant - so, to me,  the use of the r in ther makes it clear that thee was not intended.


> the /
> (stressed or emphatic) ðiː;
> (unstressed before a consonant) ðə;
> (unstressed before a vowel) ðɪ


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## wandle

JulianStuart said:


> to me,  the use of the r in ther makes it clear that thee was not intended.


So it does to me, and to *ewie*, *Loob*, *Keith Bradford*, *panjandrum*, *natkretep* and anyone else familiar with this peculiar British way of representing a schwa.

My observation in post 29 that a modern editor would probably use italics for the purpose is intended to help people who are not familiar with that particular British eccentricity to understand what the author meant.


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## JulianStuart

wandle said:


> So it does to me, and to *ewie*, *Loob*, *Keith Bradford*, *panjandrum*, *natkretep* and anyone else familiar with this peculiar British way of representing a schwa.
> 
> My observation in post 29 that a modern editor would probably use italics for the purpose is intended to help people who are not familiar with that particular British eccentricity to understand what the author meant.



Perhaps I'm being dense, but such an editor (using _the_) would cause many people to say _thee_, while we all agree that Milne wanted people who read the book to "hear" _thuh_ . An editor who wanted to keep the intent would do better to use _thuh, _and thereby convey the ("eccentric" stressed schwa) sound to rhotic and non-rhotic readers alike.


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## wandle

JulianStuart said:


> we all agree that Milne wanted people who read the book to "hear" _thuh_ ..


Well, the UK contingent has been unanimous on this all through. The question is how best to convey the point to forum visitors from outside the UK. I was reacting to post 28, which showed that despite the constant repetition in this thread, it still remains unclear to some. I wanted to make the point from a new angle. We are not in an editorial conference for a re-issue of the book! 

If I understand correctly, *parla's* post 8 means that, in US editions, the phrase has always been presented as 'Winnie-_the_-Pooh'; in other words, US editors have from the start used italics instead of 'ther'.


> such an editor (using _the_) would cause many people to say _thee_


Some people would read it as 'thee', but when we look outside the UK the number of such people is far smaller than the number who would pronounce the 'r' in 'ther' and be flummoxed as a result.


> the ("eccentric" stressed schwa) sound


I do not suggest the stressed schwa sound is eccentric. I am sure it occurs constantly all over the English-speaking world. However, using the letters 'er' to convey a schwa is an eccentricity which is not only uniquely British and strange to other people, but also jars on many in the UK and Ireland who regularly pronounce their 'r's.


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## JulianStuart

Ahh, I think parla's comment is misleading you/us.  The only instance of "ther" is in the cited piece of dialogue.  Every other instance the middle word of the name is "the" and that is what I suspect parla meant.  Every instance _of that dialogue_ I can find on the net has "ther", even in pages from US sources.


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## wandle

Well, in fact, I was not influenced by that comment; I remarked on it as an afterthought. 
I still think modern editors would be likely to prefer italics and that to most potential readers italics would be a much clearer way to represent a stressed schwa. However, as I have said, this is not a suggestion for altering the text but a way to help people in this forum see that Milne intended a schwa sound.


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## JulianStuart

That night be a good idea for "younger speakers" for whom the emphatic the (and for some speakers the only way the word is pronounced, even before vowel sounds) is thuh, while the "usual" emphatic is Thee"
Two American sources:
Random House


> As an emphatic form (“I didn't say a book—I said the book.”) or a citation form (“The word the is a definite article.”), the usual pronunciation is  [thee]  although in both of these uses of the stressed form,  [thee]  is often replaced by  [thuh]  especially among younger speakers.


MW


> _for emphasis before titles and names or to suggest uniqueness often_ ˈthē\


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## Wordsmyth

JulianStuart said:


> I agree - I suspect a wide American/rhotic readership was _not_ something Milne had in mind during the writing of the work


 There's a lot of surmise in this thread (and why not ), but I'm not so sure about that one, JS (assuming your "/" is an _or_, not an _and_ – and temporarily ignoring the ). I don't deny that Milne himself may have been non-rhotic, and it does seem likely that his "ther" was intended to represent a schwa, but I doubt he'd have been unaware of the possibiity of a wide rhotic readership (even in the UK) ...

Pooh dates from 1926, when rhotic speech was far more widespread than it is today: some degree of rhoticity was common across more than half of England, and it was predominant in the rest of the UK. Milne's father was Scottish, so he would probably have heard rhotic speech in the home. At the time of writing Winnie-the-Pooh, Milne was living in rural Sussex, which was then a rhotic-speech area.

I'm also a bit doubtful about this one, nat: 





natkretep said:


> Milne was probably envisaging a British reader, and rhotic BrE speakers will no doubt also be familiar with the hesitation marker written _er_ and not attempt to pronounce the 'r'.


 Milne was writing Winnie-the-Pooh for children (*) — and children tend to read unfamiliar words phonetically, at least until they're 'corrected'. I'm pretty sure that most rhotic speakers, especially kids, would read "ther"as having a pronounced /r/.
*_ (That said, I've got even more out of it as an adult . I'm convinced Douglas Adams was influenced by A A Milne!) _

Ws


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## wandle

Wordsmyth said:


> I doubt he'd have been unaware of the possibiity of a wide rhotic readership (even in the UK) ...
> Pooh dates from 1926, when rhotic speech was far more widespread than it is today: some degree of rhoticity was common across more than half of England, and it was predominant in the rest of the UK. Milne's father was Scottish, so he would probably have heard rhotic speech in the home. At the time of writing Winnie-the-Pooh, Milne was living in rural Sussex, which was then a rhotic-speech area.


I feel certain that Milne would have been very well aware of American, as well as Scottish, Irish and rural English accents which pronounced the 'r', but I do not believe this would have influenced him against using 'ther' to express a stressed schwa. On the contrary, it may well have strengthened him in his decision to write in the idiom of the southern English educated class. He would have relied upon the 'right people' throughout the British Isles knowing what he meant and he may well not have been concerned to seek actively any American readership.

This, like other features of the book, is to a degree about identity. He wanted to create a gentle English idyll and to present it in the characteristic tone of the English middle class. If others wanted to come to it, that was fine, but he was not going down the road to meet them. 

Another aspect of it is that this and other social and language markers are part of how English children are educated into the middle class. It may be that he found his son rather baffled by the strange social and linguistic rituals he encountered at school and that he told the stories and wrote the book to help ease this transition.

Does anyone else have a view on my suggestion that an editor today, faced with a new text for first-time publication containing the word 'ther', would be unlikely to accept it and would probably say to the author, 'Oh, if that's just a stressed 'the', we'll simply put it in italics'?


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## JulianStuart

wandle said:


> I feel certain that Milne would have been very well aware of American, as well as Scottish, Irish and rural English accents which pronounced the 'r', but I do not believe this would have influenced him against using 'ther' to express a stressed schwa. On the contrary, it may well have strengthened him in his decision to write in the idiom of the southern English educated class. He would have relied upon the 'right people' throughout the British Isles knowing what he meant and he may well not have been concerned to seek actively any American readership.


I think this says, probably more clearly, what I was trying to say about Milne not "having  American or rhotic speakers in mind"



wandle said:


> This, like other features of the book, is to a degree about identity. He wanted to create a gentle English idyll and to present it in the characteristic tone of the English middle class. If others wanted to come to it, that was fine, but he was not going down the road to meet them.
> 
> Another aspect of it is that this and other social and language markers are part of how English children are educated into the middle class. It may be that he found his son rather baffled by the strange social and linguistic rituals he encountered at school and that he told the stories and wrote the book to help ease this transition.
> 
> Does anyone else have a view on my suggestion that an editor today, faced with a new text for first-time publication containing the word 'ther', would be unlikely to accept it and would probably say to the author, 'Oh, if that's just a stressed 'the', we'll simply put it in italics'?


I'll just restate my view: Only if they were happy with the risk that some/many would read it as thee - i.e. those not from the "southern English educated class" - and therefore possibly miss Milne's intention.


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## Wordsmyth

wandle said:


> I feel certain that Milne would have been very well aware of American, as well as Scottish, Irish and rural English accents which pronounced the 'r', but I do not believe this would have influenced him against using 'ther' to express a stressed schwa. _[...] _


 Absolutely. wandle. As I said, "... it does seem likely that his "ther" was intended to represent a schwa", but I felt that it wasn't with any lack of awareness of rhoticity amongst his readership  ... er, I think we all agree now.

As a follow-up to nat's view that rhotic BrE speakers would be familiar with the hesitation marker written _er_ and not attempt to pronounce the 'r', I tried a little test on three colleagues, all distinctly rhotic (two from the West Country, one from Northern Ireland). I wrote a sentence containing direct speech with several "er" hesitations, and asked them (separately) to read it. Every one pronounced the _r_ in _er_. They were all surprised when I suggested that it was a written representation of a schwa. They all had much the same reply: that they'd previously seen "er" written, but assumed that it was because some other people actually say "er" as a hesitation, although they don't use it themselves. One of them explained that if he wrote what he habitually said it would be "uh" or "um". 

I then wrote "Winnie-ther-Pooh" for them: they all pronounced the 'r'. One of them remembered that spelling from having read the book. He assumed that "ther" was meant to represent what Christopher Robin actually said (with the 'r' pronounced), because of the question "Don't you know what 'ther' means?". He believes that a child might well challengingly ask that question about a word he'd invented, whereas saying "Don't you know what 'the' means?" to his father would sound insolently sarcastic. I'm quite attracted by that argument.



wandle said:


> _[...] _Does anyone else have a view on my suggestion that an editor today, faced with a new text for first-time publication containing the word 'ther', would be unlikely to accept it and would probably say to the author, 'Oh, if that's just a stressed 'the', we'll simply put it in italics'?


 It might well depend on whether the editor was rhotic or not.

Ws


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## Roxxxannne

Going back, back in time to #13:
I _distinctly_ remember 'Winnie-ther-Pooh' in the American edition that was read to me as a child (and which I read to my stuffed animals as well.  They understood exactly what it meant.).


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## Forero

JulianStuart said:


> But the r would be present (by "re-insertion" "re-intrusion"?*) in the phrase "Eeyore is upset" because of the following vowel


It never occurred to me as a child, and even as an adult until very recently, that "Eeyore" is just a bizarre way to spell "Hee haw".

I assumed it was something like "Igor".


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## Keith Bradford

Oh, dear.  You Americans and other foreign readers had just better get used to the fact that British writers write in British English, and that British writers in 1926 wrote in the style of their time.

If you don't, I swear I'll bring out a UK edition of _Huckleberry Finn_ and _Tom Sawyer_ featuring hedge-sparrows instead of whip-poor-wills and Blackpool rock instead of sugar candy, in the pretence that English children won't understand it otherwise.  You have been warned! _ [Exit to bed, muttering crossly.]_


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## Myridon

I've been saying "erm" and "er" with actual Rs in them all my life.  I never realized erm was pronounced "um pip pip cheerio stiff upper lip wot wot."


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## JulianStuart

A related issue
Nigerian born British singer Sade's first album was Diamond Life.  In the credits on the CD itself, under her name was a pronunciation guide  and it said SHAR-DAY.  I've heard quite a few pronounce it with the r inserted, even though the guide was written, presumably, by a non-rhotic person


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## RM1(SS)

JulianStuart said:


> A related issue


See post 20. 


Keith Bradford said:


> a UK edition of _Huckleberry Finn_ and _Tom Sawyer_ featuring hedge-sparrows instead of whip-poor-wills and Blackpool rock instead of sugar candy


That I'd like to see.  (Along with UK editions of all the Harry Potter books.)


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## JulianStuart

RM1(SS) said:


> See post 20.


It did seem a little familiar


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## Loob

RM1(SS) said:


> See post 20.
> 
> That I'd like to see.  (Along with UK editions of all the Harry Potter books.)


Here, for your delectation and delight, is someone's list of 222 differences between (UK)_ Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone _and (US)_ Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone_: click.


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## Hermione Golightly

I didn't realise about Eeyore's name either. I never puzzled about 'ther' and I still don't. My parents were highly literate,  educated working class, both the first of their families to go to university in the 1930's. It wasn't until I started reading to my own children that I realised there was a bank of children's literature that I knew nothing about despite having many books, reading and being read to. No Beatrix Potter, no Swallows and Amazons, no Wind in the Willows, and no Winnie-ther-Pooh. I can only think this was a political statement.
Sometimes there are no answers.


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## Rover_KE

jmichaelm said:


> Winnie *is *a female name;


... unless you're a male who chooses to call yourself Winnie Churchill, presumably in homage to the late Winston.


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## Roxxxannne

Keith Bradford said:


> Oh, dear.  You Americans and other foreign readers had just better get used to the fact that British writers write in British English, and that British writers in 1926 wrote in the style of their time.
> 
> If you don't, I swear I'll bring out a UK edition of _Huckleberry Finn_ and _Tom Sawyer_ featuring hedge-sparrows instead of whip-poor-wills and Blackpool rock instead of sugar candy, in the pretence that English children won't understand it otherwise.  You have been warned! _ [Exit to bed, muttering crossly.]_


_[Exit to bed, muttering crossly.]   _


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## kentix

For rhotic speakers, an r in a pronunciation guide is always a terrible idea. An r is a consonant and will be pronounced as written. How could it not be?

We use uh for schwa sounds. The h indicates that. u by itself would not. And neither would eh. That's a different vowel.


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## JulianStuart

kentix said:


> For rhotic speakers, an r in a pronunciation guide is always a terrible idea. An r is a consonant and will be pronounced as written. How could it not be?


That pretty much defines the key property of rhotic speakers.  For non-rhotic, the sounds of shar and shah are the same.  Don't worry, though, many non-rhotic speakers save the r's and insert them where rhotic speakers are surprised (see intrusive r).


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## kentix

I meant to say of course, "an r in a pronunciation guide is always a terrible idea, _if there is no actual r in the word_". It's the equivalent of adding a "d" or a "p". It doesn't affect other letters, it's simply pronounced as an additional letter.


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## jmichaelm

JulianStuart said:


> For non-rhotic, the sounds of shar and shah are the same.



I'm now experiencing a good deal of anxiety at the prospect of reading _the Shar of Iran _in a history book.


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## JulianStuart

jmichaelm said:


> I'm now experiencing a good deal of anxiety at the prospect of reading _the Shar of Iran _in a history book.



No-one is suggesting changing the spelling of shah.  When you hear a non-rhotic speaker pronounce that phrase they may insert an r so it sounds like "Shar of Iran".

If they were concerned/worried about rhotic speakers, both Milne and Sade would have done better to use thuh and Shah-day instead of the ones with r in


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## kentix

They would have. I'm sure some people here, to this day, say Sade with an r sound because they were told to. It's right there in writing and people try to get names right.


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## JulianStuart

Just another day in the common language that divides us


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## RM1(SS)

Said division contributing to my belief that the English language is the greatest toy ever invented.


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## natkretep

To go back to the name in question, if we are agreed that _ther _is there to indicate a stressed schwa, I wonder how rhotic speakers would respell the word to indicate it.

Non-rhotic speakers habitually add an <r> to indicate the quality of the vowel before it, and although it looks strange to rhotic speakers, it might be useful to be aware of this. This is the reason for Burma being recast as Myanmar, for instance. The final <r> in the new spelling is not meant to be sounded, and it is there to indicate a full vowel before it rather than a schwa. (Similarly the <r> in 'Burma'.) Once you realise that, the two representations are quite similar!


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## kentix

In general, uh is the indicator of a schwa sound in the U.S. rhotic accent. So I guess it would be thuh. But honestly, there is not much occasion to spell it out. I don't know when you would.

Of course, we have non-rhotic accents, too, and I am not sure what they would do. I suspect it would still be uh. But again, I have never had occasion to see it written.

I will admit I'm a little bit puzzled why there seems to be a pretense among some British speakers that rhotic accents don't exist there - as if the only true British accents and pronunciations are non-rhotic. The idea pops up a lot, but it seems odd to me. Is it a class thing? It seems very dismissive.

I mean we do make fun of non-rhotic Boston accents a bit if we're rhotic, but we don't pretend they don't count as American. They are part of the mix.


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## JulianStuart

I was aware of the regionality remaining in the different areas of the UK, but not about the origin and spread of "r-dropping".  Interesting article on both history and geography here. Rhoticity In British And American English


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