Cinema or Cinemar - yes, it's a pronunciation one!

[chomalungma]

I say cinema with a hard 'a' as in c /a / t

But listening to the radio, someone pronounced it 'cinemar' as in ' ar' at the end.

So what do you say?

(I have more )

*it's not just final Rs it affects. That was an example. It's basically Rs after vowels not followed by other vowels.

@lazylinguist

Thank you! Every time I see it mentioned I wonder if I have been terribly mispronouncing it all my life and nobody has ever bothered to tell me.

No worries. I tend to weigh in every time I see rhotic/non-rhotic-related stroppiness or disbelief on a thread. It can get very heated. It always baffles me that people are unaware of it. We all must hear those accents very regularly on tv, radio, films etc if not in real life, and yet so many people can't seem to imagine or reproduce in their heads the way that words sound in those other accents.

I've seen a few of those discussions . Funnily enough when reading them I am generally aware of the differences in pronunciation of words like car or park, and why some people write 'ar' to denote the pronunciation 'ah' , thus confusing others, but it didn't occur to me that drawer was another with different rhotic/non‐rhotic pronunciation.

All rhotic means is that you pronounce the final R in words like car and (to take an example from the thread) drawer. Non-rhotic means you don't. Some non-rhotic speakers use 'ar' to show a long a/ah sound, which irritates some rhotic speakers

I honestly couldn't think of another way to explain how this person pronounced 'cinema' in a different way to how I pronounced it!

I pronounce 'ah' differently to 'ar' as well.

I’m a geordie and say cinemar

I still don’t see the difference.
@RichardMarxisinnocent what difference in pronunciation between the ar sounds in car and park? They’re surely the same?!

All fine as long as you don't say "the movies" ;)

How about forehead, "for-hedd" or "forrid"?

@raspberryk

I still don’t see the difference. *@RichardMarxisinnocent* what difference in pronunciation between the ar sounds in car and park? They’re surely the same?!

There's no difference between car and park, they are examples of words which sound different in a rhotic accent to a non-rhotic one. So some people will say them like cah and pahk without sounding the r, others will pronounce the r.

Oh, well that’s my mind blown! Thank you for explaining, I can say I’ve never heard or noticed that.

The movies!

(signed, an American)

@0blio

Cinema with emphasis on first syllable. I'm Scottish so definitely wouldn't pronounce it cinemar

My bugbear is when tv presenters (mostly on Homes under the Hammer) say comm-YOU-nal instead of COMM-unal - but my pronunciation could be a Scots thing too.

I say cinemar, from Surrey.

This is the one I’m most interested in! I’ve not heard anyone pronounce it COMM-unal. The emphasis has always been on the 2nd syllable? That reminds me of controversy. I was CONtroversy but hear a lot of people say conTROVersy... what’s everyone thought on that?

Cinemas I also pronounce draw and drawer slightly differently with a very cropped uh at the end.

I hate autocorrect, it should have said cinemaa

I've seen a few of those discussions smile. Funnily enough when reading them I am generally aware of the differences in pronunciation of words like car or park, and why some people write 'ar' to denote the pronunciation 'ah' , thus confusing others, but it didn't occur to me that drawer was another with different rhotic/non‐rhotic pronunciation.

I know what you mean. Tbh I'm still not 100% sure that's the reason for the 'drawer' pronunciation difference, but I strongly suspect it is.

This is the one I’m most interested in! I’ve not heard anyone pronounce it COMM-unal.

Really? I don't think I've heard any one pronounce it comMUnal!

@lazylinguist I’m confused now because I just googled how to pronounce communal and they all say it the way I would pronounce it, so maybe I got the wrong end of the stick with what COMMunal meant

NoSensei - my (Concise Oxford) dictionary has both options, with the COMMunal version first (i.e. with the emphasis on the first syllable). I Googled as well, and there are various videos of how to pronounce it, which say comMUnal. But tbh I trust my dictionary more than YouTube.