Do you pronounce Merry and Mary the same?

[SpringIsSpringing23]

The main character in a book I'm reading is called Merry. She has to introduce herself as "Merry as in Merry Christmas, not the Virgin Mary" for other people to spell it right.

In my accent they are pronounced differently!

If Merry and Mary are pronounced the same then does Mary Berry's name rhyme? Are ferry and fairy the same? Very and vary?

I do remember the “We’re Mary and Gerry from Derry” line in Derry Girls. I hadn’t really thought about that before but he did make them all rhyme.

Not with my accent. Merry rhymes with berry and Mary rhymes with fairy.

I remember when Greys anatomy first started they talked about the fairy boats and I wondered what they were. Pictures tourist boats all lit up in fairy lights for evening rides.
Turned out they were ferry boats.

To me, Mary and merry are not the same

No

I’ve only ever heard Mary pronounced M-air-ee. So totally different to Merry. Also, how the hell does giraffe and scarf rhyme? J-raff and sc-ar-f.

No I have a very mild Newcastle accent.

Very different to me in Scotland.

But you will have lots of inside the M25 people along shortly unable to comprehend differences in speaking.

How do they not rhyme? They most definitely rhyme in my southern UK accent.

Yes this would be my thinking. Even if they are pronounced slightly differently (I’d rhyme them with fairy and ferry) people would likely confuse the name merry for the name Mary because it’s a much more common name. So it could be about them sounding a bit similar rather than sounding indistinguishable.

Mary. Pronounced Mairy.
Merry. Like Christmas.

They sound similar so easy to mishear, but I pronounce them as above.

I also know a Maire which is pronounced Mah-ree.

That’s not true!

Very differently in my accent.

No but its just different accents isn't it? I'm Scottish and the e and the a are pronounced as e and a so although they sound similar they're definitely not the same.

I think there’s a @JDKirk where this happens too - I presume it’s not an accent thing, but the familiarity of Mary as a first name, so people presume they have misheard Merry.

I pronounce giraffe as girarf so it would rhyme with scarf and laugh in my accent. (I'm from Herts).
I've definitely heard 'you're having a giraffe' as rhyming slang for 'you're having a laugh'.

I love accents and pronunciations the variables are so interesting.

My wonderful MIL was a Suffolk girl born and bred with a broad Suffolk accent.
Her local town was Bury St Edmunds. She always used to say she was going to Bairy.
I with my hurried generic southern accent I pronounce it Berry.

I say them differently. But I struggle with saying Mary Berry and always end up saying Mary Bairy or Merry Berry.

i think with the book it’s just that when you have an uncommon name that is close in sound to a much more common name, people will often mishear it. They don’t have to sound exactly the same for this to happen.

In linguistics there's a concept of the Mary/marry/ merry merger, so they all sound the same in some accents.

That's it though, @DinosApple . You have the self-awareness to realise that although words rhyme in YOUR accent, they don't necessarily rhyme in everyone else's.

It's the people who will insist that of course scarf/giraffe or Merry/Mary or farm/palm rhyme and that anyone who disagrees is quite plainly wrong that wind the rest of us up. Or those who think that a SE England way of speaking isn't an accent at all - it's just the rest of us who have an accent.

This reminds me of when we took a ferry to France with a small child, who asked "will we fly on the fairy boat?".
I was Mary for days!

Mary rhymes with scary.
Merry rhymes with Terry.
Giraffe does not rhyme with scarf. Neither does laugh.

I have a Nottingham accent but had Irish parents. My dad was from NI and would definitely say merry and Mary more or less the same.

@IkBenDeMol Yes I agree it is frustrating!

There's also a distinct, but fast dying out, if not already long gone Essex accent that was much closer to a Suffolk accent and Norfolk accent. Nothing like the Essex accent of today which stems more from the post war shift out of London.

But there's much more population movement these days so accents blend together more quickly.

I'm not the quickest at getting my ear in, it took a long time before I could understand my MIL!

These threads make me laugh. Is it so hard for people to imagine words being said in their heads in a different accent, or to say them out loud?

Mary rhymes with fairy for me, but it isn't hard to imagine that for some people if rhymes with Merry. Equally, giraffe rhymes with laugh for me, but comes nowhere near to rhyming with scarf. However, I have heard other accents in my life other than my own, so it's easy to see how it does for some. On these threads people seem to have only heard their own accent, like they live in some peasant village in the dark ages.

I wanted to call DD Meredith, Merry for short but the midwives on the postnatal ward put me off so I went with my other name choice. I often regret it.

I definitely pronounce them differently. Mary like fairy. Merry like berry.

Here in NI, Mary is often pronounced a bit like Meery!

Me too!! I thought he was saying fairy bugs. I was so confused.