Pronounce Kamala

[HelenWheels]

apparently it is like Comma, as in a sentence and La

however we pronounce comma differently in UK
i guess it should be pronounced as they do in America rather than we would in UK?

That clip sounds EXACTLY like Pamela with a K to me.

In my Orcadian accent father would be more like fay-ther and in Doric (Aberdeenshire) it's more like fither rather than the ah sound that English people use.

As far as Kamala Harris goes then I think not taking the piss out of how to pronounce it is probably all that's required. She's not going to get mad at someone Tamil saying it the Tamil way or someone English saying KAM-ala as long as their intentions are decent and not politically motivated like Trump.

I have a common name that with my Scottish accent I pronounce the vowels differently to an English person, I can't actually say the vowels the way my English children do. But I don't mind people pronouncing it with their own accent, the thing that annoys me is English people not understanding what my name is when I tell them and then saying 'Oh, you mean X'. Funnily enough non-English speaks never try and 'correct' me and happily pronounce my name their way and understand that our different accents mean we pronounce the name differently.

Exactly!

And in MIL's strong Glenrothes accent Park and Parakeet have the exact same first vowel.

Pah-rrru-kee (no t). Or even Paw-ruh-kee if it's cousin's wife (Kirkcaldy).

But Bra and Rather are the opposite, very short a sound like the Ah-Ah sound you'd make to tell off a pet or toddler.

I think a lot of people outside of Scotland have no idea of the variety of accents there are even from village to village (in MIL's case Glenrothes and Dunfermline are geographically close but there is an accent difference).

But that could apply to other broadly Rhotic speaking countries too...the vast difference between a Waterford and Dublin accent for example or California/Boston/Arkansas/New York Yiddish etc. It's often very patronising to attempt to have a one size fits all approach then tell Native speakers they must be wrong about their own accent.

I’d like to be clear that I was not questioning that PP being right about their own accent. I was replying to a claim that rhotic accents in general do not differentiate between long and short a. There may well be some accents where they don’t distinguish but in plenty of rhotic accents they do.

The first rhotic accents that came to mind for me (North American and rhotic Lancashire) were ones that do distinguish. I did then edit the post when I thought some more and realised that I could in fact think of some that did not.