Cava - cavver or carver?

[StillCoughingandLaughing]

Just been on the phone to my mother, who was waxing lyrical about the lovely ‘cavver’ (Cava) she’s bought to go with Christmas lunch. I’ve always pronounced it ‘carver’, with a soft A, and that’s what I hear more often than not, but she’s not alone in her pronunciation, so I have a nagging doubt I could be wrong. Can I get the views of the MN jury?

YABU = Cavver with a hard A
YANBU = Carver with a soft A

The non-rude comments just keep on coming...

In parts of the U.K. I would expect people from the South West and Liverpool to say carver because their accents add in r and lengthen existing rs.

It’s neither. It’s Cava. With no r.

Your studying doesn't seem to have helped you Rudolph, the OP's carver makes perfect sense to lots of us on here. Not sure what else there is to say that requires having studied 5 languages.

These threads about invisible r's always turn to shit. Different regions have different accents. Nobody's right, nobody's wrong. I remember being utterly mystified by the seemingly random r's place into phonetic spellings of certain words. Then I though about my own accent (Belfast) and realised there are some words we say which no combination of letters in the alphabet could ever convey!

It would be great if we could be proud of the diverse dialects and accents in the U.K. as they are an important part of our cultural heritage and are declining over time due to exposure to media.

But it is correct in a non-rhotic English accent. Obviously most English speaking people don't pronounce 'cava' the way Spanish people do as we don't really have the Spanish 'a' sound, which is actually kind of midway between a flat short English 'a' as in 'cap' and a long English 'ah' as in 'pa'. And we don't have the same pronunciation of 'v' either, which is not quite 'b' but is closer to it than an English 'v'. So we approximate as we do with Liebfraumilch and lasagne.

It is ca.....va. Short sounds. No r. Accents or not !!! Ca...va