On Wed, 29 Oct 2003, John Klein wrote: #I actually had a similar discussion with a friend recently about 'fairy' #and 'ferry'. This was particularly disconcerting because: # #a) I couldn't notice a difference when he pronounced them or played a # sound file of someone else doing so. #b) He claimed I pronounced them differently despite not being aware of any # difference. This is known to happen. William Labov, who is damn' near the father of variation studies (and who's right here at Penn, and giving a talk tomorrow that I may have to miss, dammit!) was IIRC the first to show it. -- Mark A. Mandel Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania