Re[2]: [tied] Re: Asian migration to Scandinavia

At 6:05:02 PM on Tuesday, September 16, 2008, Piotr
Gasiorowski wrote:

[...]

> The merger of the MARY, MERRY and MARRY lexical sets
> (regularly distinguished e.g. in RP and Scottish English)
> is a fairly recent dialectal phenomenon (of course almost
> general in the Englishes of North America).

I think that a significant (but probably shrinking) minority
of Americans distinguish <marry> from the other two (/æ/ vs.
/E/); only a very small minority distinguish <Mary> from
<merry>.

Brian