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Nice! Except it doesn't quite work for me because the vowel sounds don't match. (For me the second and third "a"s in "banana" are like the "a" in "arm", whereas the two in "Banach" are like the "a" in "at", and those are quite different sounds. Other people may differ -- and indeed I may be mispronouncing "Banach".)


Your banana is like arm?

Mine is like umbrella (the u).

Buh-nah-nuh.


Whoops. Mine's the same. Two schwas and one a-as-in-arm.

[EDITED to add: Er, except that the first vowel in my "umbrella" isn't the same as I think you're putting in yours. In IPA, my umbrella is /ʌmbrɛlə/ and my banana is /bənɑːnə/, unless I've made mistakes there.]


As an American, I'll never understand how the English can indiscriminately throw /ɑː/'s into perfectly normal words, yet when faced with a foreign import that actually asks for it, willfully refuse.


Maybe I made more than one mistake in my description (I definitely made one: the third "a" in "banana" is of course a schwa, not the vowel in "arm") -- but the "a"s I put in "Banach" are (modulo incompetence) pretty much exactly the ones you'll find by clicking the "listen" link after Banach's name at the start of his Wikipedia page. So I'm not sure what you mean about "a foreign import that actually asks for it". And I just checked the etymology of "banana", and the likely Wolof original has exactly one /ɑː/ in it, in the same place as I put one. But, see above, I misdescribed how I say "banana" so I may have caused confusion.




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