Yeah, I think it has something to do with them being the same one on both sides, but "flail" is a great counterexample to that. I'd only come up with examples that lack the consonant ("li'l", "lull", "loll", "rare", "rear", "roar"...). Of course, "flail" uses a fricative rather than a stop, so that seems to also be part of it.
The diphthongs might be important. Though, —at least in my dialect— "dreary" doesn't have one (I pronounce it as /driri/ with the same vowel as in "see/sea", "seem/seam", "meet/meat",...). The bigger thing about "dreary" is which syllable(s) the second "r" belongs to; if it's "drea-ry" then it doesn't count. (I pronounce it as "drear-ry", so that should be fine; though it raises the question of whether the syllable is allowed when the following syllable doesn't begin with the same consonant.)
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chiming
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Date: 2015-10-02 11:56 pm (UTC)From:Yeah, I think it has something to do with them being the same one on both sides, but "flail" is a great counterexample to that. I'd only come up with examples that lack the consonant ("li'l", "lull", "loll", "rare", "rear", "roar"...). Of course, "flail" uses a fricative rather than a stop, so that seems to also be part of it.
The diphthongs might be important. Though, —at least in my dialect— "dreary" doesn't have one (I pronounce it as /driri/ with the same vowel as in "see/sea", "seem/seam", "meet/meat",...). The bigger thing about "dreary" is which syllable(s) the second "r" belongs to; if it's "drea-ry" then it doesn't count. (I pronounce it as "drear-ry", so that should be fine; though it raises the question of whether the syllable is allowed when the following syllable doesn't begin with the same consonant.)