What exactly is the distinction in the U.S.?

British journalists make some pretty gruesome puns, but this one works: "oar" and "awe" sound basically the same to me. AFAIK the only part of Britain where they would differ is Scotland, where most people would sound the r in "oar" distinctly.

What exactly is the distinction in the U.S.?

In the US there is a clear R-sound on oar, but not on awe. This R-sound is essentially the same as the standard initial R-sound in UK or US English. Not sure whether it's the same as the Scots R-sound you're referring to.

AE: oar rhymes with door, awe rhymes with jaw

Thanks - 'shock and awe' somehow passed my by completely, so I didn't get the pun and thought 'shock and oar' a bit of a strange phrase when I saw it yesterday. Now it all makes sense.

#2 I thought that might be it, but wasn't sure. The Scottish r is rolled like the southern German r, so it isn't the same as in the US.

Outside Scotland, the 'r' at the end of a word is mostly inaudible in Britain - pour sounds pretty much like paw, and so on. No doubt LEO's linguistics buffs will probably be able to say more about it.

#3 BE: oar rhymes with jaw rhymes with awe rhymes with door :-)

@Bill: In BE, 'oar' rhymes with 'door', too. That doesn't help ;)

Edit: Captain Flint's edit wasn't there a second ago.

Further to the above, you definitely would hear the r in BE if the subsequent word began with a vowel, e.g. "Pour_it into the glass". But you wouldn't normally hear it otherwise. Edit: ... and I think the distinction between "pour it" and "paw it" would be quite slight for most people.

In the UK, do oar and awe truly have the identical pronunciation?

They do in Australia too - we don't pronounce the "r" in oar. In our rhyming slang, for instance, dead horse = sauce.

OT dead horse = sauce: Is that the sauce you put on food or impudence?

you definitely would hear the r in BE if the subsequent word began with a vowel

Interesting. There's a curious semi-parallel in English. In some regional dialects in the US, an extra R will be interpolated after "shock and awe" or similar cases, if the next sound is a vowel.

Example: "the shock and awe approach [pronounced: oar approach]". I'm not sure which dialects do this, but it's not uncommon.

Sounds like MA or maybe New England. People imitating JFK would also pronounce "Cuba" as "Cuber."

Twice the race was rescheduled — when both crews sank in 1912 and in 1951 when Oxford were swamped.

Twice the race was rescheduled, when both sank in 1912 and in 1951 when Oxford were engulfed.

Diese beiden Sätze habe ich aus dem im OP genannten link kopiert(ganz am Ende). Warum steht hier were?

edith: hat nichts mit der eigentlichen Frage zu tun, tut mir leid :-(

Weil 1912 und 1951 abgeschlossene Vergangenheit ist.

@12: Do you mean why is the verb plural? Because it's common in English to refer to a team (in fact groups in general) in the plural. The police are, etc.

I think the question is "Why isn't it 'was'."

And I think the answer is because BE uses the plural to describe organizations where AE uses the singular.

Edit: Just saw SD3's. OK, I guess it doesn't apply in every case! "The police are" is also what we would say.

Ja, wahrscheinlich habt ihr Recht, Bill und SD3. Darauf bin ich gar nicht gekommen, aber in AE ist es ja oft anders.

Edit: Manchmal ist die Edit-Funktion auch eher nervig... ;) Man denke sich die Hälfte von Bills Posting weg, dann passt meine Antwort besser.

As long as the protester was arrested, the rower who collapsed is recovering, and Cambridge won, all is well. ;-)

Genau. Cambridge rule!

Interesting. There's a curious semi-parallel in English. In some regional dialects in the US, an extra R will be interpolated after "shock and awe" or similar cases, if the next sound is a vowel. (#10)

Not only in the US - this is the "intrusive R":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linking_R

The phenomenon of intrusive R is an overgeneralizing reinterpretation of linking R into an r-insertion rule that affects any word that ends in the non-high vowels /ə/, /ɪə/, /ɑː/, or /ɔː/; when such a word is closely followed by another word beginning in a vowel sound, an [r] is inserted between them, even when no final /r/ was historically present. For example, the phrase tuna oil would be pronounced [ˈtjuːnər ɔɪl]. The [r] is inserted epenthetically to prevent two consecutive vowel sounds.

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhotic_and_non-r...

Words like 'team' and 'company' (and the names of corporations) are typically plural in BE but not in AE; however, there are others in AE that can be plural, like 'family,' 'jury,' 'committee' and so on. 'Police' is actually not in the same category as any of those, because it's (virtually) always plural in English, though it's always singular in German.

Back to pronunciation: Another complication is that many AE speakers, myself included, distinguish between two different O vowels before R: short O as in cot, God, or, horse, for, tor, dorsal, morning, porridge vs. long O as in coat, goad, oar, hoarse, four, tore, door, more, pour. Unfortunately, this important and useful distinction isn't even reflected in many dictionaries, and is glossed over in a lot of sloppy puns, perhaps because many editors and comedians have come from the north rather than the south.

There's also a lot of variation in the degree of rounding. For me there's very little difference between awe and ah, but in both northeastern accents and BE accents, awe is farther back and more rounded.

All this is hard to describe, but you could try comparing audio files of these key words as pronounced by speakers from different regions. Perhaps someone remembers a link to a pronunciation website where you can listen to individual words in accents from different regions.

PS: Not all Americans pronounce an "R" sound in oar. For me, having grown up in New York City, "oar" and "awe" sound exactly the same, and rhyme both with door and with jaw.

Also, an "R" sound appears in both words for me when followed by a vowel. "Awe and shock" and "oar and shock" both have the "R" sound.