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What is the standard rule, if there is one, for pronouncing words beginning with the prefixes com-, col-, cor-, con-?

Very often these words have an /ɒ/ vowel, like in the word hot - in Gen American, I think it's the vowel /ɑː/. Other times they may have a schwa, /ə/, like the first vowel in amazing. Sometimes they seem to have a syllabic consonant, /m, l, r, n/.

Sometimes there even seem to be two words which are spelled the same but have a different pronunciation. For example content meaning "happy" and content as in "the content of the lecture", for which Cambridge Dictionaries gives the transcriptions /kənˈtent/ and /ˈkɒntent/ [US:/ˈkɑːntent/] respectively.

Here are some examples with transcriptions from Cambridge Dictionaries Online:

  • common /ˈkɒm.ən/
  • commercial /kəˈmɜː.ʃəl/
  • colleague /ˈkɒl.iːɡ/
  • collection /kəˈlek.ʃən/
  • correlate /ˈkɒr.ə.leɪt/
  • correct /kəˈrekt/

So my question is:

  1. Is there any rule for whether a schwa or full /ɒ/ or /ɑː/ is used?
  2. Are there generalisations that can be made which will help me have a good guess at which to use.
  3. Are there any rules that will enable me to tell in certain restricted situations.
  4. If I'm unsure about a particular example, would I be better to go with a schwa or a full vowel. Why?
Araucaria - Him
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jafar
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  • Maybe start with a few examples? – Amandine FAURILLOU Aug 25 '15 at 08:43
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    Written words are not pronounced. Spoken words are written down. And the spelling encodes many different things, of which a poor approximation of the pronunciation is just one. Consequently, there is absolutely no reliable way to figure out the pronunciation of a word by looking at its spelling. In every language, not just English. In short, this question is unanswerable at best, and nonsensical at worst. – RegDwigнt Aug 25 '15 at 08:47
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    Which words? You haven't given any. Which ones have you encountered that seem problematic, or contradictory? – Brian Hitchcock Aug 25 '15 at 09:24
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    @RegDwigнt That's seems a bit deliberately unhelpful! There are indeed generalisations we can make to help us decide whether or not the first syllable is going to contain a schwa or not when seeing a word for the first time. – Araucaria - Him Aug 25 '15 at 13:31
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    @RegDwigнt Many languages have a good enough spelling pronunciation correspondence for us to be able to accurately predict what phonemes are going to be present in the word. – Araucaria - Him Aug 25 '15 at 14:10
  • @Araucaria Many languages, certainly. I would cite modern Greek as a prime example. However, does English possess such a predictive quality? The language that inspired the chaos? – oerkelens Aug 25 '15 at 14:29
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    @oerkelens No way Jose. It does not! However, the pron can be predicatable. These prefixes all have a full vowel when stressed and a schwa when not. So if you're familiar with the word enough to know where the stress is, but haven't worked out the pron before, you can do so. Problem is telling where the stress is if you haven't seen the word. However, the length of the word in conjunction with it's part of speech can give you a clue. Also certain suffixes make stress predicatble within the word, so you might be able to figure it out from there ... – Araucaria - Him Aug 25 '15 at 14:34
  • @oerkelens ... Knowing another word from the word family can help you too. Otherwise you're stuffed! – Araucaria - Him Aug 25 '15 at 14:36
  • @oerkelens Fancy a reopen vote? – Araucaria - Him Aug 25 '15 at 14:37
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    @Araucaria I sure do, if only because of your implied promise of a great answer. Looking forward to it :-) – oerkelens Aug 25 '15 at 14:47
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    I'm confused. Is this about American English or British. You mention American, but then refer to Cambridge Dictionaries on line which sounds very British to me. From the pronunciation of 'commercial' which is non-rhotic I'd guess British. So which is it? The answer may not depend on rhotacism but the two varieties may differ on the first syllable. – Mitch Aug 28 '15 at 00:58
  • @Mitch It's about both, (and tacitly about non-standard varieties too). Hence the one strong vowel given for SSBE and the other for Gen AM (although the second's a generalisation because it would be different in front of /r/ in Gen Am ...) – Araucaria - Him Aug 31 '15 at 13:45
  • As Mitch says, it has to do with the word stress. I saw an interesting answer recently that talks about this prefix, word stress and vowel reduction: http://english.stackexchange.com/a/272706/77227 – herisson Sep 08 '15 at 21:31

1 Answers1

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It looks like, from your small sample here that at least in General American, no stress on the initial syllable gets pronounced with the schwa /kə/, and with stress it is /ˈkɒ/.

And that is what the rule is,The rule is usually that a vowel in unstressed positions often gets converted to schwa (and such a rule pretty much answers all your questions, 1 through 4).

What the rule is for when there is stress on the 'with' prefix, it depends on the whole word: two syllables stress in on the first, three syllables stress on the second.

Mitch
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  • That stress rule doesn't work. For two-syllable words, generally the stress the second syllable for verbs (compare the noun "content" and the verb "contain"). Two-syllable adjectives may take iambic stress ("content,""correct," "complete"). Also, three syllables doesn't mean stress on the second syllable: there are many three-syllable words like "competent," "correlate," etc. where the stress is on the first syllable. – herisson Sep 08 '15 at 21:37