The Letter of the Day

'R'

Australians have a funny relationship with the letter 'R':  I'd say it's almost a love/hate relationship.  They don't use it when they're supposed to and they use it where it has no business being used.  They love using the letter 'R' but hate using it in the correct context.

There are many, many English words that end in the letter 'R' or the 'R' sound:
-Computer
-Chair
-Letter
-There
-Your

Nevermind that almost every descriptive noun in the English language ends with 'R':
-Baker
-Sailor
-Biker
-Robber

What Australians tend to do with these words is to simply not bother to pronounce the 'R' sound at the end of the word and replace it with the 'Ah' sound.  For instance:
-"computer" becomes "computah"
-"baker" becomes "bakah"
-"sailor" becomes "sailah"
-"more" becomes "mo-eh"

You get the idea.

It's not terrible and it's not difficult to understand until you get to other words such as:
-"there" becomes "theh-ah"
-"your" becomes "yo-ah"
-"chair" becomes "che-ah"
-"our" becomes something almost unpronounceable but similar to "ah-eh"

Fortunately, you get used to it fairly quickly.  What I'm having a harding time adjusting to is the Australian habit of inserting the 'R' sound where it doesn't belong, usually after a vowel at the end of a sentence, and almost always after the hard "O" sound.  Exhibit A:
-"no" becomes "no-er"
-"spa" becomes "spa-er"

I didn't realize how often as English speaking people we use words like 'no', 'go', 'know' and 'so' until I heard these simple, innocent, little words butchered mercilessly by these descendants of criminals.  It's almost like Australians can't quite coordinate their mouth and tongue to work together in making the "O" sound.  The mouth seems to be doing fine in forming the "O" sound when all of a sudden the tongue, rather than just hanging out and letting the mouth do the work, insists on getting involved and mucks up the whole operation.  I now understand why removing tongues was considered to be an acceptable form of punishment for certain crimes.

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Ah-eh original laptop is currently in the shop.  Apparently the hard drive is corrupted and needs to be replaced.  What this means is that we ah-er down to 1 laptop and 1 iPad fo-er two adults that use the computah moderately and 3 teenagahs that use it excessively.  Also-er, because we aren't able to get a decent TV package (due to the proximity to the switching station, o-eh something) we often plug the laptop into the TV and watch a show-er of our choice online.

What this means is that ah-eh access to things like email, Facetime & Skype are a little mo-eh limited and if you-eh trying to get a hold of us it may be a touch mo-eh difficult.

The other issue that we face is that the laptop that's being repaired has all of our photo-ers on it.  We tried to back it up but due to the corruption we're not shoo-ah it worked.  There's a chance we may-er lose ow photo-ers which would suck enormously.