What is

What is
 

Can we pronounce what is like this. Wharis?
Or just whats?

Either one is OK

úaris

úats

Thank u

You're very welcome.

Yes, but people might think you're drunk.

Or maybe that he has an accent? :rolleyes:

Quite an accent, I might add. 'Is' is never pronounced with an 's' sound and we never pronounce 'what' like 'watt'.
Here is how it's said in many places in America: /wət ɪz/

They're homophones in my dialect. But I can't think of any dialect which replaces the stop in what with a flap (which I assume whar is supposed to indicate). Some might elide it completely and make what's and was homophones.

In many North American varieties it is common to pronounce intervocalic /t/ and /d/ as a voiced flap, especially when the preceding vowel is voiced stressed and the following vowel is unvoiced unstressed. Common homonym pairs include "latter"/"ladder" and "waiter"/"wader".

The same thing may or may not occur across word boundaries. For example, when I speak more carefully I typically use a glottal stop before the initial vowel of a word: that's how I render the pronunciation that Rusty gives as /wət ɪz/. However, when I speak more casually I may omit the glottal stop and render the /t/ as a voiced flap. Of course, I'm also just as likely to abbreviate "what is" to "what's" and say /wəts/.

I agree with you wholeheartedly. This is exactly how a speaker of American English would pronounce that. I just didn't take the time to write about it.
It's interesting that the 's' in 'is' is pronounced as an 's' when used in a contraction. When used as a separate word, the 's' is pronounced like the letter 'z'.

Rusty, please don't tell that to a Spaniard!

:lol::lol::lol:

The English pronunciation of the letter was inferred, as you know.

By whom?

By the English reader... of course... (given that the discussion is being carried in English...) ;) :)

I think Chileno's point was that Rusty should have said implied rather than inferred.

Implied and inferred can be used interchangeably when the meaning is 'hint or suggest'.

Maybe this has happened to some of you, maybe not.

As I used a bilingual dictionary to translate from English to Spanish. I would also read the phonetics provided for the word in English. In order to understand them I had to read the instructions, and usually they would like:

whatever symbol as in ....

Several dictionaries listed the help for sh pronunciation as "a soft ch as in the French word chapeau"

And if I remember well, this instruction was the same in both languages. Maybe it was only in Spanish, I don't recall and now I am too lazy to be looking for it.

Does anybody think this instruction is right?

:)

I disagree. To imply is to make an implication, whereas to infer is to draw an inference (from that implication or elsewhere).

Put another way, to imply is to make an indirect statement. To infer means to deduce from a statement. Thus if somebody implies something, somebody else can infer something from it. It is the same event from different perspectives.

By definition, these two can't be used interchangeably. :)

It's complicated.

pjt, exactly as I understand the terms imply and infer.