Hi again and welcome back to Seattle Learning Academy's American English pronunciation podcast.

My name is Mandy, and this is our 139th episode.

Today I'm going to talk about the pronunciation of the word sure, and I'm going to include some symbols from

the international phonetic dictionary in the transcripts for this show. You can see

the symbols I'm talking about and read along with what I'm saying by going to

www.prenuncian.com slash podcast and clicking on episode 139.

Pronuncian is spelled P-R-O-N-U-N-C-I-N.

That web address, again, is www.prenuncian.com slash podcast.

The first oddity of the pronunciation of the word, sure, is the beginning SH sound.

The only other common word that I could find that begins with an SH sound spelled with an S,

instead of an SH, is the word sugar.

If something occurs only once or twice or even a few times, I consider it to be a non-phonetic

word.

A non-phonetic word is a word that is not pronounced the way we would expect by its spelling.

Since most words that begin with the letter S, obviously excluding S,

begin with an S sound, words that begin with the letter S that are pronounced with a different sound are non-phanetic.

The full transcription in the Longman pronunciation dictionary shows the S-H sound,

sh, then the other U, then a small raised shaw, then the R sound, er.

The raised letters in the Longman pronunciation dictionary mean that the sound

can optionally be inserted. So I can say, sure, without the added schwa, or sure with the added

schwa. That is actually rather complicated, but I don't want you to worry about it too much.

Here's why.

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