Have you ever noticed that the American pronunciation of the letter i in various words is exactly "opposite" of the British way. Look at the following two word groups to understand what I mean...
Word group 1
Word group 2
What I would really like to know is if this is a well known pattern and can be used to derive American pronunciations from their British counterparts (and vice-versa)?
I think it's over-optimistic, and probably not very possible, to try to derive a formula to come up with the right choice in all situations. In short, I doubt the usefulness of the proposed rule.
In my (American) experience, both pronunciations for anti/semi/hemi are used interchangeably, and probably inconsistently even in an individual's lexicon.
On the other hand, I feel like "quasi" ends in "zee" more often than "zai" or "sai."
For Mobile/Fragile/Docile, I find myself using a short i sound that makes them sound like "mohbuL" "frazhuL", "DossuL". I don't doubt for a second though that there are going to be Americans who also pronounce it with the "ile" sound.
is but I think antai, semai, mobil, fragil are decidedly American. I haven't ever heard of anyone else using these variations. Therefore I posit the conversion rule is still useful at least in the direction from British to American.
Commented
Dec 1, 2014 at 12:45
Applauds OP
Other notable examples for group 1 are, of course, Iraq and Iran.
If you asked the average British person to do an 'American' accent, chances are these are the changes that they would make.
That said, I doubt the rule could be applied to create anything more authentic than a caricature. In much the same way as the American idea of a 'British' accent sounds nothing like any accent anyone in the UK could identify, the diversity of accents on both sides of the pond makes this unlikely to be useful other than for a generalisation.
