Pen-pen merger

[Rudolph C Troike]

Larry,

        I also have the merger "stem" and "strength". It was only a few
years ago that I learned that anyone pronounced an /E/ in "friend" (thanks
to Gordon for mentioning that), since I have to rely on spelling to guess
which phoneme differentiators use. (Of course, this sometimes results in a
hyper-form for "English" for some Southerners.) I was listening to a talk
on morphology once by a colleague from New Jersey, and was bothered that
he seemed to have a non-English accent in his pronunciation, so I started
focusing on that, and soon realized that it was the high frequency of the
term "stem", with /E/, that created that impression for me.

        Rudy