Vowels NURSE

In CamE, there is a radical split of the NURSE lexical set, a split mostly conditioned by the spelling. /ɔ/ occurs for orthographic or, our, ur as in work, journey, purpose; in acrolectal speech, /ɔ/ alternates with /ε/ in words like work, burn, turn, church; interestingly, the word nurse itself seems to be realized more often as /ε/ than as /ɔ/ ; it is therefore not a good representative of the set, in terms of CamE. The second syllable of incur rhymes with cure and is pronounced like CURE vowel ( [inkjɔ] ), a pronunciation that changes the spelling of the word to *incure. /ε/ is the common realization of the NURSE vowel for words with orthographic er, ear, ir, yr like term, learn, thirty, myrrh. /a/ occurs in mesolectal and basilectal speech in Sir. /a/ is even more common in her. Finally, the occurrence of /a/ in maternity, (verb) transfer, and often in servant [mataniti, transfa, savant] is presumably due to the influence of /a/ in the neighboring syllable, and can be considered as a case of vowel assimilation or harmony.

Given the major splits observed above with clear orthographic conditioning, it seems more convenient in CamE to establish another set, which I will call the TERM set. Leaving the NURSE set for words with <ur, or, our>, the TERM set will comprise words with <er, ere> as in were, and words with <ear, ir, yr>.