I think it’s the former, I also think I maybe imagined the “Th” when someone else said it. I also may have been surrounded by others who mispronounced both.
Uh, thanks for the heads up. I’ve been pronouncing epitome both correctly and incorrectly my entire adult life because for some reason I thought they were two different words.
I've been an avid reader since I was 6/7 and I hate reading dictionary listings with phonetic spellings as ironically they only make it harder for me to know how to pronounce a word. I'm also a native speaker.
This one seems like it's very accent-dependent. A cockney geezer will definitely say "be'aah", but a geordie would say "be'eh and someone from the west country would say "betterrrr". I think the American pronunciation makes the R sound a lot longer (you can tell I don't know all the property linguistics words!) so anything shorter probably sounds weird to you.
I'm sure it's definitely regional, just like accents in the US. But generally in England at least it's non-rhotic. I know Scotland is different, maybe Wales too
It's like a hippopotamoo, but somewhat more existential and obsessed with arcana like boulders and mountains for exercise to discover happiness in life.
Para-dig-em checking in. The bulb that lit up when I connected the sound with the word was pretty bright, but made me feel awfully dim. It changed my whole paradigm.