Learn English – Are “mist” and “missed” really pronounced exactly the same in English

In both American and British English, there is an emphasis on the first O, but not too much. For example, "astronomy" is pronounced:

• "as" like "us" (or sometimes "ass" from "class")
• "tr" from "trim"
• "on" from "marathon"
• "om" like "um"
• "y" like "ee" from "tree", but shorter

However, in Indian English, I have heard many people pronouncing it astrOHnomy, basically giving the O in "astro" the same emphasis as the O in "micro" and tacking on the "nomy" (rhymes with "mommy"). This is completely different from the pronunciation above, and is wrong in American/British English.

No, not run-they-who but ron-day-voo.

Both Modern French and Modern English got the word rendezvous from Middle French. It's been an English word for about four hundred and twenty years!

So simply saying it's a French word and we should mimic the modern French pronunciation is disingenuous.

English spelling is quirkier than its pronunciation. We've pretty much retained the French spelling (merely dropping the hyphen) but the pronunciation is quite different. French "r" is very different to any of the ways "r" is pronounced in English. French has nazalised vowels (the first "e" is one) but English does not.

(In fact it's quite possible that even the French meanings and pronunciation have drifted a little in the four centuries since English adopted this word.)

Both the Middle French and Modern French pronunciations are out of scope for this site for English learners. (They would be relevant in a forum, or in a linguistics site.)

The only pronunciation I know is like "ron-day-voo". Different dictionaries would render it different ways. The English Wiktionary currently uses:

/ˈɹɑndəˌvu/ or /ˈɹɑndeɪ̯ˌvu/ for American English and /ˈɹɒndɪˌvuː/ or /'ɹɒndeɪ̯ˌvuː/ for British English.

Without the IPA these would be like ron-duh-voo and ron-dee-voo. These suggest that the second "e" can also be reduced like the "e" in chicken. But I'm not familiar with these pronunciations. These are both farther from the French pronunciation and perhaps a little closer to run-they-who.

Anyway, I would render the pronunciation I know in IPA this way:

/rɒndeɪvuː/ (ɒ is the vowel in hot. In most American English accents this is usually affected by the "cot-caught merger" and is rendered ɑ in IPA.)