General American has a three-way merger between the first vowels in "hurry" and "furry" and the unstressed vowel in "letters". In Received Pronunciation, all of them have different sounds (, and , respectively), and some minimal pairs exist between unstressed and , such as "foreword" vs. "forward" . In General American, they collapse to , but in phonemic transcription, they can still be differentiated as and to facilitate comparisons with other accents. General American also often lacks a proper opposition between and , which makes minimal pairs such as "unorthodoxy" and "an orthodoxy" variably homophonous as . See the strut–comma merger for more information.