Pronunciation of seer. Is the CMU dictionary wrong
I was looking at how "eer" is usually pronounced and I used the CMU pronouncing dictionary (American accent). I saw that most of the time (around 95%) "ee" before "r" is pronounced /ɪ/, but there are a few words like seer for which the dictionary says that "ee" is /i/. However, when looking at the oxford dictionaries (Received Pronunciation), all the words that the CMU says that have an /i/ are indicated as being pronounced with a /ɪ/.
Is the CMU dictionary wrong or is seer (or bucaneer or puppeteer) really pronounced with /i/ while other words like steer, deer, veneer and peer are pronounced with an /ɪ/?
Some links:
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Seer, CMU /sir/: http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict?in=seer
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Deer (~95% of the words with this pattern are pronounced like this), CMU /dɪr/: http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict?in=deer
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Seer, oxford dictionaries (pronunciation at the bottom) /sɪə/ (non rhotic that has schwa instead of /r/ because of RP, but vowel is /ɪ/) https://www.lexico.com/definition/seer
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Deer, oxford dictionaries (pronunciation at the bottom) /dɪə/ (non rhotic that has schwa instead of /r/ because of RP, but vowel is /ɪ/) https://www.lexico.com/definition/deer
I know RP and Ame are different, but I'm adding it anyway because it supports a bit the argument saying that seer is /sɪr/
Some people pronounce seer to rhyme with freer (more free), but this isn't what the CMU dictionary is talking about. The CMU dictionary encodes freer as F R IY ER, not F R IY R. The problem with seer is that the CMU dictionary is inconsistent as to how it encodes these phonemes.
The CMU dictionary has
bier, ear, hear, here, seer, tier, weir
as /-ir/, and
beer, cheer, clear, dear, deer, ear, fear, gear, jeer, mere, near, peer, pier, queer, rear, sear, sere, shear, sheer, smear, sneer, spear, sphere, steer, tear, veer, year
as /ɪr/.
Furthermore, beard is B IH R D and bluebeard is B L UW B IY R D.
I don't think that any Americans actually differentiate between these two sets of words, although some Americans pronounce all these words with /-ir/ and some with /-ɪr/, so either of these notations would be a reasonable representation of these words. But the CMU dictionary is inconsistent, which is not reasonable.