Yeah, I guess the Brits, at least where Oli lives, don't have the phoneme written ʌ in the I.P.A. They say moother looves her poopy. But is that R.P.? It seems to me that Rumpole and Monty Python and Inspector Morse always said up and duck the way we do, not oop and dook.
Muther loves her puppy. Mother puppy put cud could would up duck look luck cook fuck shut etc. Although in certain parts of the country, especially oop North you'll have a luke in freezer to see what you want to cuke for lunch.
The point I'm trying to make--unsuccessfully--is that in American dialect the words in that series do not all have the same vowel. Could, would, look, cook: that is the IPA symbol ʋ (sort of, I can't find the real symbol on my menu). It's formed with the lips tightened into an OO shape, but it's not as closed as the OO sound in cutie, brute or scoot. Puppy, cud, up, duck, luck, shut: that is a different phoneme in American dialect. It's the IPA symbol ʌ. It's a very lax vowel, rather open with no tightening of the lips into an OO shape at all. It's more like an AH with the mouth not so wide open. It's the unaccented Russian A in Volga and the unaccented Russian O in Glasnost. What you're saying is that IPA ʋ has been tightened into IPA u. So that look rhymes with Luke. (Although they're still not homonyms over there because you pronounce Luke as Lyuke. We leave out the Y.) What I'm commenting on is your remarks indicating that virtually everywhere in the U.K., luck and look are homonyms, as are putt and put, cud and could, pus and puss. That Jethro Tull rhymes with wool. In America the first word in each of those pairs has the vowel ʌ, and the second one has ʋ. And as I said, when I hear Britons speaking RP on television, they seem to pronounce those pairs with two different vowels, just like we do, so they're not homonyms.
Do you say "nyooz" for "news," "tyoon" for "tune" and "overdyoo" for "overdue"? That's textbook-perfect Received Pronunciation, right? It seems like all the Lords and Ladies talk that way in TV interviews and on Masterpiece Theatre. Even Monty Python, when they're doing the "upper-class twit."
Those words would sometimes have the "w" sound spoken (I think it is the proper way), but other words with the "oo" sound would never have it sounded e.g. Luke (Look), spook (spook) etc. It seems to depend on the consonant preceding it. As for "news", "tune", "due" and similar words; there are ways I've found it's common to hear them: nooz --- nyooz ----------tyoon --- choon --- chyoon ---------- dyoo ---------------------------- joo --- jyoo
I should add that most of the time when saying the "ch" or "j" variations, there is normally a hint of a "t" or "d" to be heard as well, but not always.
So you're identifying the vowel in American booth and tuna as a diphthong: buwθ, tuwna. That's accurate enough. The vowels I write as cardinal e and o (and possibly i) are also diphthongs in American: hate = heyt, bone = bown. And maybe keep = kiyp, especially in the South. So the distinctly different phoneme in American foot, push, could, is not a diphthong: fʋt, pʋʃ, kʋd. No W. To us those are two different vowels, appearing in two different sets of words, and we never interchange them. With one exception: I pronounce roof as ruf, but many Americans say ruwf. There are probably two or three other words like that that I'm not thinking of. Hmm. So even though you sometimes say nooz like we do, you never say toon like we do. It's always interesting to find how the divergence in dialects has so many tiny inconsistencies. This is palatalization, and it only occurs on the alveolar consonants D T N S Z before Y. In American we never pronounce OO as YOO in an accented syllable after an alveolar consonant. So we've never said tyoon and therefore it never changed to CHOON. But we do it rampantly in unaccented syllables. Educate --> ejacate, congratulations --> congrachalashuns, issue --> ishoo, usual --> yoozhooul. I think even you guys palatalize the S in mission --> mishun and the Z in confusion --> confyoozhun. There's always a bit of a T in CH and a bit of a D in J. CH can be written phonetically as tʃ and J as dʒ. In French, which does not have either phoneme, they transcribe our CH sound as TCH, as in the common spelling Tchaikovsky of the name that should be spelled phonetically in English as Chaikofski. And they spell our J as DJ, as in the African city Djibouti, which we could spell Jibooty.
Speaking of "toon" Fraggle might like this one - Geordies/ Northumberland area pronounce "town" as "toon". But not AFAIK clown or frown as cloon/ froon.
I KNEW there was at least one more! Cheers Steve. Where's that damn "slap self on the head" smiley. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Can I borrow your classnotes please.Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Oops, nearly forgot. This is the linguistics section. May I borrow your classnotes please.
No, that's "byord." Sounds like the name of an Icelandic rock and roll star. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! It's just брд, in American dialect. In the British non-rhotic (silent R's) dielect, быд.
if it was just брд as you wrote it, and a russian would read it, it would sound like this: "bye, yer, dye" . Just like KGB, in russian its "Kye, Gye, Bye"
Well sure. But would they do that if it was established that the text they're reading contains transliterated foreign words? Russian is full of consonants that have to be pronounced without a vowel, like the preposition B, "in". It would not be so remarkable for a Russian to discover that we treat R that way in English. Besides, KGB is all capitals; that's the convention for an acronym in any European language. If it's in lower case they'd stop and think about it. In any case, бёръд is simply wrong! The word is not pronounced that way! It's BRD in American or BUHD in R.P., never BYORD. And my Russian teacher taught us to pronounce the name of the letter P as эp, not ep. And also that the name of K is ka, not ke. What part of Russia are you from?
