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The way I remember it, Webster standardised a lot of the spellings to be close to how it’s pronounced. The u in colour is never pronounced,…etc.
by 8ytecoder 5y ago
The way I remember it, Webster standardised a lot of the spellings to be close to how it’s pronounced. The u in colour is never pronounced,…etc.
- thaumasiotes 5y agoI wouldn't bet on that. The u in colour is never pronounced, but neither is the o.[1] The spelling color is much more likely to be motivated by that being the Latin spelling of the word. [1] I watched Star Trek: The Original Series recently and the cast's pronunciation of "sensors" with the FORCE vowel in the second syllable is really jarring. Do we know if that was an affectation or a natural pronunciation?
- phonebanshee 5y agoI think you're hearing a typical Vulcan accent...
- thaumasiotes 5y agoSpock says it a lot, which is very conspicuous, but the rest of the cast pronounce it the same way.
- dfawcus 5y agoI was always amused when someone ordered the launch of some some form of buoy. "launch a boo-eey" (Brit's distinguish between "boy" and "buoy" - the latter has the same sound as in "buoyancy")
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> (Brit's distinguish between "boy" and "buoy" - the latter has the same sound as in "buoyancy") That didn't clarify much. I would pronounce "buoyancy" as if it began with "boy".
- dfawcus 5y agoThe 'o' in boy is 'oh', that in buoy is 'oy'; the distinction is subtle, but can be heard, plus the latter is slightly longer. Edited: - Maybe this will help: http://www.employees.org/~dfawcus/Good-Boy_Life-Buoy.m4a http://www.employees.org/~dfawcus/Good-Boy_Life-Buoy.m4a
- dfawcus 5y agoSo I should probably have written 'some Brits'... Anyway, if someone can't hear the difference in that sample, load it in to an audio editor, and see that (in a time / amplitude graph) the two words have different shapes. I've not got a tool for graphing the frequency content to hand, so can't easily see how those would be distinguished.
- Symbiote 5y ago(Am British.) I don't understand either. As far as I'm concerned, boy and buoy are homophones, and the first syllable of buoyancy is too. Wiktionary agrees: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/buoy#Pronunciation https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/buoy#Pronunciation
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bregma 5y agoIt's like the way the 'G' is pronounced in 'GIF'. You know, like in 'garage'.
- pge 5y agoAs an American, I pronounce buoy as a two- syllable word: boo-ee. I have only heard buoy pronounced as “boy” in the northeast, not at all universal across the country.
- mattkrause 5y agoOne story is that it's an (over)correction of Leonard Nimoy's native Boston accent, which would otherwise obliterate the /r/. Southie Spock would have been amazing though.
- saltcured 5y agoMaybe they didn't want to awaken the censors...