Hi, everyone. Funny thing happened yesterday in my physics class. The professor was talking about taking the square root of some number, and they way he pronounced "root" was so funny, but at the same time horrible. The was he pronounces it rhymes with "book". And everybody laughed at him, as he repeated that several times. So what I want to know is what part of the US has that kind of pronunciation? I'm in NYC but he definitely doesn't sound like a New Yorker.
I don't know whether any particular part of the country is associated with that pronunciation, but I've heard "root" pronounced that way. Pronouncing "roof" with the vowel sound that is in "book" is fairly common. I'm from California and I pronounced it that way when I was a child. I think I occasionally say it that way still. I've also heard it used in "room." I had two teachers who pronounced all three words with this vowel sound; one was from Boston and the other was from California.
Yes, many AE speakers pronounce room, roof, root, and book with
the same vowel (the one usually associated with book).
The only person I ever heard who did that (same vowel as book in room, roof and root) was my seventh grade science teacher Mrs. Barnett... and she was British.
Hmmm, it sounds brutal LOL And someone said about "room" being pronounced that way - that sounds even weirder.
I believe he pronounced it correctly. The double "O" in root, book, food is pronounced the same.
No AE speaker that I know of pronounces book and food with
the same vowel. The vowel in food is a long oo, as in "Boo".
The vowel in book is different, more like the vowel in 'Put'.
For the vast MAJORITY of native speakers:
/oo/ - room, roof, root, food, kook, cool, dude.
/u/ - book, cook, foot, look, stood, should.
Are there any native speakers who don't pronounce them this way? Then where are you from?
and the /u/ in "put" is short, whereas /oo/ is long.
Don't say majority. You haven't spoken to them all. This is how I pronounce them (Minnesota accent):
/oo/ - room, root (verb), food, kook, cool, dude
/u/ - book, cook, foot, look, stood, should, roof, root (noun)
Roof and root are in contention I admit but not the other words.
American nic, it's interesting that you point out a difference in pronunciation of the verb and the noun, root. The teachers I mentioned were pronouncing the noun with /u/. I don't know how they pronounced the verb.
Joe, I'm a native speaker and, as I said above, I used to say roof with /u/. I think this pronunciation might have been more common when I was young (I'm 54) than it is now.
Chamonix, I've never heard any native English speaker from any country pronounce "food" to rhyme with "good," except when I was a kid and we'd deliberately pronounce the two words to rhyme, as a joke, in the following children's grace:
"God is great, God is good.
Let us thank him for this food."
Joe - I'm in the "vast majority". :)
In the following joke (which I learned as a child), pronouncing "roof" with a /u/ sounds better:
A man walks into a talent agency with his dog and claims he has a great talking dog act. The talent agent asks to see the act.
The man asks, "How does sandpaper feel?" The dog says, "Rrrrough!" "What do you call the top of a house?" "Rrrroof!" "Who was the greatest baseball player ever?" "Rrrruth!"
The talent agent kicks them out of the office. As the man and his dog are picking themselves up from the sidewalk, the dog says, "I shoulda said DiMaggio."
(That last line is an indication of how old this joke is.)