"/nju/ is generally West Coast, especially California. It's how you can tell the born-and-bred Calis from the transplants."
That's news to me! Does the fact that I say /nu/ make me not Californian? Hehe. I honestly have heard very few people here ever say /nju/ (whether in Nor or So-Cal, young or old, born here or moved here), altho I don't doubt that some people do it. However, what I do suspect is that the sometimes highly fronted /u/ in California English (which is commonly [M] in my speech, even as front as [}] or [1] in some people's speech...this is all XSAMPA of course) sounds like /nju/ to people who aren't familiar such high degrees of fronting.
LOL! I'm near exit 18, off 46... :P
Is that far from where mjd is? You guys can throw an East Coast Antimoon party lol
Is there a sufficient level of fronting that you could call that /ny/ rather that /nu/ (/y/ being the phoneme in, say, standard Hochdeutsch "über")?
Since I missed out on the last 5 or so pages, I'll make it short.
Standard American English sounds weird. When people with SAE say 'house' it sounds like 'howse' or something...that sounds wrong. It should be 'huoose' or something like that...
With the 'nu/nyu' thing, I pronounce things weirdly. Coupon is 'cyoopon' but new is 'nu'. There seems to be no pattern with me. Oh, well.
Well, you probably speak a dialect with Canadian Raising, american nic, where before unvoiced consonants, /aI/ becomes [@I], and /aU/ (which is the diphthong in "house", that is, /haUs/) becomes [@U] (which seems to be what you're describing with "huoose"), whereas SAE lacks both of these changes, and many American English dialects have the /aI/ change, but lack the /aU/.
That should have been "but lack the /aU/ change." Aaagh!
Ed,
>>Dawn=hawk=talk (tawk)<<
Well, my boss also said "Dawn" with the same vowel as in hawk and talk. I was trying to determine how you say that sound.
Re: When I was a kid, I used to make fun of my cousins from San Francisco and Salinas when they said "I nyoo it!" or "chocolate and nyoogat" or "he's nyooorotic!"
In British/Irish/Australian/New Zealand/South African English, "I nyoo it" and "nyoorotic" would be correct, but not "nyoogat", which would be "noo-gah", so if the cousins were trying to sound English or Commonwealth they would have scored a pass without topping the class. Two out of three isn't bad of course.
An American pronunciation which has always puzzled me is that for "figure"; this word is pronounced "figger" (non-rhotically, so perhaps "figga" is closer to the mark) throughout the British Commonwealth (except possibly in Canada), i.e "fig" followed by a schwa, with no "y" sound before the schwa. Why the "y"? Do all US speakers say "fig-ya"? AmE speakers usually seem to omit the "y" in such words as "mature", "endure" etc, yet insert it in "figure".
<<'huoose'>>
Hmmm. I'm trying to determine how this sounds.
Travis, I'd say that fronting here doesn't reach the point of /y/...or maybe in a very few cases, but it sounds too extreme. I don't think it'll get there anytime in the forseseeable future because the name of the game in California /u/ fronting has seemed to be more and more unrounding, and /y/ is highly rounded (and, of course, its unrounded equivalent /i/ is obviously a barrier to an unrounded /u/ ever moving that far up unless /i/ happened to be changing, which it doesn't seem to be in the California Vowel Shift). I haven't measured my formants for that vowel in a while but I think it's generally /M/ for me (with a possible fronter allophone before a palatal and a a definite back rounded [u] allophone before velar [l]..."tool" is still back and rounded [u] for me, but not "too" [tM]).
On the whole Canadian Raising thing, I heard someone speak the other day who was from Chicago and as far as I could tell she only significantly raised in the case of /aU/ before /t/ to [@U], so she only had partial Canadian raising. As far as I could tell "house" and "life" still had initial [a] in her speech. Is that characteristic of Chicago and its environs?
I'm from California and I pronounce dude as [dud; not dyud] and new as [nu; not nyu] (nyu is more used by (Valley)Girls :) )
<<Well, my boss also said "Dawn" with the same vowel as in hawk and talk. I was trying to determine how you say that sound. >>
Well, probably the way your coworker did.
>> Do all US speakers say "fig-ya"?
Not all of us do. Many of us say [fig j..r]
Well, I myself wouldn't know exactly about Chicago, but I'm from the Milwaukee area (Wauwatosa specifically), which is pretty much directly to the north of Chicago, and I have such a partial Canadian Raising, with potentially a very slightly raised [a] in [aU] when before an unvoiced consonant, but nothing near the raising of /aI/ all the way to /@I/ that I have, which is very marked.