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I pronounce "buoy" the same as "boy", but having seen an old (60s I think) TV show called Sea Hunt recently on cable, I heard one of the characters call it something like "boo-ee", as though it had two syllables. It made me laugh at the time, when I finally worked out what they meant, but later I started wondering how someone who said "boo-ee" would pronounce "buoyant".
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I believe they pronounce it the same as you & I (i.e. as "boyant" i.e. /boI.@nt/). I think it's more of a (North) American vs. Commonwealth thing rather than an older vs. younger one.
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Yeh, it's pronounced the same as 'boy'
Ben.
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I would say boo-ee for the bobbing object in the water, but boy-ant for the quality that allows it to do that.
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Same as Uriel on both counts. But I did call it a "boy" until the age of eight when someone told me it was "boo-ee"...
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I'm the same as Uriel and Tiffany. Actually, the first time I heard of the pronunciation 'boy' (on here I think), I laughed. I've never heard it said that way.
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I myself pronounce "buoy" and "buoyant" as ["bui] and ["boII_"~?] respectively myself.
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I pronounce "buoy" as /bwoI/ i.e. "bwoy" and "buoyant" as /bwoI.@nt/.
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Unless you want to say boy-eh, the most logical pronounciation with be "boy" as the word comes from Dutch "boeye".
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I pronounce "buoy" as ["bui] and "buoyant" as ["bOI@nt].
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Best not start with "logical" pronunciations ... there's nothing logical about pronunciation and that's half the beauty of it. Tiffany, you aught to have told those scoundrels to shove off: "boy"'s fine but it is food for thought. Until you were eight you said /bOI/ but then someone told you otherwise so what is it in your true idiolect? Perhaps there can be no such thing.
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I was an avid reader when I was young (and even now). Hence, at a young age, I knew a lot of words that I did not really know the pronunciation of. I'm not sure why, I must have read it somewhere, but I knew "buoyant" was "boy-ant", so then decided that "buoy" was "boy". It is logical as the above poster said. However, English spelling and pronunciation is not logical in reality so when corrected, I took the new pronunciation at face value.
My idiolect? I don't know! There are a lot of words that went like "buoyant" and "buoy" - pronunciation totally off till someone corrected me! I mean how often do you hear words like "beguiling" from an eight-year-old's mouth? But I was always eager to use whatever new vocabulary I had - regardless of correct pronunciation. My parents have some hilarious stories of my "notions" around that time.
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It's "boy".
"Boo-ee"? What in God's name is that all about?
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>>Unless you want to say boy-eh, the most logical pronounciation with be "boy" as the word comes from Dutch "boeye".<<
That makes no sense whatsoever, as if my understanding of Dutch pronunciation is right, one would pronounce "boeye" as something like ["buY@], which is nothing like, say, GAE ["bOI] (my dialect having ["boI]), and is far closer to GAE ["bui]. Pronouncing "buoy" like "boy" (that is, as something like ["bOI]) would make sense if the Dutch word were more along the lines of, say, "booi" or "booye", if my understanding of Dutch orthography is correct.
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<<Tiffany, you aught to have told those scoundrels to shove off: "boy"'s fine but it is food for thought.>>
It's ambiguous, whereas "boo-ee" is not. It's best not to cause confusion.
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