Re: Latin vowel inventory

On Wed, Jul 30, 2003 at 05:58:44PM +0200, Andreas Johansson wrote:
> Quoting Tristan McLeay <zsau@...>:
>
> >     The less common diphthongs oe and eu are best pronounced as they are
> > written (o+e, e+u). In 'cui', 'hui' the ui is to be pronounced as a
> > dipthong, somewhat as in 'ruinous'; but 'qui:' is [kwi:].
>
> I have three syllables in "ruinous", and like to think that I in this mimic
> most nativers I've heard. And I've heard Americans complain about Tolkien
> describing the Quendian diphthong /ui/ as like the _ui_ in "ruin", despite the
> later not being a diphthong.
>
> So, is there some (obsolete?) variety of English English that have a
> monosyllabic pronunciation of "ruin", or have I, due to people like the
> abovementioned Americans, acquired an unusual pronunciation here?
I'm not aware of any English dialect in which <ui> in e.g. <ruin> is
a diphthong (although there are dialects in which <ruin> is monosyllabic
[run] without any trace of the <i>).  I wouldn't be too surprised to
learn of one, though; by analogy with anadewism we should have
ADEPILT (A Dialect of English Pronounces It Like That).  But I think
<ruin> is used as an explanation of the diphthong simply because it's
as close as you can get in most dialects of English.  If you start out
with [ui] and make an effort to run the two vowels together, the
result is indeed the [uj] diphthong, or at worst a good approximation
thereof.

-Mark