Re: THEORY: language and the brain [Interesting article]

On Mon, 7 Jul 2003, Peter Bleackley wrote:

> Staving Mark J Reed:
> >On Fri, Jul 04, 2003 at 09:59:07AM +0100, Peter Bleackley wrote:
> > > I pronounce "book", "look", and "Took" to rhyme with "spook". This would be
> > > normal in northern English pronunciations.
> >
> >Okay, but how do you pronounce "spook"?  :)
> >
> >A contrasting pair in my speech is "look" (which which "book" rhymes)
> >and "Luke" (with which "spook" rhymes).  I have personally always pronounced
> >Took to rhyme with the former.  Which I thought was how at least Gandalf
> >pronounced it in the movies, but that could just be because that's what
> >I was expecting to hear.
>
> Let me guess... you pronounce "look" as a near homophone with "luck"? I don't.
> It sounds more like "Luke" to me, and does rhyme with "spook". Presumably
> we can divide English dialects into length contrastive and tense/lax
> contrastive.
> My speech is length contrastive, and so in the table below, words rhyme
> down columns and contrast across rows
Just to pipe in here, I pronounce all three differently (I like that
minimal pair, btw)
        look = /lUk/    Luke = /lu:k/   luck = /lvk/

--Apollo

(My first contribution to an English pronounciation thread :-)

Reply