Re: Californian vowels [was Re: Liking German]

Quoting Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>:

> On Friday, September 28, 2001, at 05:20 PM, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
>
> > Well, where's he from? That pronunciation of "because" is
> > actually widespread in Britain.
>
> And I had a physics teacher from the midwest who consistently
> said [mELk] for "milk"--I always figured that, along with [nukjul@r]
> for "nuclear," it was a regional thing.  To address a later question,
> I can certainly tell the difference between [mILk] and [mELk].  ^_^
That pronunciation of "nuclear" is very widespread; in fact, it's
nearly universal in my experience (which may or may not count for
much), where the only people who *don't* say it are those who've
learned *not* to.  (Heck, even my father says it, and he was three
hours short of a chemistry degree in college before deciding he liked
mathematics better!)  It's also easy to understand why: [nukli:r=]
has that hiatus between [i:] and [r=] which most languages, English
included, seem to hate.  So:  make the delete the /i/ so that /l/
becomes the onset of [r=] (> [nuklr=]), and make up for the lost
mora by epenthesizing [ju] into the middle of the word. Another
(probably better) analysis might be: metathesize the /i/ and the
/l/ to give /nukilr=/, and then break /i/ into a diphthong /iu/,
which surfaces naturally as [ju].

==============================
Thomas Wier <trwier@...>

"If a man demands justice, not merely as an abstract concept,
but in setting up the life of a society, and if he holds, further,
that within that society (however defined) all men have equal rights,
then the odds are that his views, sooner rather than later, are going
to set something or someone on fire." Peter Green, in _From Alexander
to Actium_, on Spartan king Cleomenes III