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Regional pronunciations

Posted by R. Berg on October 24, 2002

In Reply to: Regional pronunciations posted by Bob on October 24, 2002

: : : : A purely idle question, but it made me wonder. I was watching some US-made nature show with my daughter over the weekend - all about protecting parts of the Hawaiian coastline from overfishing, so a worthy cause indeed. That's hardly the point though. Part of the scheme to monitor fish stocks involved divers going down at marked areas to count fish types and numbers. These areas were marked with buoys, which we over here in the UK pronounce to sound exactly the same as "boys". However the diver being interviewed at the time, who was some marine biologist PhD from the US, called them "boo-weeze". Is this the typical pronunciation in the US?

: : : Yes, that is the way it is pronounced over here in the good ol' US of A.

: : : I was in the Philadelphia area recently and people down there pronounce the days of the week with -dee endings as in "Tues-Dee thru Fri-Dee I will be out of the office". A subset within a subset.

: : : The link below will show both pronunciations at Webster. Just click on the little speaker.

: : Merriam is not allowing direct linking anymore it seems.
: : Also a typo---I left out the "n" in pronunciation.
: : Sorry bout that!

: Lubricant discussion overheard on a Baltimore, Maryland (or, rather, Balmer Merlin) streetcorner: "Did you know in Brooklyn they say erl instead of ahl?"

In my part of the western US, "buoy" and "boy" are homonyms.

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