Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2018 November 28

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November 28

OO sounds

Does anyone know the reason moon and book have different sounds?? (Please generalize this question to all words with oo pronounced in either of these ways.) Georgia guy (talk) 01:19, 28 November 2018 (UTC)

An interesting question. Wish I knew the answer, supposing there is one. But consider that many of the "-ook" words rhyme: book, cook, hook, look, nook, rook, took. And that many of the "-oon" words rhyme: boon, coon, goon, loon, moon, noon, soon, swoon. Logic (a risky thing to assume with English) could indicate that the letters surrounding a given "oo" pair could have something to do with their pronunciation rules. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:28, 28 November 2018 (UTC)

In that case, it may be the influence of consonant voicing. "n" is a voiced consonant (meaning your vocal chords vibrate when you say it) while "k" is unvoiced (they don't vibrate). What we need is a minimal pair to see if the effect is there. --Jayron32 14:44, 28 November 2018 (UTC)

(ec) Well, they're two different phonemes, rendered /uː/ and /ʊ/, respectively, in the International Phonetic Alphabet. I think phonemes are generally thought to evolve independently of how they're transcribed (to a first approximation; I'm sure there are exceptions).

So is your question really, how did these two phonemes both come to be rendered "oo"? --Trovatore (talk) 01:31, 28 November 2018 (UTC)

No, it is why the oo sounds diverged. Wikipedia articles talking about it say that the change of oo's sound from oh to oo came from the Great Vowel Shift, but it talks nothing about the oo in book. Georgia guy (talk) 01:48, 28 November 2018 (UTC)

What is your reason for thinking they "diverged"? Is there any reason to believe that "Moon" and "book" ever had the same vowel? --Trovatore (talk) 02:38, 28 November 2018 (UTC)

They still have the same sound in my native dialect (the Yorkshire–Cumbria border), though /buːk/ is heard less frequently these days. Dbfirs 07:37, 28 November 2018 (UTC)

• Indeed, it is a shift which is still in a process. For some positions it began earlier. I guess it will not satisfy you, but see Phonological_history_of_English_high_back_vowels. Шурбур (talk) 08:10, 28 November 2018 (UTC)

Gallagher (comedian) had a whole routing about these. The one I remember is him asking why good and food don't sound the same. MarnetteD|Talk 05:10, 28 November 2018 (UTC)

They actually do in some British dialects, as Dbfirs pointed out. Akld guy (talk) 20:48, 28 November 2018 (UTC)

Yes, "moon" and "book" did have the same vowel in Middle English (i.e. before the Great Vowel Shift, as did "blood", "good", "mood" and others. Today, these words either have /u:/ ("moon"), /ʊ/ ("good"), or /ʌ/ ("blood"). Some of the details of this divergence is covered in our Phonological history of English high back vowels#Shortening of /uː/ to /ʊ/, but as so often in historical linguistics, a straightforward answer to a question of "why?" is not possible. This particular set of sound changes is quite messy as it proceeded (and is still proceeding) in a seemingly random word-by-word fashion, rather than operating on a whole phonological set of words in the same way at the same time as some more "well-behaved" sound changes do. Fut.Perf. ☼ 22:22, 28 November 2018 (UTC)

See also Lexical diffusion... AnonMoos (talk) 09:03, 29 November 2018 (UTC):::

Ah, thanks, hadn't seen that article. That's good background reading for what I was trying to describe. Fut.Perf. ☼ 09:48, 29 November 2018 (UTC)

All very interesting. I thought GG just had a false assumption; I figured that /u:/ and /ʊ/ were always distinct phonemes, and the written language just happened to transcribe them with the same letters.

So there was a time when the /u:/ versus /ʊ/ distinction was not phonemic? It definitely is today. One minimal pair would be /nu:k/ (a yod-dropper's pronunciation of "nuke") versus /nʊk/ "nook"). But it's true that I haven't been able to come up with any minimal pairs more than, say, 100 years old. --Trovatore (talk) 19:45, 29 November 2018 (UTC)

Then there's the further oddity of regional accents which pronounce a word such as "nuke" as if there were a "y" after the "n". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:48, 29 November 2018 (UTC)

Here in the UK, we regard your American pronunciation (/nu:k/) as a regional oddity, but you did invent the word around 1955, so I suppose you can pronounce it as you wish. Dbfirs 22:23, 1 December 2018 (UTC)

I pronounce "nuke" as /nju:k/, myself. I linked yod-dropping to explain the /nu:k/ variant, which is an innovation, though admittedly standard in much of the US. I remember wondering what Mr Rogers was talking about, when I was a boy, and he came on TV and talked about his "noo" sweater. --Trovatore (talk) 19:54, 29 November 2018 (UTC)

As would many British English speakers, although some (such as those from eastern England) do drop the yod, as it were. Bazza (talk) 21:22, 29 November 2018 (UTC)

OK, but diversion aside, do we agree that the difference between /u:/ and /ʊ/ is phonemic today, and is it true that it didn't use to be? --Trovatore (talk) 00:11, 30 November 2018 (UTC)

Trovatore -- in the line of development leading to standard English, old [ʊ] shifted toward [ʌ], leaving a gap, so a new [ʊ] developed from shortening of [uː]. Almost all the words with modern "oo" spelling had a high-mid long o vowel in Middle English (to be distinguished from the low-mid long o vowel which also existed in Middle English)... AnonMoos (talk) 04:14, 30 November 2018 (UTC)

Side question: Do all the dialects that have /luːk/ and /buːk/ for look and book shift other words to "compensate" (e.g., turn boot into /bʊt/ or something)? If not, this would seem further proof that /uː/ to /ʊ/ are not distinct phonemes that just accidentally got both written oo, but that it really is a matter of random word migration, with some changes being applied to similar words for verisimilitude, but others escaping a shift (from less frequent use, like boosterism; from phonic similarity to other words in different lexical categories, like hooligan and who; due to a shift being resisted because it increases ambiguity, say between book and buck or look and luck or Luke; because a word was more common in an area where the shift wasn't happening and so it ossified more in one particular codified pronunciation before becoming more generally common; and so on). The lack of minimal pairs, outside of recent slang and jargon (like nuke and nook), is really striking, and there are even modern counter-examples like "fook" /fuːk/ as a barely minced fuck (which in real dialect rather than child-slang actually shifts in other ways, to "feck", "foak", and "fahck" depending on region, register, and intent). If we come up actual min. pairs that go back a ways, I would almost bet money it'll be due to radically different etymology like Anglo-Saxon versus Greek or whatever.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:14, 4 December 2018 (UTC)

Aside to the aside: I wonder if there's any statistical correlation between frequency of /nuːk/ versus the pronunciation of nuclear as /nukjʌlər/; maybe it's a "Where to yodify? But do it somewhere!" conflict. Heh. Does anyone double-yod, and say /nuːkjʌlər/?

Monsieur Dbfirs, here in the medieval France, we regard your Brittish pronunciation (/hju:mən/) as a drolle petite chose, we much prefer our more raffiné /hymɛn/, but hey, À chacun ses goûts. --déhanchements (talk) 03:30, 5 December 2018 (UTC)

• I'd say see also dialect borrowing, but that redirects to an article that does not cover dialect borrowing. Anyhoo, that's one way for a word to break a pattern; one /wʌn/ is a famous example. —Tamfang (talk) 00:12, 6 December 2018 (UTC)