[Sca-cooks] Reptilian (and other) Pronunciation

[Jane Williams]

Laura C. Minnick <lcm at efn.org> wrote :
> The 'ew' in 'news has an 'oo' sound not because of the e, but because of
> the w.

That's a general rule then, is it? (Does that make a female sheep an "oo-e"?)

>So we say jag-waar.

Ah, right, thanks.

> Having recently had occasion to play with writing in Middle English, it is
> my observation that there are a great many words which now have 'w' in them
> that previously had 'u', and the other way around. Other letters too, but
> that one was the most obvious.

I suppose the letter "w" is probably called "double-yew" for a reason. Maybe that's it: they're the same letter originally? Come to think of it, in Welsh "w" is a vowel and pronounced a lot like "u".

> American English has had considerably more outside influences thrown at it-
> languages are living things, and with an ocean to seperate people, the
> evolution of pronunciation and spelling (not to mention vocabulary!) grew
> in different directions than did language in Britain.

And English as spoken in England consists of dozens of mutually incomprehensible dialects anyway.

> This of course does not explain why jaguar and guarantee are pronounced so
> differently,

"guarantee"? OK, so how do you pronounce that one? I know we ignore the U: "ga-ran-tee". What do you do?