Talk:History of the pronunciation of the "poor" and "cure" vowels

Regarding the predictability in AuE
I've often thought about this split and I have a theory regarding it... Could anyone please support/refute it? (This applies to AuE in general and Victorian English in particular, because I've spent almost my whole life in Melbourne.)


 * With the exception of the word 'your' /jU@/ > /ju\:@/; the /j/ may subsequently be dropped/coallesced in some words (marked with a star): cure, lure*, fewer, pure, newer, sewer*; and many other words spelt with -ure or -ewer (or equivalents)
 * With the exception of the word 'tour', all other /U@/ > /o:/: your, moor, poor, sure; note that 'sure' naturally finds its way into this category because the /j/ was coallesced at a much earlier date, otherwise it'd be a homophone of sewer. Beware the vagaries of the English Orthographry!
 * Tour > /tu\:@/.

These rules also apply to earlier /U@r/ = [U:r] in words like curious /kju\:ri.@s/, sewerage* /su\:rIdZ/, tournament /to:n@m@nt/.

I postulate that 'insurance' /InSu:\r@ns/ still had the /j/ at a latter date, but assurence /@So:r@ns/ either lost it earlier, or had its pronunciation influenced by 'sure', otherwise one or both of these need to be exceptions.

Some speakers (a definite minority) don't have the exception for tour, so it becomes 'tore' just the same.

Recent borrowings probably find their way into the /u:\@/ category.

Yes there's a lot of exceptions there, but as a general rule it seems at least useful. It also helps date the loss of /j/ in words like lure and sewer and/or date the sound change itself, because [U@] > /o:/ almost certainly happened before /lj, sj, zj, rj/ > /l, s, z, r/ change.

I'm using u\ for u-dashed because I can't remember the IPA/X-Sampa and think whoever came up with a distinction between { and } was foolish. Felix the Cassowary 12:03, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * That's an interesting theory, Felix, I'll have to sit back and digest it. You can write " u " easily enough with " u

". Jimp 21Dec05


 * Well, I wrote that before I'd customised my keyboard and Wikipedia was good at supporting Unicode. Nowadays I just need to type AltGr+0 and I get it (the mnemonic comes from the TIPA TeX IPA package), or alternatively click the link that lets you insert them: ʉ. These methods have the advantage of being plain-text & propely encoded rather than your formatted way. As to my idea, there seem to be some problems with regard to what happens after the post-alveolars... It's been discussed elsewhere. —Felix the Cassowary ( ɑe hɪː jɐ ) 02:23, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

a spelling-based split?
as written, this page implies that the poor-pure split was primarily spelling based, which is probably not true. it is probably rather simply a case of realignment, where became  and  became. This is not a "split" at all, just a plain ol' sound change. Note that a somewhat similar change takes places in GenAm, where "poor" and "moor" rhyme with "door", "store" and "for", and "pure", "cure", and "sure" are often reduced in fast speech to rhyme with "her" [but they keep the /j/ -- or rather pure and cure do, and sure begins with "sh"].

Benwing

Better title
This article needs a better title. The current title is confusing. Foogol 14:43, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
 * Yes, it was but the new one is good. Jimp 16:39, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
 * ... except for the fact that links to it don't quite work. Jimp 10:17, 31 December 2005 (UTC)
 * Precisely. Which is why I've renamed it to History of the pronunciation of the "poor" and "cure" vowels, using quotation marks. Please do not use double apostrophes in article titles, because it makes links break. --Angr (t·c) 13:06, 31 December 2005 (UTC)