That would be To Kill a Mockingbird. I had the impression that it was less about city vs. country folk than it was about social class, but I guess the two sets of categories overlap, to some extent.
Yeah, I don’t hear a “w” in it. Or in cog, dog, or Og. I’m having trouble imagining a “w” in there without it sounding like a two-year-old trying to pronounce the word frog…
Anyway, if someone said something about a “dunkey” I’d assume that Dunkin Donuts has added a new item to their menu and gave it an obnoxious name. It would take context before it would occur to me that they might mean the animals like the ones that live down the street from me.
A lot of the o-as-o-sound words are, I suspect, spelling pronunciations. Most people I know say “mongrel” and “warmonger” as if there were o sounds, but quite a lot say “mungrel” and “warmunger.” The latter is more likely to be historically correct, I think; obviously, if you go far enough back it’s an o sound, and both pronunciations are accepted today, but I suspect that certain historical [o]s in labial polysyllabic contexts (around m, w) shifted to s until the orthography brought them back to an archaic pronuciation.
I was thinking it was To Kill a Mockingbird, but I just read it with my son a couple of months ago and was sure I would have remembered it.
And, you’re right, it was more about social class – perhaps in the context of Walter Cunningham drowning his dinner in syrup.
Correction to my earlier post: The donkey / dunkey thing would explain why “monkey” and “donkey” don’t rhyme, not why “donkey” they do for some people. In that case my guess is it’s an analogy with the more common “monkey.”
If it’s pronounced “dunkey”, you could get one, call it “Hotay,” and go tilt at windmills.
Don’t be an ass. “Donkey Hotay” makes much more sense for Don Quixote.
That was my first thought–the only place I remember hearing it as dunkey was in the movie Shrek.
This topic came up in a recent “rhyme time” game thread in which Dolores Reborn posted a clue that was intended to evoke the response “honky donkey”. I answered correctly, then noted that I pronounce “donkey” to rhyme with “monkey” (munky) as opposed to “honky” (hawngkee).
Other words that have popped up in this discussion, and how I say them:
Frogs – Frawgs (rhymes with dogs, hogs, logs, etc., but not cogs (which sounds more like “kahgs”).
Cot (kaht) and caught (cawt) definitely have different vowel sounds. So do lot (laht) and cloth (clawth).
The o in both mongrel and warmonger has an “ah” sound.
I grew up in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio.
Wow, every time we have one of these threads I learn more and more about how weird English is. I remember a friend who was born in New York trying to explain marry/Mary/merry, and also Aaron/Erin.
Now there’s lot and cloth. Seriously weird.
BTW, I pronounce it dawn-key while my mom (Philly native) says dun-key.
This is exactly why you and your father pronounce “donkey” differently. The “dunkey” pronunciation is an old-timey (though not that old, not like “toidy-toid” for “thirty-third”) that you don’t here much more in NYC, but I have heard “The Brunx” for “The Bronx” a few times from older speakers. The other features you mention – the dropping of the r at the end of “horror” and the pronunciation of the o before an intervocalic r (that is, an r that is pronounced between two vowels) in “horror” and “horrible” turning into an a sound, as in “cot” or “farm” (vowels tend to sound weird before r’s) – are still common today in the NYC area. Even the programmed voice for the NJ Transit trains say “Arange” instead of “Orange.” (There are a group of towns in north Jersey – South Orange, West Orange, East Orange, and Orange – that the train I take to see my mom goes through.)
I work on NYC English, so I’m just full of fun facts about it.
And Mike Meyers/Shrek is doing a pseudo-scots accent.
Oh, tell me about it. After moving to New York at 24, it took me years to learn to say these words so people could understand me. Then I came back here at 49, and had to un-learn everything. Then there’s the “soda” vs. “pop” thing.
Anyway . . .
Donkey is “dawnkey” and frog is “frawg.”
Cot is “caht” and caught is “cawt.”
Not to derail this thread too much, but my dad, who is in his 70’s and from Brooklyn, uses the word “dunkey” very specifically as a slur against the Irish. Donkey is a beast of burden; dunkey is a low-class Irish person. Anyone else heard this? Maybe it’s not something that’s used anymore, but that’s the only context in which I’ve heard a person say “dunkey.”
If you get into your time machine (or just turn a rerun on TV), you’ll hear Bob Denver use the dun-key pronunciation on Gilligan’s Island. Of course, IRL, he was a WV native.
I* say dawn-key but some of the older relatives in East Tennessee pronounce it to rhyme with monkey.
*Grew up in northern Indiana, have lived in middle Tennessee for years.
My mother is from North Jersey, although she had the accent trained out of her when she went off to grad school in California. I remember her telling me that she grew up saying “dunkey”.
Now that i think about it neither. Something half way in between. Dahnkey