Sorry typo. Fuel should be fool. Fuel like duel is a two syllable word at least according to my dictionary.
Hmm. That’s how I say mayor as well in NYC. Mayor/mare, same thing.
There’s a Northern Ireland panel show called Blame Game which the host always pronounces as 4 syllables
Hell, I say something closer to “fuh-yer” when speaking than “fire” with the regular “long I” diphthong in English.
ETA: actually, dictionary.com gives the pronunciation as two syllables, /fahyuhr/.
Not unheard of in other places (remember Bishop Brennan and the “blasphemous fillum”?).
Come to think of it, I noticed (also Geordie) Sarah Millican getting very nearly two syllables out of “lone”
“Duel” is a one-syllable word; “Dual” is a two-syllable word. That’s how you tell them apart.
‘Down with this sort of thing!’
Careful now!
Not on this side of the Atlantic.
Not in my dialect. (Upper Midwestern) Rool, fyool, and dool
And in mine, only rule would be one syllable.
Here’s another famous example from Strabane:
Wow, for a minute there I thought he was speaking Gaelic 
I was watching the Irish TV show ‘Derry Girls’ last night- I needed something not too taxing to watch while I hit the elliptical, and it seems like I’ve watched everything else I want to see on Netflix. And yeah, it takes place in Northern Ireland so I was curious about the accent.
For the most part vowel breaking can be heard when the characters talk, but is somewhat subtle. One character though, a priest, had a doozy-- he very distinctly pronounced ‘car’ as ‘kee-yer’. “Get in the kee-yer!”.
In my dialect, they way you tell them apart is write them.
Yes, that’s what I’m talking about. When our brains are forming, the language center is very fluid. It’s how we learn to hear how people talk so we can emulate them. But as we get older, the language center becomes less flexible. The patterns of noise have been categorized and sorted, so that we can understand, for example, the kind of pronunciation differences we’ve been discussing. But the trade off is that the brain is trying to sort foreign language to fit the patterns of our own native one.
That’s why children learning multiple languages can be fluent in all of them, but adults tend to struggle with learning a new language.
If I had time, I would enjoy looking into the way our mouth shape affects the sounds we make, and how that varies in different languages. That, more than anything, had helped me with getting names right.
True, but that only can happen because a common way to say those words is to split the vowels.
Fire = Fi-er. Desire = De-zi-er. If you don’t say those words that way, that’s when it sounds weird.
Not necessarily. Some people pronounce certain words, say one’s with u instead of oo, as “yoo” vs “oo”.
So that could be “dyu-el” vs “doo-el” vs “dool”.
L and r are curious consonants in that they are voiced, so they have some aspect of an inherent vowel. For me it’s almost impossible to say those sounds without the schwa.
A pirate says “Ah-er”.
Light a “fie-er” or even “fie-yer”, depending on the vocal glide between vowels.
Some people hear the y more than others.
That’s another curious case, the double consonant. In order to pronounce the different sounds, you reshape your mouth. Since m is a voiced consonant, it has a similar effect of an inherent vowel. That transition from l to m is less voiced for some dialects. Others, it is more pronounced.
Basically, vowel transitions and voiced consonants contribute to these variations developing in different dialects.
Yeah, not to get in a duel with Alessan, but in my Midwestern accent they don’t have dual pronunciations or syllable counts; they both sound like ‘dool’ when I say them.
Dictionary. com gives only two-syllable pronunciations for both. Merriam-Webster gives only two syllables for “duel,” but one- and two-syllable for “dual.” These are US or based on US dictionaries.
It might be fairer to say RP British English gives “duel/dual” and “fuel” one and a half syllables.
Except when singing Good King Wenceslas, when it’s definitely “fyu-oo-el”.
Ha, I almost jokingly mentioned GKW when the word ‘fuel’ was first brought up in this thread. Great minds, and all that.
Well, then to be fair, the way I say both words (and they are homophones for me), might also better be described as a syllable and a half. It’s not super distinct.
I think the ‘L’ sound is s similar case to an ‘R’, as Irishman pointed out upthread:
‘L’ is kind of pronounced as ‘el’, so in words like ‘dual / duel’ the mouth shape has to change, so it’s a bit like ‘doo-el’. Not quite 2 syllables, so yeah, maybe a syllable and a half. If I was singing a song with either of those words, and they needed to be one syllable to fit the meter, I could easily do so.
“Fuel” on the other hand, is a better candidate for being a 2-syllable word. Unlike dual / duel, which at least in my accent both sound like ‘dool’, ‘fuel’ is not a homophone for ‘fool’. It’s more 'few-el".