There’s a show on TV now mentioning people who saw – sawyers. The narrator pronounces it SOY-er. I’d always thought it was pronounced SAW-yer, rhyming with ‘lawyer’.
So I looked it up on Merriam-Webster and listened to the pronunciation. M-W has the SOY-er pronunciation. For ‘lawyer’ they have both LAW-yer and LOY-er, respectively. Answers.com has a pronunciation (on their audio link) that sounds like something in between SAW-yer and SOY-er.
Is SAW-yer an acceptable pronunciation? If not, why not?
I’m a transplant up here in New York (albeit not one of recent vintage).
I get teased a lot for my southern-inflected pronunciation of “lawyer”. Up here they say loy-er, so I guess that rhymes with soy-er.
I did say that they made fun of me, right? In their attempts to mock my pronunciation, they say “low yurr”. That’s not how my own pronunciation sounds to me, the “aw” diphthong being more of a moving target than the syllable “low” suggests.
I’ve heard SOY-er/LOY-er, but only from northern transplants. That pronunciation makes no sense to me.
Of course, this is English we’re talking about, so all pronunciation bets are off.
On a side note, I remember a thread a couple of years ago where people discussed the pronunciation of “caught.” It turns out that some people pronounce it identically with “cot.” This blew my mind.
I’ve always said law-yer and saw-yer (even though evil Dad despised lawyers.) A similar occupational surname, Bowyer, (guy who makes bows, I guess) is always Boy-er.