I certainly would not say that. /j/ is a consonant. /ju/ is a consonant followed by a vowel.
I may be technically incorrect calling it a diphthong (I’m not sure), but it is referred to such by various sources:
At any rate, the “u” corresponds to /j/ + /u:/ and not just the /u:/ part (at least as I’ve always interpreted it), so I’d think when you’d ask most English speakers what the sound of the second vowel in “amuse” is, they’d respond /ju:/ and not /u:/.
My elementary school teachers would correct you on vicuna and quadruped. Quadruped has a schwa sound, and vicuna has a long U sound.
According to them, a U has the following sounds- long U (mule), short U (hundred), oo U, (fluke), and schwa (campus).
Quadruped with schwa- QUADRUPED | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary
It seems there is some argument even with phoneticians about this, as I find here (click on page 96 if it doesn’t come up as a direct link.)
So I’m not unique in calling it or treating it as a diphthong.
Is Uber considered an English word yet?
I’m trying to think of one that hasn’t been posted already. It’s brutal I tell you.
As Pulykamell said, it is usually treated as one of Standard American English’s vowel diphthongs. And when it comes to comparing phonemic inventories, pre-GVS evolved into post-GVS [ju], so it functions as a diphthong.
Living in Wisconsin, you probably never encountered this Mexican company: https://rickgaylestudio.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/14-foot_trucks-copy-31.jpg
As soon as I saw the word, I started hearing “Waaa Waa a Watusi” in my head.
Around here, I hear “Zumba” pronounced as in “push” or “bush” - the same “oo” as in “book”
Other possible u’s are:
- the u in “blue”, “true”, same as “bloom” (or zoom)
- the u in “nuclear”, “human” , same as “you”
- the u in “luck”, “mud”, not an “oo” sound
Not sure which if these is actually the “right” u
If only there were some kind of, y’know, rule.
No, j-the-letter is normally called a “consonant”, but /j/ represents a vowel sound. Letters are neither consonants nor vowels, it’s the sounds that can be consonants or vowels, and we really, really need to stop confusing both. That a certain IPA symbol happens to match a certain letter does not mean the symbol equals the sound or sounds represented by that letter in any specific languages: they sometimes do match (the basic vowels /aeiou/ match the letters representing them in several languages) but not necessarily so (the consonant /x/ is represented in modern Spanish by “j” or “g” depending on what the following vowel is, by “x” in a handful of words whose spelling tries to be Olde, and the letter “x” can represent several other sounds in the same language).
In general, you can’t adequately describe the vowels of English by just using the words “long” and “short” with the letter names of A, E, I, O and U. That implies that English has ten vowels, but in fact there at least 21 vowels in English (depending on how you classify them, more).
Letters don’t intrinsically make sounds–they just represent sounds we make with our mouths. So when you say “long A,” the only reason others know what you mean is because so many of us were taught by teachers using this expression, but the letter A is used to represent ***two ***long vowels (as in hate and father), so for someone who wasn’t bought up hearing the expression “long A,” they aren’t necessarily going to know which one you mean.
It particularly becomes a problem when poorly trained ESL teachers use these expressions with students (assuming they will just naturally know what they mean), because these expressions really are only meaningful for people brought up in typical American school systems.
In the same way, to say things like “the oo sound,” as in the OP, can be confusing, because–as Ascenray notes–in English those two letters can represent various sounds: wool, good, coop, floor, blood.
There are even languages where a “long vowel” and a “short vowel” are exactly the same except for length of actual pronunciation, they are the same sound. I understand that for ESL learners who have that kind of distinction the English expressions are even more confusing than for those of us who simply hadn’t encountered them before: they tend to assume it means the same as in their original language, whereas we get all confused the first time we hear the expression and ask the teacher who then gets all confused… but eventually we all end up figuring it out. So long as your next native teacher’s dialect isn’t too different from the first one, you’ll be OK.
I think the question should be whether there is any English dialect that doesn’t. I’ve never heard one. It’s always “Portyugees” (insert IPA equivalent here).
Yes, to the extent that the ‘t’ tends to sound more like ‘ch’. I think the reason we pronounce ‘sugar’ and ‘sure’ with ‘sh’ sounds is the same - the pronunciation went from ‘soogar’ to ‘syoogar’ to ‘shoogar’. Someone here will know the name of this process (the one with the ‘s’, not the great vowel shift).
Yeah, I’ve heard it most often in a way I’d transcribe as “porchugíis” (I’m feeling too lazy to IPA). One of my coworkers did say “porchiu gíis”, space and all, but he always pronounced any words over two syllables as if he was afraid to break them.
Palatalization
Thanks.
I would say “tyouba”, so for me it is not an “oo” sound. Same with nuclear and stupid.
I don’t understand what you didn’t understand about it. Did you not recognise it as a misspelling of “food”?