“African-American Neighborhood Terrorized By Ask Murderer”
Sorry, but that sort of stuff is what I’d call “folk-science”. It may be true that some aspects of earlier English dialects have been preserved, but to call them “pure” would be patently false. Same goes for the folks on Tangier Island in the Chesapeake area. No Elizabethan English dialects survived into the 20th century.
ETA: I often pronounce “asked” as “ast”, especially if I’m speaking fast. Probably a bit more like “asst”, just to be clear. And when I’m back in Boston , it’s “ahst”.
“Zebber.”
The koo pronunciation is pendantically correct because that’s how it’s pronounced in the original French, but lots of Americans do pronounce it kyoo-pon (or queue-pon, or what-have-you). I do not know for sure why but I did a search on English words matching cou* and sounds include:
couch, council, count (many more)
cough
could
course, court
cousin, couple
Found only two with a koo sound:
cougar, coupon
So probably people hear a koo in a word of foreign origin and just aren’t sure how to handle it, so pick the nearest approximation based on sound alone, not spelling.
cue ball => cue pon
cube on => cue pon
There’s actually a term for this, but I can’t find it right now. It’s part of the natural evolution of a language. The original pronunciation is elided by the phoneme not being completely formed, which is then heard as an elongation of the previous phoneme or a pause, which is then heard as if the phoneme doesn’t exist.
:dubious: Really?
I’m reading this thread while drinking an expresso.
I had major problems with one of my employers because I had not realized that Bayer was one of our clients. My boss kept talking about Behr, and for weeks I never realized I was misunderstanding her. Who in NJ pronounces “Bayer” with just one syllable?
Yeah. In Britain I often hear /njuː/ (nyoo) rather than /nuː/ (noo) for new. Definitely not a Texas/southwestern ‘innovation’
Pronouncing ‘ask’ as /æst/ (ast) would definitely depend on the context. I just went through a few phrases out loud, and when saying "I asked him to’ within conversational speech, I said /aɪ jæst ɪm tə/ (I ast 'im to) at least once. It’s easier to move to the next vowel from the alveolar position (hitting your tongue against the ridge just before your teeth) than from the velar (back of tongue, back of mouth).
That’s probably why some of you are getting a little confused. Pronunciation depends highly on context. You will not pronounce a word the same way every single time you say it.
I give you the full etymology of “ask” from the OED.
You are correct: it is off topic. The issue has come up in other threads, (for example, here).
Not true in any sense. It has had more than one pronunciation in English since the time that English was spoken only in England–as noted in multiple posts in this thread.
While this may sound logical, it fails on the fact that both pronunciations have already each endured for hundreds of years with neither one overwhelming or replacing the other.
If used in a mocking way, I could see that, but the usage is actually much broader than the “Southern” or “black dialect” usages to which several posters have alluded. It is relatively common in one of the New York boroughs, (I don’t recall which one at the moment), dating to the period when that borough was overwhelmingly white, and I know a number of whites in Michigan and Ohio who employ the same pronunciation.
“Lazy,” of course, is always unfortunate choice as a descriptor of language pronunciation or usage. It brings in an immediate value judgment, (tending toward condemnation), that no legitimate linguist would countenance.
It is also nearly always incorrect in that assessments of what might require more or less effort are frequently in error, often concentrating on a single phoneme while missing the effort required to insert that phoneme into a string.
And, as noted, neither /ask/ nor /aks/ have actually replaced the other, universally, in several hundred years, so I suspect that predicting when a particular pronunciation will die out, (short of carefully working out the current theories expanded from the Grimm brothers’ first efforts), is an exercise in futility.
African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is the most common term for the dialect. African American English, Black English, Black Vernacular, Black English Vernacular, and Black Vernacular English are also used. No linguist would use the term Ebonics:
A getcha. I thought you were referring specifically to KYU-pon, which I have never ever heard in the UK and to me is specifically American. I do say NYOO for ‘new’, KYUbe for ‘cube’, TYOOb for ‘tube’, and TYU-nә for ‘tuna’. But KOO-pon for ‘coupon’.
There’s a class divide too sometimes: e.g. ‘posh’ people in England often say SYOOt for ‘suit’, the rest of us say SOOt.
The weirdest ones I’ve heard are people in Ireland saying KIE-osk for ‘kiosk’ and ‘COL-yoom’ for ‘column’.
Separating the wheat from chaff in this thread, I conclude that some people who use a non-standard vernacular in some circumstances and standard English in others might at times let a word from one slip into the other.
No one has said that a person might be incapable of pronouncing the word as /ask/. Although it might cause no problem for most people, perhaps it is a problem for a few. Johnny Carson had a famously difficult time pronouncing “linoleum” (or maybe it was “aluminum”).
In Britain I generally hear the more Jamaican influenced pronunciation “arks”; there is no finer illustration than in this Peter Serafinowicz clip, where his slightly camp estate agent (realtor) breaks into a menacing Yardie growl whenever hubby says something to threaten his sale. Did I arks you? <sucks teeth>
See also Kali the pigeon for a slightly less gangsta interpretation of the accent. She also says “arks”, but not in this clip.
I used to work in IT at a university in London and would be childishly amused by students (presumably from the West Indies?) coming up and complaining,
“Ma floppy diks is no workin’!”
I always assumed there was some other language they spoke that had the “ks” sound at the end of words, but not a “sk” sound, so they tended to reverse it.
You know damn well what I mean - vowels sounds float with regions.
sk != ks in pronunciation unless you have a speech impediment.
Ask is 1 syllable. If you have to make it two then you too have a speech impediment.
Coupon comes from the French verb “couper, to cut” (sounds like “coo-pay” to English ears), same as coup and coupe. It stands to reason that they’d be pronounced similarly. Do you say kyoop for coupe?
Really? I thought most people pronounce the ‘t’ in “street” as the plain ‘t’ sound.
I pronounce “train” as “chrain” so I see what you’re getting at, but when you put the ‘s’ in front of “tr” it makes it easier to say them with the ‘s’ and ‘t’ sounds. I thought everyone said it this way, but that seems to be the case with almost every pronunciation variation.
This kind of thing happens in other languages too.
For example, in standard Bengali, “box” is “baksho,” but in some regional accents, it is pronounced “basko” or “bashko.”
The “sk” sequence can be difficult word-initially, as well. The English word “school” has been adopted into standard Bengali as “ishkul,” but is sometimes pronounced “askul” or “sakul.”