I can’t speak to athlete or jewelry but until a series of ads within the past decade I had never heard anyone say realtor instead of real-ah-tor. The apparently correct pronunciation sounds ridiculous.
For years I’ve been asking (thinking) the same question and it’s only since my participation here that the answer seems to be some combination of geography, local usage, and um, other stuff that I’m not versed in. It’s a really interesting subject to me but the anwer always seems to amount to " people speak differently".
Aggravates my misophonia like a mother.
I may have, indirectly. I pointed out why sometimes “spearmint” comes out of my mouth as three syllables instead of two. Sometimes there’s a bit of a gap between moving my tongue out of the way for the R and closing my lips for the M. Going from a hard R to another sound or vice versa is a complex movement.
Jewelry has L and R right next to each other, and trying to move your tongue from the lateral L position to curved R position can leave a gap. The same can be true moving your tongue back from the TH sound to the L sound.
Realtor, however, I suspect is not the same. There we have metathesis, where two sounds get swapped, usually due to the other direction being less complex. While not everyone would notice it, the syllable “real” has a schwa before the L. This happens as you move the tongue back for the back L, which just does not combine with the “ee” sound the same as it does for, say, the “ah” sound. So we actually have “REE-əl-tər”. This then gets swapped to “REE-lə-tər.”
It’s possible this is also the case for jewelry. Some will say jew-el-ry, not jule-ree. It doesn’t much for that to become joo-lə-ry. Syllables with vowels at the end are easier to say.
[quote=“BigT, post:269, topic:949375”]
Jewelry has L and R right next to each other, and trying to move your tongue from the lateral L position to curved R position can leave a gap.[/quote]
Then why don’t people have this problem with rivalry, chivalry, cavalry, etc.? I suspect the “w” has something to do with it.
I’ve noticed a lot of people pronounce it like the biblical hill. As I was commuting to the office yesterday, I’m pretty sure I heard a reporter on NPR say ‘Calvary’ instead of ‘cavalry’.
Regarding root beer. Since I was a kid and through my formative years, and in those environs, root beer always came out as “Roopeer”, with the “t” hardly uttered, and the “b” being replaced by a very soft “p”.
In the same time, and the same area, the word “theater” came out as “Theerturr”.The “a” was never pronounced unless the word was used in other variations, like say, “theatrical”. I remember my grandmother used to get annoyed when she heard one of our neighbor ladies pronounce “theater” in the correct enunciated way because she would later say she sounded prissy.
I’ll raise you another holy cow, as your renderings of “experiment” and “ginger ale” mirror(ed) mine exactly.
Nearly similar in the dropped/very faint “t” and substituting a very soft “p” in place of a “t” while pronouncing root beer, it also happened with the word football.
“Foop-all”. I used the hyphen because their was also a very subtly glottal stop involved. For people farther “down county” ( and closer to NYC ) it came out as “Fooppawll”.
Good point. Sure, as others mention, cavalry often gets the metathesis treatment, but the other two are said just fine.
I doubt it’s the W, as that’s not really pronounced as a separate letter. But it definitely could be the vowel. I can see two possibilities, both of which may be valid.
If the standard pronunciation is “JOOL-ree”, then the difference may have to do with the preceding vowel involving less mouth space. In the other words you mention, I find I open my mouth like I was saying the word "ol’,"m as in “old” without the D. That may make the L to R transition easier.
If the standard pronunciation is JOO-əl-ree, then you have the issues that there are two vowels next to each other, unlike in your other options. In that case, it makes sense that you get the metathesis that I mentioned earlier. It’s generally easier to divide two syllables with a consonant. You may notice that often words that have two vowels together in two different syllables wind up with some consonant between them, e.g. co-op becomes “COH-wop,” or neo- becomes “NEE-yoh.” I’ve even seen “The First Noel” spelled out as “The First Nowell.”
Interesting. In my experience, there’s no /p/. It’s just that the /t/ is completely glottalized, and the sound completely before the /b/. But perhaps some variations actually still have air flowing up to the /b/, which would sound like a /p/. It took me a second, but I can say it that way.
I find that, in my accent, /t/ gets glottalized at the ends of words all the time. Sometimes my tongue still moves into position, and other times it doesn’t.
Oh, and glottalization refers to mixing in a glottal stop with the sound in question. In other words, you partially or completely stop the sound with the vocal cords rather than your lips, tongue, etc. The most well-known example is probably how someone with a stereotypical Cockney accent says the T in water or better, but it’s not always that obvious.
Now this reminds me that I had to practice saying words like “water” and “daughter”. I grew up saying it like “wadder” and I hate the sound of that. But I didn’t want to sound Cockney either (not that there’s anything wrong with that if you’re actually English!).
I think I might have shared this here before; I grew up in SoCal and until I was twelve(ish) I had the typical surfer sound (kind of like Valley Girl but, stoned?). My mother (verbally) beat that out of me so I’ve tried to speak as “neutrally” as possible. I have no illusions that I don’t have some kind of accent but I try.