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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> >Bush  
> et al pronounce the word new-CUE-lar (or new-KYA-lar), adding a  
> syllable between the c and the l, where there is none.

You HEAR a slyllable, but that doesn't mean one is necessarily there.

Most people are surprised by the fact that words contain, or don;t contain 
sounds they thought otherwise.

I have had people threaten to come to blows over this:

Say the words   'prince' and 'prints'.   They are pronounced exactly alike.  
Because it is impossilbe to say an 'n' and an unvoiced 's' without passing 
your tongue through the place in your mouth where 't' is formed.  Yet people 
are 
willing to swear on a six-pack of Bibles that there IS no 't' sound in the 
word 'prince'.  There is.  It shows up on the electronic analysis and if you 
record either word and ask someone to write down what they hear, thy will 
choose 
one spelling or the other with equal frequency.

Yet I've see people get hotly adamant that the two words are pronounced 
differently.


Say 'puddle', 'rattle', 'staple'.   Are you saying 'oo' or 'uh' before you 
say the 'L' or are you saying the 'L' by itself??   

Now say this nonsense word:   'nookle'.    It's the same phonetic situation 
as the above example.  Go on, try to make it so there is no gliding 'oo' (as 
in 
'book'),  Can't do it, can you?

Go back to my previous three examples and add the word 'her' to it.  You can 
leave off the 'h' and make it like 'git 'er done'.

Puddle her.  Or puddle 'er.   There will be a stop, a hiatus where the 
apostrophe occurs, so it isn't puddler.  It's puddle 'er.

Rattle 'er.  Not rattler, like the snake, not rat-ler, but rattle 'er.

Staple 'er.  Not stapler like a SwingLine, not stape-ler, but stapple 'er.

You will see that the syllable, almost subvocal but present none the less, of 
oo in 'book' is put there in order to glide into the terminal 'L' sound.

Now let's do the same thing with our nonsense word 'nookle' :

Nookle 'er.  Not Nook-ler, but just like the above examples, nookle 'er.  Can 
you do it without adding an 'oo' glide?

Now suppose  you are speaking a dialect where an unaccented medial syllable 
disappears into a hiatus such as can be seen if you open your eyes (eh, ears) 
to it.

Say nuclear,  nu-clee-ear or nu-clih-ear.  Now leave off the 'ee' or the 'ih' 
and try to say it. As in the above exercise, don't say 'New-Clear' but 
'nookle 'er' and try to NOT put the glide in just before the 'L'.  

'Can't do it, can you?

Neither can Bush.

Now thats somewhat of a treatment on the subject.  If you've thought it out 
more deeply than I have, by all means, let's hear why you think it is 
something 
different.

James   </HTML>