Amy and the /uː/

[pne]

I’ve occasionally noticed that my /uː/ in English is not [uː] but something further forward, perhaps [ʉː].

Recently, I’ve noticed that Amy’s realisation of that phoneme seems to be even further forward. At first, I thought she had merged it into [yː] from German /y/, but I think it’s not quite that far forward.

Still, hearing her pronounce, say, spoon as [sʉ̟ːn] sounds odd to me. Perhaps it's just that she's get a “real” [ʉː] while I’ve merely got a [u̟ː] or whatever. At any rate, it reinforces the fact that my /u/ is not an [u].

Comments

[ubykhlives.livejournal.com]

That's quite unusual. The realisation [] is overwhelmingly the most common realisation of the phoneme in Australian and New Zealand English, but it's very much a marker for those dialects in that very few other Englishes seem to have it.

(In fact, I used to have no end of trouble with working out the pronunciation of the IPA close central vowels until I realised my dialect actually possesses one.)

[tungol.livejournal.com]

I believe there are some North American dialects with a fronted /u:/ but I'm not sure which ones.

[pne.livejournal.com]

After having just watched a video with some Japanese speaking English, I wonder whether what I hear from Amy is not fronting but rather unrounding.

As far as I know, Japanese /u/ is roughly [ɯ], and their pronunciation of "two" sounded similar to Amy's vowel in "spoon".

[nik-w.livejournal.com]

I wish I knew what you were talking about! I like languages, and know what a lot of them sound like, but I have no idea what the symbols mean!:p

[zompist.livejournal.com]

English /u/ isn't [u] anyway. Catford's Phonetics takes some time to teach students how to actually pronounce the cardinal vowel, as English speakers are likely to pronounce it rather forward and laxed. Whether your u is too far advanced, though, I couldn't say without hearing it. :)