1

The following words have the UR and URE graphemes representing the /jʊɹ/ phoneme.

  • uranium
  • security
  • curious
  • Europe
  • fury
  • mural
  • cure/pure/demure
  • failure
  • tenure
  • figure

But for many of the above words, the UR or URE graphemes can also sometimes represent a more streamlined /jɚ/ phoneme.

I also noticed that many words like POOR and TOUR have the /ʊɹ/ phoneme increasingly streamlined to /ɔɹ/. My general sense is that both the /ʊɹ/ and /jʊɹ/ phonemes are being increasingly streamlined in General American. This trend is especially pronounced in English speakers on the West Coast (e.g. Californians).

Is the /jʊɹ/ phoneme being streamlined to /jɚ/ in General American?

Improve this question
5
  • 2
    Yes. And it's frequently not rhotacized, even in rhotic dialects. The normative unstressed syllable in American English is just /ə/. The faster one talks, the more likely that is.
    – John Lawler
    Commented Feb 17, 2023 at 19:59
  • Figure typically rhymes with bigger in the US. There's no /j/.
    – Phil Sweet
    Commented Feb 17, 2023 at 23:56
  • see here - english.stackexchange.com/questions/469241/….
    – Phil Sweet
    Commented Feb 18, 2023 at 0:00
  • Agree that typically figure rhymes with bigger in the US! But I grew up hearing it with a /j/ in the Eastern US, and that link confirms that at least one dictionary confirms it: "ˈfi-gyər, British and often US ˈfi-gər".
    – kanamekun
    Commented Feb 18, 2023 at 1:50
  • Related.
    – tchrist ♦
    Commented Jun 1 at 22:10

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
2

I also noticed that many words like POOR and TOUR have the /ʊɹ/ phoneme increasingly streamlined to /ɔɹ/.

The situation with "pour," at least, is the straightforward result of of the pour-poor merger (see Wikipedia). This is common in AmE speakers; both words are pronounced /poːɹ/.

Oddly enough, I'm pretty sure that I pronounce "tour" as two syllables /ˈtu.ɚ/, rhyming with "bluer" or "brewer." At the very least, it's closer to /tuɚ/ than /tʊɹ/. I have heard /toːɹ/ (the same as "tore") before, but it sounds unusual to me.

Improve this answer
5
  • Notwithstanding the three or four living American speakers up in some retirement home in New England who can still make lax vowels before R like Queen Elizabeth did, I don't think anybody here ever pronounces pore/pour/poor with the lax vowel of a puppy’s paw, only with the tense vowel of Edgar Allen Poe. Hence only ever tense [pʰoɹ] never lax [pʰɔɹ]. Only a pawer (one who paws) could ever work the other way. :)
    – tchrist ♦
    Commented Feb 17, 2023 at 21:37
  • @tchrist Edited to (hopefully) fix my mistaken use of IPA.
    – alphabet
    Commented Feb 17, 2023 at 21:46
  • It's not that yours was mistaken. I can see why you wrote that; that's what the books tell you. But it's a common misunderstanding of where American English is today based on RP spellings of phonemes from a hundred years ago. Like you, I always find tour with a tense O instead of a tense U to be strange as well; you hear it in the Northeast where they confuse us tourists with their towerists. :)
    – tchrist ♦
    Commented Feb 17, 2023 at 21:47
  • @tchrist I'm in the Northeast and hear both fairly often. Oddly enough, the /oːɹ/ pronunciation sounds much more natural in tourist than in tour, maybe because the latter makes it a homophone of tore.
    – alphabet
    Commented Feb 17, 2023 at 22:07
  • (Incidentally, given the weak vowel merger and tendency to drop word-final /t/, I've heard some speakers come quite close to a tourist-torus merger.)
    – alphabet
    Commented Feb 17, 2023 at 22:35
0

You're looking at that "wrong", at least in uranium: /jʊɹ/ is not tautosyllabic. The diphthong is just /ju/ phonemically, and the R belongs to the other syllababble. It has quite literally infinitely many phonetic realizations.

Reduction towards schwa is inevitable in unstressed syllables in all forms of English, not just in North America or Australia. How far it goes you'll never pin down. But you don't have to, because just precisely where that lands does not matter. All phonemic rather than phonetic representations posited in this question and others like it are misleading because they are not how we perceive unstressed syllables.

What all these questions completely misunderstand is how unstressed syllables actually work in English. I will not repeat that here because it has been explained on this site countless times already.

As for words with stressed syllables like poor and tour, this varies. Most of us have /poɹ/ and /tuɹ/ for these, but this in not universal. More importantly, those are the phonemes we perceive said no matter which actual phones people say. That's because the tense–lax opposition is neutralized before R in American English.

Improve this answer
6
  • I haven't heard uranium pronounced where the initial U presents /ju/... this is consistent with my understanding: youtube.com/watch?v=HszeBTwx8dc
    – kanamekun
    Commented Feb 17, 2023 at 20:22
  • @kanamekun What is your first language? Is it stress-timed? Why are you listening for phonetics that native speakers never hear? The phoneme is /ju/, but it has a million possible phonetic realizations that we never perceive. You have to train yourself to stop perceiving things that are infinitely variable and which never matter. The phoneme never changes despite its allophones. Listen to all of these. Remember we cannot hear different tense–lax vowels before R, so you have to train yourself to stop hearing those, too.
    – tchrist ♦
    Commented Feb 17, 2023 at 20:25
  • 1
    I'm American and English is my first language. I am writing software to teach kids how to read, so I've been studying closely the relationship between graphemes and phonemes. The Dictionary of the British English Spelling System lists UR as part of a the 2-phoneme sequence /jʊə/ in words like urea, bravura, curate, curious, furore, furious, fury, lurid, mural, purify, purity, security, spurious and "derived forms of some words ending in <-ure> pronounced /jʊə/ (see below) after <e>-deletion, e.g. manuring." But sometimes I hear streamlined phonemes for those words, so thought I'd ask here.
    – kanamekun
    Commented Feb 17, 2023 at 20:36
  • @kanamekun Oh yeah, that makes sense now. British explanations are harmful to those trying to understand how American English pans out.
    – tchrist ♦
    Commented Feb 17, 2023 at 20:41
  • I've found his dictionary to be very helpful to me, having grown up on the East Coast... but my wife grew up in California, and she almost always uses streamlined phonemes. The non-rhotic stuff though is always the biggest disconnect.
    – kanamekun
    Commented Feb 17, 2023 at 20:44

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .