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Usenet Posted 21 years ago
English in UK

American British pronunciations

I'm no Professor 'Iggens, but I have a lifelong interest in, and sensitivity for local dialect pronunciations. I'm particularly fascinated with the persistence of Elizabethan dialectic pronunciations that have been documented in various backwater areas of the eastern United States. I personally observed this in the 1970s when a local resident on the Eastern Shore of Maryland essayed the following phrase describing a job offer that paid "noine thewsand dawlers". It made an instant believer of me.

Anyway, years ago I noted that native residents of the Maryland area around Washington, D.C. would pronounce the "u" in words such as bush as the oo in "whoosh" (the oo drawn out as a long o-o-o). I figured it was some kind of local colonial corruption, until I started hearing British news presenters on BBC doing the same thing with "President Bush" as in "who-o-osh".

Can anyone comment on the British origins of this pronunciation?

John Mazor
"The search for wisdom is asymptotic."
"Except for Internet newsgroups, where it is divergent..." R J Carpenter
  
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