On 2007-11-20 01:19, Rick McCallister wrote:
> In English /@/ + /R/ produces /öR/ or /ö/ in most
> dialects, or at least the vowel is indistinguishable
> from German /ö/
A rounded and slightly advanced NURSE vowel occurs in some accents, e.g.
in Cockney, some varieties of Welsh English and often in the Southern
Hemisphere Englishes; however, it's only the really extreme, fully
fronted realisations, such as can be [hø:d] in New Zealand, that are
really confusible with German <ö>. It certainly isn't true that _most_
accents of English have a rounded vowel in this lexical set. Admittedly,
there's a good deal of acoustic similarity between /3:/ and German
<ö>/French <eu>, hence the usual British pronunciation of <milieu> as
/mIlj3:/ (inviting an intrusive /r/), but any French person will tell
you that it's a poor substitute /&U lj3:/ de la prononciation correcte.
Piotr