Truly Donovan (truly@lunemere.com) writes: > Seriously, folks, Americans don't really think Canadians pronounce > "house" as "hoose" -- what we think is that some Canadians pronounce > it pronouncedly differently from the way we pronounce it and it is in > fact a sound that we can't reproduce (from not having learned it in the > the cradle, I think). It isn't "hoose" but it doesn't sound like my > "house" sounds, either. I think it is actually a nice sound and regret > that I can't make it.OK, I can't resist trying to make Truly an even happier woman, so here's -- as my students say -- the Cliff's for how to make it. Pronunciation is Midwestern American for the most part. I don't know how well it'll work for speakers of other dialect areas -- play along and see, I guess.
You can get to distinguish both parts quite well by listening carefully and observing your tongue movements (in a mirror if you're visually oriented and have tolerant roommates, or just in front of the screen here) while saying words with diphthongs in them. Like the ones above.
Canadians say this word /hawz/ the same as Americans, by the way -- /hawz/, with a real /a/, and not /h@wz/, which sounds strange to almost everybody, Canadians included. In fact, Canadians and most Americans also swap off /@y/ and /ay/, as in /r@ys/ - /rayz/, according to a very simple and completely predictable rule. More examples of the rule are height/hide, ice/eyes, bright/bride, five/fife, tripe/tribe, for instance. There are thousands more pairs and the rule is very simple. I regularly assign college freshmen to figure it out and they have no trouble once they learn to pay attention to sounds.
There's a Web page devoted to "Canadian Raising", as it's called in the trade, which has sound clips you can download and play while you practice. The URL is http://www.yorku.ca/twainweb/troberts/raising.html.
Any American who figures out this rule, though, can fool other Americans into thinking them Canadian, which (like knowing all the words to Tom Lehrer's "The Elements"), may be useful someday, in a somewhat bizarre set of circumstances.
(The answers are in every introductory Linguistics text -- it's a standard example.)