Joel vs Jo-El

[Wilson Gray]

There's something peculiar about that name.. When I first had occasion
to say "Jill," the name of one of my roommates, to my (white)
classmates at M.I.T., they heard it as "Joel" [jowl]. After I'd had to
spell her name out a few times, they apparently added a new rule to
their grammars:

When Wilson says [jowl], read as [jI at l]

(Since I didn't hear it as they heard it, I couldn't change my
pronunciation, though I tried, to no avail.) :-)

-Wilson

On Tue, Mar 4, 2008 at 10:15 AM, Damien Hall
<halldj at babel.ling.upenn.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
>  Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>  Poster:       Damien Hall <halldj at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU>
>  Subject:      Joel vs Jo-El
>  -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>  When I arrived in Philly from London five years ago, I had trouble pronouncing
>  my American classmate Joel's name as he did, too.  My native (and, I think, the
>  usual British) pronunciation of that name is /'Jow. at l/, whereas he (and everyone
>  else in the class) pronounces his name /Jowl/.  That phonotactic combination
>  (/ow/ + /l/ with nothing intervening) in that name seemed so strange to me that
>  I caught myself thinking I didn't even have it in my inventory, until someone
>  pointed out that of course I did, in words like 'dole' etc.  From that point on
>  I had no trouble pronouncing Joel's name in the way he did.
>
>  I can't really account for the pronunciation of (Billy) Joel as /Jow.'El/,
>  though (I assume that there was main stress on the second syllable, from the
>  perceived hyphenation).  I had certainly heard the piano man's name pronounced
>  before I came here.  Maybe it was a calque on the French pronunciation
>  /Zo.'El/?
>
>  Damien Hall
>  University of Pennsylvania
>
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