reservoir.

[Herb Stahlke]

This native Midwesterner has always pronounce reservoir with a low back rounded vowel for the <oi>.  But I recall hearing people in Michigan and Indiana pronounce the <oi> as [oi].

Herb

>>> laurence.horn at YALE.EDU 04/14/01 08:22PM >>>
At 6:19 PM -0500 4/14/01, Tony Glaser wrote:
>I'm a person who uses "reservwha", but not to suggest my education.
>In fact, I don't think I've ever heard it pronounce any other way.
>What is the other pronunciation ("reservoyer"?). Maybe I just haven't
>listened and my native BrEng is misleading way.
and
At 8:54 PM -0700 4/14/01, Jerome Foster wrote:
>How else do you pronounce it  in English besides the "French" way? The man
>who drilled my well in Connecticut in the seventies, pronounced it
>"reservoy."

I think the idea is that the non-rhotic pronunciation in a dialect
that is NORMALLY rhotic is an attempt to pronounce the word in a
"French" way (by dropping the final consonant) in a context in which
the French way would actually be to pronounce the final consonant.
(The pronunciation I've always used and virtually always heard is
['rEz at rvwar], sort of like French except for the vowels, the stress,
and the point of articulation of the [r].)  In this respect, the
-r-less pronunciation of "reservoir" is like the quite frequent
rendering of "coup de grace" as "koo duh grah", again out-Frenching
the French, who would always pronounce the final -s of "grace".   In
England, Boston, etc., of course, "reservoir" would automatically
come out without either a medial or a final -r, ['rEz at vwa:].

larry