reservoir.

[Peter A. McGraw]

This discussion amazes me, because I haven't yet heard my pronunciation
mentioned: "reservor."  At least that's how I learned it as a child.  I may
have modified it as an adult after I had learned some French, because
"reservwar" sounds right, too, and I'm not sure which I actually use
nowadays.  Certainly not "reservwah," which definitely sounds affected, at
least from speakers of rhotic dialects.

I think "reservor" is the pronunciation I've heard in the humorous useage
in which the uneducated American renders "au revoir" as "ah reservor."

Peter Mc.

--On Monday, April 16, 2001 8:34 AM -0500 Herb Stahlke
<hstahlke at GW.BSU.EDU> wrote:

> 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



****************************************************************************
                               Peter A. McGraw
                   Linfield College   *   McMinnville, OR
                            pmcgraw at linfield.edu