Canoodle: odds and ends

[Patty Davies]

This ("honky") is again different for me.  I say and am sure I have always
heard:

"donkey"      /'dawnk ee/
"monkey"     /'muhn kee/
"honky"         /'hawnk ee/

and you pronounce "honky" as /'huhn kee'/ which is "hunky" to me.  So you
pronounce "honky" and "hunky" the same way?  And I also find it *very*
interesting that the politically incorrect words rhyme.  I wonder how
widespread the pronunciation is so that this rhyming is the case.  You
would think this would have been picked up on for a sociolinguistic study
(oooh, a new research project :) ).

Patty

At 10:32 AM 11/15/02 -0500, James A. Landau wrote:
>In a message dated 11/15/02 10:11:26 AM Eastern Standard Time,
>laurence.horn at YALE.EDU writes:
>
> > >This is interesting, I have *never* heard donkey rhyme with monkey!
> >
> >  Meanwhile, back on the East Coast, I rhyme them with impunity.  But
> >  "honky" rhymes with neither, so it's a matter of lexical diffusion
> >  rather than purely a phonological matter.  (The adjective "wonky"
> >  rhymes with "honky", but then unlike the others it has an internal
> >  morpheme boundary.)
>
>I rhyme "donkey" with "monkey", i.e.  /'duhn kee/,  but I find /'dawnk ee/ or
>/'dahnk ee/ acceptable.  (And yes I do hear the /k/ move across the syllable
>boundary, though I do not have the knowledge of phonetics to say why this
>happens).
>
>However, in my experience "honky" meaning "whte, usually disparaging" also
>rhymes with "monkey".  Yes, the two politically incorrect words rhyme.  I
>can't recall ever haing heard /'hawnk ee/ or /'hahnk ee/ in this sense.  Yes,
>  /'hawnk ee 'tawnk/, but here this is probably to make the first and last
>syllables rhyme.
>
>Raised in Louisville KY, college in Michigan, than living in DC and South
>Jersey for 33 years.
>
>        - Jim Landau