spelling that exclamation of disgust

[Mark A. Mandel]

Dale Coye <Dalecoye at AOL.COM> writes:

        >>>
In parts of the South they have /ju/ in variation with /iu/ and
according to PEAS it used to be a folk pronunciation in NE-Upstate NY,
but I believe it has now died out (this is in words like music, due,
news in NE). But what's interesting about ee-yoo is that all dialects in
the US have added it (at least that's my guess), so we have this
diphthong existing in a single lexical item.
        <<<

"ee-yoo" -- IPA [i(j)u] -- is not a diphthong, but a sequence of two
vowels, with a glide in between that may be more or less prominent.
Segmentally, it's no different from the vowel sequence in "I <see you>"
or "r<eu>nite".

Of course exclamations have different prosody from other speech, and may
contain "phonemes" not found in the ordinary lexicon. Two well-known
examples in American English are the ingressive alveolar click of "tsk,
tsk" and the glottal stop that distinguishes the negative "uh-uh" from
the positive "uh-huh". If [i(j)u] were a phoneme and we didn't already
have it in "reunite" and possibly other words, "eeew" would join this
list.

-- Mark A. Mandel
   Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania