Hockey

[James Harbeck]

>On a Seinfeld episode from 1995, Michael Richards is talking about hockey
>tickets and he pronounces the sport as "hawk-y." Has anyone ever noticed
>this pronunciation of this word or similarly constructed words? IMDB lists
>him as originating from Los Angeles, for what that's worth.

This surely betrays my Canadian phonemic stuntedness (we don't have a
separate phoneme for the open o, meaning "caught" and "cot" are
phonemically identical in CanEng), but can you give more detail on
how Richards pronounces it and how you would pronounce it? In Canada,
generally (I don't want to rule out a few regional variations, but
for the most part CanEng is pretty homogeneous), the first three
phonemes of "hockey" are identical with "hawk". So, because I wasn't
paying attention to this detail when I lived in the US (and I try not
to watch TV shows where they talk about hockey), I'm not sure which
of the two words has which sound for you...

James Harbeck

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