pronouncing "hobo" et al. today

[Joel S. Berson]

At 5/26/2009 12:10 PM, Mark Mandel wrote:
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
>
>At 11:37 PM -0400 5/25/09, Douglas G. Wilson wrote:
> >Laurence Horn wrote:
> >>Does "boyo" rhyme with "yoyo"?
>
> >Hmm...For me, that's not <CoCo> but <C [diphthong]o>
>
>Sorry; I've been using angle brackets for written forms. <CoCo> means
>a word written as any consonant letter + "o" + a consonant letter +
>"o", and I'm looking from the perspective of a reader of the cite.
>
>So far in this thread we've mentioned the following <CoCo> words. (I
>haven't seen Randy's spreadsheet yet.) All have final /Ow/.

Where does "homogeneous" fit?  I think there are multiple (two?)
pronunciations for both vowels.

Joel

>The first
>two sets are mutually exclusive, as are the second two, but neither
>group is exhaustive; "homo" < "homosexual" is listed in both.
>
>BY FIRST VOWEL
>* first vowel / Ow /
>  - hobo
>  - yoyo (ideophonic reduplication); also <yo-yo>; similarly <so-so>
>and probably any other hyphenated word
>  - Homo (as in "Homo sapiens", "genus Homo", etc.)  (OED: also / a Ow / )
>  - homo (clipping of "homosexual")
>
>* first vowel / O /
>  - toro (effect of _r)
>  - boyo / OI /   (boy + /Ow/)
>
>BY ORIGIN
>* clipping pronounced as in full word
>  - mono / a / [US]  /turned-a/ [UK]
>  - homo (clipping of "homosexual")
>
>* written abbreviation, pronounced as in normal spelling
>  - boro
>  - folo
>
>
>Two questions (at least) present themselves:
>1. Which of the above words would be relevant to the readers of the 1885 cite?
>2. How would they tend to pronounce an unfamiliar <CoCo> sequence?
>
>m a m
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org