'noose' = news

[Tom Zurinskas]

Saying the letter "s" as an ~s for plurals is one of the two big changes in pronunciation I've noticed over the years.  (The other is awe-dropping - some folks never saying the sound "awe" but "ah" in its place.)  So "news" is mistakenly said as "noose" and "eyes" as "ice".   Not good.  In fact presidents Bush2 and Obama have this tendency.  
Here is/are my data on letter "s" as seen in print https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PteYgrmV3Wk .  This is from truespel book 3. which has data on all 26 letters and 40 sounds of US English in terms of frequency in print.  The letter "z" is the least used letter by far, but the sound ~z is in the top third of popularity (rank 13 out of 40).   I find that the sound ~z is spelled by letter "s" about 95% of the time in print (which is similar to speech also), and only about 3% of the time is the sound ~z spelled by letter "z".
The problem is that elementary schools do not teach pronunciation.  They reason is that pronunciation guides are too cryptic.  But a simple guide like truespel makes pronunciation easy enough for k-1.  In fact "phonetics" is a k-1 requirement for common core.  Truespel is the answer.  See http://justpaste.it/comcoreenglish .  But it appears to me that hardly anyone in English education knows what phonetics is.  They are still coming out of the "whole word" dark ages.

Tom Zurinskas, Conn 20 yrs, Tenn 3, NJ 33, now FL 12.See how English spelling links to sounds at http://justpaste.it/ayk


 
 > ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Bergdahl, David" <bergdahl at OHIO.EDU>
> Subject:      'noose' = news
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> A few times in the past week I've heard "news" pronounced as "noose" on cab=
> le news (probably CNN or MSNBC).  Is the devoicing of the final /z/ in [nuz=
> ] fashionable? =20
> 
> David Bergdahl=
> 
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