The very specific quirks of English spelling and how they correspond to pronunciation are fun. The vowel sounds of “mute” and “moot” are identical and there are many similar pairs where the two words are either homophones or near-homophones depending on dialect (“droop” and “drupe”), but the fact that in “mute” the vowel is represented by the letter u tells us that sometimes there’s a lil j sound there. Myoot versus moot. Same for “muse” and “moose.” The word with the u in it is actually myoos while the animal is just a moos. No idea how we ended up here.
This is why you can’t call your mutuals your moochuals, because “mooch” doesn’t have the same initial consonant cluster. Or I mean you could but it would sound quite silly. They’re your myoochuals.
Similar thing with fuse and foosball (a thing Americans believe in).
I wanted to see if this was true for other vowels, but like, mere cat Vs meerkat isn’t doing the same thing,. unfortunately.
Yeah, fuse versus foos- is another good example! :D
But this actually leads me to something @invisible-goats pointed out to me: that the final sibilant in “muse” is often voiced, so the difference between “muse” and “moose” isn’t just one of initial consonant, but it’s specifically /mjuːz/ vs. /muːs/! And looking at “fuse” vs. “foos” it seems to be the same thing! /fjuːz/ vs. /fuːs/ (although it does seem that in “foos” there’s some variation between /s/ and /z/)
It would be easy to conclude from this that if a word has /juː/ preceding a sibilant then it will be voiced, and if it’s just a /uː/ then it’ll be unvoiced, but then I immediately thought of a pair that would break that rule: “ooze” and “use” (this pair, however, does confirm the assessment that if the /u/ sound is actually represented with the letter u then sometimes there’s a lil /j/ in there as well, whereas the /u/ sound represented by “oo” will not have it)
Sing, O moose, of the rage of Achilles…
That’s it… The moose singing of the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus…
(via sparklyeevee)
