Several thoughts on nooze/noose.
1. I've noticed this pronunciation in a colleague of mine from Connecticut. In her case it's particularly evident with the -ese suffix designating languages, like Chinese and Japanese. It's more widespread than that but still unusual enough to be noticed.
2. There is a widely believed and perpetuated view of English consonant phonetics that is simply wrong. This is the notion that the English obstruents /ptkCfTsS/ are voiceless and /bdgjvDzZ/ are voiceless, and this is the fundamental difference between the two sets. In fact, it has been demonstrated both phonetically and phonologically, in numerous studies, that the former are fortis, having a strong articulation, and the latter lenis, having a weaker articulation. The lenis obstruents will voice when between voiced sounds, like vowels, nasals, and liquids, but elsewhere they are voiceless.
3. The difference between "sieze" and "cease" is twofold: "sieze" has a longer vowel, and the final consonants are lenis and fortis respectively.
What's happening in the nooze/noose case may not be that the consonant is devoicing, since it's already voiceless in both cases but rather that the vowel has shortened before a lenis /z/ so that that important clue to a final lenis is lost and we perceive the final lenis as a fortis /s/. It may even become an /s/, although in my colleague's speech I don't think it does.
There is also a morphological phenomenon involved that Bill astutely points out his analysis, suggesting, as he does, that the etymologically suffixal -s of "news" ceases to be a suffix and is reanalyzed as part of the root. However, I have a paper coming out in Word next year, written with a couple of grad students, arguing that the -s on "news," "dependence," "linguistics," and "spokesman," arose in the late 16th c. or early 17th from several different sources that came together as a new suffix creating nominalized forms mostly from adjectives but also from other classes. That new suffix -s behaves phonologically just like all the other suffixes -s in English (at least four of them). This reanalysis of the final -s of "news" doesn't really bear on Bill's interesting suggestion that the word gets reanalyzed in some varieties of modern English, but the fact that other speakers do this with other suffixes as well suggests that there may be a sound change taking place in English neutralizing the consonant strength (fortis/lenis) contrast before or within some suffixes. This deserves further study.
Herb
Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of English
Ball State University
Muncie, IN 47306
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From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Spruiell, William C [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: November 18, 2008 12:54 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: nooze or noose?
Dick,
Is Montagne from Chicago? There are some dialects that regularly do that. – Bill Spruiell
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Veit, Richard
Sent: Tuesday, November 18, 2008 10:44 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: nooze or noose?
Lately I’m noticing some people pronouncing the word news as “noose” rather than “nooze.” For example, on Morning Edition, Steve Inskeep says “This is NPR nooze” but co-host Renee Montagne says “NPR noose.”
Generally Americans use the z sound for the plural marker following a vowel sound, as in days, fees, sighs, potatoes, and dues. So what’s up with “noose”? Does it mean that news has become a monolithic morpheme ( {news} rather than {new} + {PLURAL} ) for them and so escapes the rule mandating the z-sound-after-vowels for the plural marker?
Dick Veit
________________________________
Richard Veit
Department of English
University of North Carolina Wilmington
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