Nothing too surprising here. The vast majority of respondents (75%), regardless of nationality / context of learning English, chose kye-YO-tee. The three-syllable koy-OH-tee was chosen by only 10% of respondents. Similarly, the two-syllable pronounciations were surprisingly rare, given that most dictionaries list such a variant, although some of the 'other' respondents indicated that they varied their pronunciation between three-syllable and two-syllable forms.

From my limited knowledge of Mexican and/or American Spanish, coyote would be pronounced something like ko-YO-tay [kojote], although the original Nahuatl form coyotl is, I think a two-syllable [kojoɬ] (if you can't read the final character, it's the same sound that is represented as 'll' in Welsh). It came into English only in 1759, but evidently has moved well away from both the Nahuatl original and the Spanish intermediary.

In fact I suspect that there may be quite a bit of variation between 'KOY' [kɔj] and 'KYE' [kaj] among individual speakers, depending on context and carefulness of pronunciation. A similar phenomenon occurs in various English dialects in which boy and bye are homophones (as in Newfoundland English). In some other dialects (certain Irish Englishes, for instance), the reverse happens, so that, as chickenfeet2003 noted a couple of polls back, FOY-err and 'fire' may be homophones in those dialects. It is, regardless, relatively odd for 'oy' to be pronounced 'eye' in either Standard American or British Englishes; I can't think of another example offhand.

Another possibly related phenomenon is the so-called Cot-caught merger - in many dialects, including virtually all Canadian dialects, these two words are homophones, while in some other dialects, there is a contrast betweeen [ɔ] and [a]. All of the low-ish back-ish vowels can be pretty tricky to distinguish for some English speakers. I'm not entirely sure whether that has anything to do with the variation in 'coyote', because so few people chose non-standard forms, but the vowels being contrasted are the same.

Finally, I'm not sure what effect, if any, the cartoon character Wile E. Coyote has had on the pronunciation of 'coyote', because his name is rarely pronounced in Road Runner cartoons, which mostly lack dialogue.

Tags: language, wp
Current Mood: busy