anteallach wrote: ↑Thu Sep 29, 2022 1:14 pm
I would routinely pronounce it that way in words and names from German, e.g.
schadenfreude.
I wouldn't be surprised if, after a few generations, that ended up with a spelling pronunciation.
I would almost certainly mispronounce the Wisconsin and Missouri German-origin names Travis and Linguoboy refer to on first sight. Are they pronounced that way because that was how they were pronounced in the relevant German dialects or is it because when they were anglicised the relevant English dialects didn't actually have final schwa?
I think it's possibly, at least in part, the result of some North American dialects developing the
happy vowel in place of the schwa. I'm not sure if it was a total merger, or if it only affected a few words. Most of the eye-dialect examples I can think of are Latinate or Romance borrowings —
extry, opry, baloney. You also sometimes hear what I would spell as
tooney-fish in eye-dialect, though I've never seen this one actually given a pronunciation-spelling.
Loony or
looney, from
lunatic, may also be connected with this, probably reinforced by the adjectival
-y. Borrowing foreign /a/ as /iː/ does also notably occur when there's a hiatus immediately following (as
Israel,
karaoke).
I've also encountered the Dutch name
Rijkse pronounced /raiskɪ/.