I don't find reading pronunciations themselves that far-fetched (English is plagued with a terrible orthography), but I do find it difficult to swallow that a massive sound change could be totally reversed by the orthography alone, without extremely common words showing some resistance (note that one itself has avoided a spelling pronunciation, despite only, alone, with the same morpheme, surviving with the expected vowel). I also wouldn't expect the exact same diphthong to be reintroduced. If I have no [ɔɪ]. long o is [oʊ], and terminal -y in a monosyllable is [iɪ], I'm probably pronouncing joy, boy as homophones of Joey, Bowie. For [ɔɪ] to be still there, I think it must've survived in some words but not in others in the dialects that had the boil-bile merger, with the orthography likely helping the [ɔɪ] pronunciation of the boil words to become prestigious again, alongside the massive number of homophones it created making interdialectal borrowing for the sake of disambiguation more likely.Richard W wrote: ↑Sat Sep 24, 2022 12:19 pmYes. Look at all the common words that have spelling pronunciations. As a result of an 'o' in the spelling, one, won, none, ]trouble and wonder all have variously extensive and deprecated pronunciations with [ɒ]. /h/ has largely been restored in words of Latin origin (it's a fight to keep it out of heir and hour), and there are many Americans who resurrect /l/ in calm and walk.
Of course, the dialects that resupplied the [ɔɪ] might all be dead by now, but I doubt very much that the sound itself was ever totally dead in English.