assiduous
educate
graduate
grandeur
Mandurah
residual
stridulate
verdure
5 responses to “d as in educate”
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Hi Alison,
Am I right in thinking that the letter d can also sound as j (affricate) in word initial position with a letter u and sound ‘yoo’ following (with the same co-articulation as mid-word), as in due, during, durable, dual, duet, duty – in Australian English? Are the words do and due pronounced identically in American English?
Hi Jeanette, yes, because the sound /j/ is actually an affricate which is a combination of /d/ and /zh/ as in vision, treasure and beige, there is some overlap in spelling of these two sounds, e.g. in the words ‘soldier’, ‘education’ and ‘adjust’. It’s the same process that makes many young children confuse words like ‘cheese’ and ‘trees’, they are phonetically very close. In Australian English ‘due’ and ‘do’ are not homophones but in American English they are. I’m not sure where you are, or whether you’re a speech pathologist/linguist, but the vowels in ‘new’ and ‘stupid’ are other examples of this vowel variation, I say /you/ as the first vowel in both words, but in the US the vowel is /oo/. Hope that makes sense, Alison
Thanks Alison! Just wondering if you could add more words, thanks so far though!
Thxx | Moira
‘Residue’ has a /ʤ/?
I made these lists up by going through the Third Edition of the paper Macquarie Dictionary, published in 2001. I still have this book, and just checked it, and it does list the pronunciation of residue as containing a /ʤ/, yes. But I just looked up the current online version of this dictionary, and it says /ˈrɛzədju/. So thankyou for pointing this out, I will update my list, and check the current pronunciation of the other items on it too.