6

The pronunciation of the first syllable of butcher as /ˈbʊt͡ʃ ..../ is for non-native speakers astonishing. From spelling alone, one would probably guess that it's pronunciation would be more like that of "but" /bʌt/. Surely there must be historic reasons for this (guessing sound-shifts, time of borrowing from french, etc.). What are the reasons for butcher being pronounced the way it is today?

wirrbel
  • 216
  • 1
  • 9

1 Answers1

4

There are a number of words in which a 'u' is pronounced /ʊ/ even in dialects (such as South Eastern English) where it is normally /ʌ/. They all or nearly all have a labial consonant preceding it:

Eg: Pull, push, put, puss, bull, bush, full.

This is not a reliable environment: consider puck, buck, pus, putt, which have /ʌ/ in such dialects.

So there is nothing anomalous about "butcher": it belongs to an established class of words with /ʊ/

Colin Fine
  • 77,173
  • Oh, apparently Wikipedia has a more comprehensive description of the environment for the split; I quoted it in my answer here: http://english.stackexchange.com/a/254506/77227 It seems that butcher is regular, but I can't think of any other words like it (except butch), since putch and futch are not words. – herisson Dec 30 '15 at 13:24
  • @herisson no, but there is putcher (Collins), meaning a salmon trap. The logical (back-formed) verb **putch* doesn't seem to exist, though it's so common as a typo for putsch, and putch appears as slang and as a C function (from "put character" presumably) – Chris H Feb 02 '22 at 10:13