This post is about idiosyncratic pronunciations. When I was at SOAS in the 60s, the head of the Department of the Far East, in which I was studying, regularly pronounced English as [ˈeŋɡlɪʃ] and England as [ˈeŋɡlənd]. I have just checked a few dictionaries and can find no reference to these pronunciations anywhere. As far as I remember, the guy had a perfectly normal General English accent.
Going a bit further back in my academic career, a schoolteacher of mine always pronounced the word aborigine as [əˈbɒrɪdʒɪn]. Again the guy’s accent was pretty close to General English. I haven’t found reference to this pronunciation anywhere either.
Finally, while listening to a sample clip of an audiobook read by an American with a Gen Am accent, I was confronted with the word pulpit pronounced as [ˈpʌlpət] (Yes, with a real genuine STRUT vowel). The only reference I can find to this is in LPD where it is labeled as British English Non-RP.
I find idiosyncratic pronunciations like these mystifying. It is easy to see sometimes where they originate. A fairly uncommon word, met with only in writing, can be interpreted using a common, but erroneous, spelling-to-sound rule. What mystifies me is why the pronunciation persists in the face of evidence that it is idiosyncratic.
There are some simple words in my own language which I tend to “construct” wrongly, misplacing the sounds, even though I’m aware of how they should be arranged. So when I’m trying to be accurate in my speech, I need to be specially alert lest I give myself away. I’m afraid it’s a matter of bad habits and laziness.
Merriam-Webster online has /ˈpəlpət/ as one of the variants as does ODP for GenAm. /ə/ and the STRUT vowel are fairly close to one another; so it could either be articulatory laziness (as @Alphonse suggests) or a mishearing.
JWL writes in his Phonetiblog:
John Maidment’s recent observation that a lecturer using the pn /eŋglɪʃ/ for the word “English” had “a perfectly normal General English accent” is a little bit frustrating because one wd like to’ve known whether the speaker cdve had any special influence that caused him to retain it when presumably every NS (native speaker) around him wdve been saying it differently from him including presumably his parents………. John’s comparably sudden use of the attractively simple term “General English” also prompts me to point out that at least one drawback about using it is that it’s potentially misleading especially in a worldwide context. An EAL user cd praps be in dou’t about whether it refers to being ‘general’ in little old England or ‘general’ in the English-speaking world as a whole. The words street, choice and English itself can reasonably be sed to have relatively the same pn anywhere among English-speakers.
I am afraid it was so long ago and I was a humble undergraduate and he was the head of the department, so I am afriad I have no information other than what I have already given. I meant to write General British English, by the way
Petr,
I have checked. The guy definitely said [ˈpʌlpət].
Sorry, John!
I meant a mishearing on the part of that bloke!
Petr,
No apology necessary. Just a misunderstanding.
Cheers.
I might be wrong about this, but my sense is that the American speaker for the LPD pronounces pulpit as [ˈpʌlpət].