Rhymes talk:English/uːk

I'm sorry to tell you but all these rhyme pages beginning with -j are not necessary. /j/ is the consonant phoneme before the rhyme. The rhyme begins on the stressed vowel. Whatever comes before is irrelevant. Nuke and puke and duke do indeed rhyme with spook and kook and Luke. — Hippietrail 13:14, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

It's true that consonants before the nucleus are irrelevant to rhyme, but historically /ju/ is a unitary vowel phoneme, like the /je/ in Spanish pies "feet" (which may rhyme with diez "ten" but doesn't seem to rhyme with pues /pwes/ "well,...").

Also, the pronunciation [ju] is not universal: at least in my experience the vowel phoneme /ju/ has a tendency to change from a falling diphthong [ju] to a rising diphthong [iw], if not actually [jiw] as in my idiolect. (And yes, at least once my name has been misheard as Milk. The reverse also occurs; I had a schoolmate named Ilko often pronounced like Yoko—where I grew up [ɫ] was common...)

I showed my mate Muse and ooze and he told me they didn't rhyme (he pronounced them something like [mjiwz] and [u:z] also). It could be that the vowel is [jɨw]—I'm not sure of the exact quality of it, but it's certainly not [u]. —Muke Tever 16:56, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

Seconded. In my dialect, nuke and duke rhyme with spook and kook but puke doesn't, because only puke has the palatalization. The resulting coloration of the vowel is seldom if ever heard in isolation. Perhaps in some stylized "valley" pronunciation of dude, so that dude would rhyme with imbued but not rude.

At least in the States, though, this is all subject to significant regional variation. -dmh 17:43, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

This may be beating a dead horse (even be it that /juː/ and /uː/ pronounce separately, there's too much variation in who uses what to separate them properly) but I thought I should add this one bit of information. On the radio the other day I heard a commercial whose punchline was the confusion by homophony of "euro" (/juro/ more narrowly something like [jiwɻʷo]) and "gyro" (/jiro/, [jiɻʷo]). Admittedly the rounding inherent in American /r/ helps this along (you couldn't pull the same trick with "yeast" /jist/ and "used" /just/), but I thought it was an interesting case nonetheless. —Muke Tever 15:06, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)