Buoys again

 

Buoys again

Mooring buoy somewhere in the Solent, probably Gosport.

 I was gently and rather ruefully admonished for not using one of our own photographs of a buoy. I trawled through several hundred of the thousands of sailing photographs we have, and found one and then gave up. Honour has been satisfied!

I looked up how to pronounce buoy. The north American pronunciation is ‘boo-ee’ but British English stipulates ‘boy.’ The Antipodeans also say ‘boy.’ Sorry to all you republicans in Australia.

Andrew asked, ‘does the American pronunciation come from old English, taken to the Americas.’

As far as I can discover, ‘buoy’ originated in the late 13^th century. It may have come from the old French. I found the following:

‘buoy (n.) late 13c., perhaps from either O.Fr. buie or M.Du. boeye, both from W.Gmc. **baukn* "beacon" (cf. O.H.G. bouhhan, O.Fris. baken). OED, however, supports M.Du. boeie, or O.Fr. boie "fetter, chain" (see boy), "because of its being fettered to a spot."

So you have two possible origins, one originally pronounced [bɥi(ə)] (French) or [bœɛi] (Dutch), and the other [boi] (French) or [bœi] (Dutch), all of which could be Anglicised as either disyllabic [buwiː] (boo-ee) or monosyllabic [bɔɪ] (boy).

I suspect both pronunciations have been around for a while in English, and the colonial divide just drew a more distinct (regional) line between them.’

I also found this:

‘One common 18th century pronunciation of buoy in England (and presumably also America), seems to have been bwoy (/bwɔɪ/). The book A Practical Grammar of English Pronunciation by Benjamin Humphrey Smart (London, 1810) says

Bw, in the words
Buoy, buoyance
is represented by bu. They should never be pronounced boy, boyance.

I believe that this comment shows that both bwoy and boy were used in 1810 England. This pronunciation also explains why buoy is not spelled boy.’

Finally, this:

The 1892 Webster's High School Dictionary gives both boy and bwoy as pronunciations.

‘It's not hard to imagine the pronunciation bwoy turning into boo-ee. But it's also possible that in 18th century England, besides the pronunciations boy and bwoy, there was a third, boo-ee, which now only survives in the U.S. I would tend to lean towards the theory that the boo-ee pronunciation was brought to American from England, because the OED gives a 1603 citation where the word is spelled "bowie", which seems to indicate that this pronunciation existed in England then.’

I think the Canadians might have something to say about ‘boo-ee’ only surviving in the US now!