Rhymes talk:English/uːli

-uːli and -juːli ... should these be separate pages ... to my (Australian/English) ear I feel that duly and ruly are not exact rhymes; I realize that we can think of the d in duly being soft (in the Slavic language sense), but I still hear the vowel as different. Any thoughts, anyone? — DavidL 13:47, 22 Oct 2004 (UTC)

This is a point that I address at the head of the page with the table for uː rhymes (see [1]). "Duly" and "ruly" do rhyme in RP, but maybe not in some other accents. As I point out on the main rhymes page, some rhymes list inevitably combine words that, to some ears, are not rhymes.

Furthermore, in some accents (eg, New York American), the /j/ is not pronounced in many words, so, in that case, "duly" and "ruly" have identical vowels and are perfect rhymes.

To my mind, it's a balance between subdividing the pages to the point where the user has to look at several pages to find all the rhymes in their accent (making it more likely, too, that someone adding a rhyme will do so to the wrong page) and lumping together words that rhyme in very few accents. I have already made a concession to this by separating rhotic and non-rhotic rhymes. — Paul G 15:03, 22 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Odd. I am a native speaker of Australian English and "duly" and "ruly" certainly rhyme for me. The /j/ phoneme in the former is a consonant which comes before the rhyming part and has no effect on the vowel following, and hence no effect on the rhyme. I'm not sure whether some dialects use a diphthong in "duly" or whether people just analyze this differently to me even though they are hearing the same sounds. — Hippietrail 07:15, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)