The ueil sound is notoriously hard for Americans and Brits to replicate it. There is no really good way to write it out phonetically, either.

Way back when I was first studying French and we did pronounciation drills, there was one that was full of words with the ueil sound. My teacher noted that once you've mastered the art of saying écurueil properly, you've got French pronounciation nailed.

coco-
I can't make that site work. How do I make that curly symbol? I guess that's why I can't get it to work. Or maybe I'm just not typing it correctly?

Which curly symbol? The c with the tail, like this ç ? If you are using a Windows computer, hold the Alt key down and type 135 on the number pad (NOT the number row across the top). Some other goodies encountered often in French are

Alt-130 = é
Alt-138 = è
Alt-147 = ô

Lots of other fun stuff with Alt codes in the range 128 through 173, good for Spanish, German, Swedish, etc.

If I had to describe the pronunciation of the original phrase I'd say "ah BOH nah K'WEEY".

Oddcast is another similar site to try:

http://tinyurl.com/2fpus

Doh! You mean the tilde in the URL, like ~. It's over on the upper far left of your keyboard, right above Tab and next to the 1. Shift-`.

The reason the clickable URL is broken is because Fodor's thinks it ends with the slash / , so you have to copy the part after the / ("~ttsweb/tts/demo.php") and paste that into the address bar in the appropriate place after clicking the link.

That's the symbol. I have never used it before. Guess I didn't even know it was there.

I agree with St.Cirq - if you can pronounce (not to mention spell) "ecureuil" [which also means flying squirrel, not just squirrel, according to my dico] you are pretty much home free. Add "rue" (or any word that starts with "r" and has that pesky "eeeeeeuuuuuuw" sound and you are golden. :-)

Oh NO, fnaf999....not even close, sorry!!!

Well, the eeeuuuwww sound is actually pretty simple.

Smile broadly. Say eeeeeeeee. While you're saying eeeeee, purse your lips as hard as you can. Voilà!

Where am I wrong, StCirq?

Well, it's hard even to begin. Every syllable is completely off. There's no BOH sound and definitely no KWEE sound!
I don't know how to do an accurate transliteration for you - best I can offer is find one of those online audio sites and listen to those words. But trust me, the actual sound is radically different from what you proposed.

Posting anything on these "how do you pronounce?" questions is a surefire sign that a person (like me) just likes to get drawn into arguments - - especially since sound clips are available to "settle the argument".

Still, it doesn't seem _that_ hard to transliterate this one (recognizing that no matter what I propose, someone will howl and say that"it isn't right").

Despite that, I would write (for a midwestern American English speaker)...

owe-bo("nh") nah-kuh-yuh

...trying to write it just as I hear "Juliette" saying it.

It needs multple footnotes, of course, since there is too much ambiguity in how to pronounce my "transliteration"

1. bo("nh") is the best way I know to write a nasal "on" sound. I liken it to "don't" but never get to (pronouncing) the N, nor the T.

2. Every one of these syllables is short; don't linger on any of them.

3. "kuh" rhymes with "duh" as teens today say - - except that "duh" is typically a very long, drawn-out utterance... and this "kuh" is very short.

4. ...and the "yuh" is even shorter - - not a syllable at all. Like the hint of "yuh" heard at the end of _champagne_ (if pronounced correctly by a French speaker) or the same hint of a "yuh" at the end of "fille".

Best wishes,

Rex

I pronounce it:

I bang a goy

OR

Benihana of Tokoyo

Depending on what I have in my mouth at the time.

But Rex, it's NOT kuh - not even close!

StSirq, I know you know what you're speaking of.

But we should remember that we don't actually HEAR what the user is saying when they write something "phonetically", we just hear ourselves pronounce it. Even if KWEE rhymes with three, all threes are not created equal. Or even equally:

"Ah tol' Pawleen Ah would be theyah at thu-ree-uh, but she didn' even cawl tuh tell me she wuz runnin' lay-it!"

For "euil":

Start to make a sound like the second "a" in "Martha" in the front of your mouth, think about the time and expense of trying to make everything perfect like Martha Stewart and quickly purse your lips (as you would) into something between an "oo" of surprise and a shocked intake of breath. If you don't choke, that'll get you close.

I didn't write "KWEE", I wrote "K'WEEY". For an American, the apostrophe should pretty closely approximate the tongue movement at the schwa "u", and the Y and the end of the EE sound very closely matches the way it "squeezes" towards the end.

There is no English letter or letters that get you anywhere near the French "on" sound. BOH, if you close the sinus opening, is exactly what's happening, though, and the following n, which attaches to the vowel at the beginning of the next word, gets you closer. <br>
I assure you that when I read what I wrote out loud it sounds pretty close to what a French person would say -- my French is abysmal but my pronunciation is pretty good (so says my French teacher). Your reading of This is why language people don't spell phonetically using the other language's letters. But ordinary people can't easily read IPA.

But the central, dominant, vowel sound is nothing like WEE, it's far closer to an OY with pursed lips. EE with pursed lips gets you the "u" in "tu", "rue" and so on.