Pronouncing Words

I’ve always been a fan of the Seth Macfarlane version of “You’re the Cream in My Coffee.” But for the first time yesterday, I listened to the version by Nat King Cole.

Listen to the way he pronounces “you’re.”

It’s more like “youer” as opposed to the more colloquial “your” pronunciation.

And this changes everything! It’s more poetic: the lyrics are far more assonant and parallelized. If you take another listen, you’ll hear it. And like how performing Shakespeare in the original pronunciation matters, it more accurately reflects the speech patterns of its time (early-ish 1900s). As a contraction for “you are” and written as “you’re,” the natural, phonological drift towards sounding like “your” probably just happened with time. 

Of course, I can’t blame Seth for singing in his own accent. But isn’t it a wonderful surprise to learn something new about something you thought you knew?