I found Lucy's comment on the word 'nuclear' interesting in light of the lectures I have been listening to. (To avoid housework.)
I think it is a word that was bound to change its pronunciation. The ny sound at the beginning is rather strange. With the exception of 'new' and that is often pronounced 'noo'. We are not sure what that y sound is. When I was at school there were only five vowels, aeiou and y was given some kind of associate status.English speakers often have trouble with the Indonesian ny. Especialy when it is duplicated in words such as nyanyi, sing. So I would expect over time the word nuclear to be pronounced nookleer. The final r I would expect to go too as English does not like rolling its rs the way Scots and Indonesian do.
So finally the word would be pronounced something like nookleeah.
Newkulla sounds as if it has a glottal stop in it and may just be a fashion like the rising tone at the end of a sentence; that fashion already seems to be on the way out.
It could also signal a hesitancy, an unconscious doubt over the correct pronunciation.
Linguistic change is largely unconscious and we speak very differently from our parents and grandparents.
It is fascinating how sudden and complete some of these changes can be. For example, our rules of spelling are such a mess because many of them were set down just before The Great Vowel Shift in an attempt to standardise the printed word.
Consonants shift too according to Grimm's Law. That's Jacob Grimm, the fairy tale collector and linguist.
Vowels have the Chomsky-Halle Trisyllabic Laxing Rule. This may have some relevance to the change in the pronunciation of nuclear.
But I am getting out of my depth and my nose is starting to bleed.
Which reminds me of Jill's comment on In Our Time on Absolute Zero. I thnk most people came away knowing next to nothing about Absolute Zero but I bet we all remembered Faraday picked shards of glass out of his eyes. Most will forget it was Faraday and the essence of the programme will have been distilled down to, 'Some bloke picked bits of glass out of his eyes.'
I think this says something profound about the process of education.
At least, my education.
Now I'm going to make wild rabbit curry with three types of chilli, garlic, cinnamon, tamarind, lime juice and ginger, and spiced with wild Laotian cardamoms, cloves, star anise, and my favourite juicy black cardamoms.
I shall eat it with lots of beer chilled to just below Abolute Zero while watching a good fillum, flick or movie.
Talking about films... Last night I watched The Berbarian Sound Studio directed by Peter Strickland.