Am.E pronunciation of "semi" - summary

[Beverly Flanigan]

At 03:38 PM 1/17/00 +0100, you wrote:
>A week back I asked asked about Am.E pronunciation of "semi". Thankyou
>for your answers, nine in all.
>I am not all that much wiser, but delighted to see that there is plenty
>of variation about!
>The form of my question was itself the cause of some confusion. I had
>not realised that "Demi"
>is pronounced in at least 3 different ways in AmE. I had wrongly assumed
>that it always rhymes with "Jemmy".
>A second problem was that we all used different "transcription" systems,
>so that the pronunciation where
>the second syllable of "semi" sounds like the personal pronoun "I"
>occurred as:
>sem-I, sem-igh, sem eye, sem ay, se-mi !! A third complication was that
>some of you pronounce
>the first syllable as /sIm/ and some as /sEm/ and some are not sure
>which they use!

The uncertainty about our pronunciation doesn't lie in the first syllable,
as you imply above; rather, it lies in the second syllable, where it
depends on the presence or absence of a following word.  In fact, your
following summary of what you gather are three basic forms includes a
non-form (see-my, which may have been a hypercorrective or "bookish"
pronunciation used by your aeronautical friend, but see also my final
comment below), and it excludes a really important and common form used in
much of the U.S. from Midland on down and out West, i.e., "semi" rhyming
with Jimmy (as several writers noted).  You may not be familiar with this
pronunciation, which represents a raising of the first (lax) vowel in Jemmy
to merge with the first (lax) vowel in Jimmy.  In fact, British English
Jemmy became Jimmy at some point through just such a process (as
James/Jamie laxed to Jemmy).  The classic example is the merging of "pin"
and "pen" so that both sound like "pin"--very common here (and in
Australian English, right, Roly Sussex?).

>Having said that, I'll try to be clearer this time when I summarise the
>answers I received.
>Pronunciation 1. "semi" rhyming with Jemmy, (or BrE Demi!)
>Pronunciation 2. first syllable as no.1, second syllable to rhyme with
>my, die, thigh etc!
>Pronunciation 3. "semi" sounds like "see my" as in "Come and see my new
>trailer!"
>
>The results:
>All of you except one agreed that pron. 2 is the pronunciation you use
>for the abbreviation
>for a semi-trailer, i.e. as a noun. For one speaker the choice was
>dictated by the following sound:
>pron.1 before consonants (as in semi-sweet) and pron.2 before vowels (as
>in semi-automatic).
>nother had just heard CNN's Denise Dyllon use pron.2 in "semi-rig"  i.e.
>before a
>consonant. Some of you say that they hear both, but without being able
>to detect a pattern.
>
>Other comments seem to relate to stylistic variants:
>- One informant uses pron 2 for emphasis.
>- One says that he uses pron.1 "when I'm being fancy (semiconductors)
>and [pron.2]
>when I'm being plainfolks (semi-tough)".
>
>- One of you points out that pron.2 as quasi-Texan dialect of Sam
>Jenkins's "semi-tough".
>
>Confused? This is the stuff for research!

We're not confused!  But we can understand the confusion to "outsiders."
And of course we do research on this all the time!

>
>A final point. I was most interested in pron.3, since I am sure that I
>have heard it used by an American
>aeronautical expert. But two of you specifically say that you have never
>heard it, and the rest pass over
>it in silence. If that is your last word on the subject.  then I have
>lost my dime. So please, if there is anybody
>ut there who can confirm the existence of a pron.3, write to me
>                                            Ian.Watering at hihm.luh.no
>to save me from penury.
>
>It may of course be that for those of you who pronounce the first
>syllable of "semi" to rhyme with
>"Jim" there is a stylistic variant which to my British ears sounds a bit
>like "seem".
>

In fact, I'd bet (maybe a dime) that what you thought you heard as "see-my"
was actually "simm-my", perhaps a bit tensed to sound (to an outsider) like
"seem."  It's not stylistic though; it's a tensing of that first (lax)
vowel, common in my area of southern Ohio and spreading on down into parts
of Appalachia and the South (clearly not all of the South, since several of
your respondents are Southern and have the rhyme with Jimmy, not "see-me"
or "see-my").


>Thankyou for the pleasant tone of your answers. Mighty oblig'd.
>
>Ian W
>