EITHER = EETHER or EYETHER?

[RonButters at AOL.COM]

In a message dated 7/19/2000 8:28:57 PM, LanceDM at MISSOURI.EDU writes:

<< Is it possible that the /i/ - /ai/ data reflect upward social mobility as
much as, or more
than, region?  Likewise "try and."
DMLance >>

As I understand it, Coye's students found that the younger the speakers, the
more they preferred the "casual" form "try and"--BUT the more they preferred
(what I at least think of as) the less pretentious /ay/ pronunciation of
EITHER. I definitely agree with Don Lance that some kind of social factors
are probably at work here, but just what they are is very difficult to tease
out--and, again, it seems to me that it is too simple to conclude that
greater frequency among the younger generations of Dale Coye's New Jersey
informants indicates a real change in preference in America or even in New
Jersey. I'm finding myself that trying to correlate social features with
alternate pronunciation pairs like EITHER and ENVELOPE and ECONOMICS is very
very complicated.

I don't know of anyone who has attempted to do empirical work on TRY AND
versus TRY TO except for this classroom exercise that Coye reported on here.
The kind of large-scale databank approach that Frank Abate discussed would be
very helpful, but I wouldn't want to rule out a large-scale, carefully
controlled attitudinal survey, either.

If I sounded disrespectful of Coye's report, I certainly didn't mean to. In
his first message he referred to increase of TRY AND as if it were an
established fact, without any reference to why he felt that way. His next
report indicated that he did indeed have some empirical data to support the
claim. I think that his conclusions are premature and need to be seen as much
more highly tentative than he first reported, but that does not make him
wrong.

One further thing to think about with TRY AND and TRY TO: as others have
noted, this pair has been alternating in the language for generations. It
would be a little surprising--though of course not impossible--for TRY AND
only just now to be "increasing" at the expense of TRY TO. At any rate, I
will need more than a few data collected by college students at one school in
New Jersey to convince me that a change is really taking place.