Pronunciation question (from L. Urdang)

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Tue May 29 20:04:16 UTC 2007


It matches mine, too, Charlie. As Roy Blount has noted, "Southern
American English [has] black and white ingredients [that] vary as to
proportion but are inseparable."

Ron, that should read "African-American pronunciation." "Prophet
without honor" and all that sort of rot.

The contemporary strengthening of the glottal stop to German-like and
even to Arabic-like proportion, together with its spread into
environments in which I don't use it, I find abhorrent. Hopefully,
it's merely a fashion that will die out and everyone will return to
the correct pronunciation. "The correct pronunciation" may be read as
"the style of pronunciation that *I* prefer."

-Wilson

On 5/29/07, Charles Doyle <cdoyle at uga.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Charles Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU>
> Subject:      Pronunciation question (from L. Urdang)
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Sorry, I wasn't finished editing and cleaning up that last posting.  I meant that [dI?Int] pretty much matches my pronunciation, with the final [t] optional.
>
> --Charlie
> ____________________________________________________________
>
> ---- Original message ----
>
> >Date: Tue, 29 May 2007 11:02:03 EDT
>
> >From: RonButters at AOL.COM
> >
> >No one has mentioned that "didn't" has often been pronunced with a glottal stop allophone of the /d/. My sense is that I am hearing this less among the young, with an unvoiced /d/ instead. I wonder if this is what Larry is noticing.
> >
> >Also, I don't hear a schwa so much as a barred-I. So what I am hearing is=20
> >
> >[dItInt] (unaspirated [t])
> >
> >rather than
> >
> >[dI?Int].
> >
> >Of course, I am in the South (but the majority of my students) are not. By the way, they don't say
> >
> >[studIns} or [stju?ns] only [studns].
> >
> >It is perhaps worth pointing out that "Oh no you didn't!" is a kind of buzz phrase among the young, patterned (I think) after some television comedy skit pseudo-Puerto-Rican pronunciation.
>
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-----
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