stars and ours

[Wilson Gray]

It sounds like Philadelphian to me. It's a feature of Chomsky's speech.

-Wilson

On 5/30/07, James Harbeck <jharbeck at sympatico.ca> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       James Harbeck <jharbeck at SYMPATICO.CA>
> Subject:      stars and ours
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Just read a poem by a high school student from western Canada that
> illustrates a standard Canadian pronunciation rather well: it rhymes
> "stars" with "ours" -- quite reasonably, though I'm not used to
> seeing those two words matched, perhaps because at least in my
> generation and earlier ones, we were taught that "ours" was properly
> pronounced like "hours," even if it almost never really was by us.
> Evidently even that awareness of [aUrz] as a citation form is
> disappearing. (This is from a well-educated kid, too -- a gifted
> student, graduating high school at 16.)
>
> That one's also common in much of the US, no?
>
> James Harbeck.
>
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--
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
                                              -Sam'l Clemens

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