Eggcorn? "warn" > "worn"

[Mark Mandel]

This reminds me of the stereotypical description of "Brooklynese" that
I used to hear:
that /OI/ was pronounced as [@r], and /@r/ was pronounced as [OI].
For example, "Da deep fryah berled ovah, an' I got boined by da erl."

ISTM that such interchanges are most likely actually mergers, filtered
through the ear and mind of the non-merging beholder. Like so:

1. Actual interchanges are unlikely though not impossible, since the
diachrony would require at some point either
 a) identical values for the interchanging phonemes, at which point
they would have merged, or
 b) a do-si-do, where they develop through at least two dimensions,
avoiding merger, and then wind up at each other's former positions in
both.
(Or so I remember from way back in what might have been John Ohala's
Phonology 101.)
So how do these perceptions get started?

2. (Hypothesis/WAG mode.) To a non-merging speaker who is used to
(let's say) F1=680 in the vowel of "card" and 480 in "cord", an
intermediate value of 580 will be on the boundary. Hearing something
so far off his norm for what he expects, he will interpret it in each
case as the other vowel phoneme: an interchange.

Hm?

Of course, the thought of contradicting John Lawler gives me the
willies. Did he say that there was an actual interchange (I DID say
"unlikely though not impossible"), or that it sounded that way to a
non-merging speaker?

Mark Mandel


On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 10:17 AM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>
> At 12:02 AM -0500 2/10/09, Neal Whitman wrote:
> >I haven't read the full article, but there's probably more on this topic in
> >David Bowie's spring 2008 American Speech article on the 'cord/card merger'
> >in Utah. (Or for the more scatologically minded, the 'fort/fart' merger.)
> >
> >Neal
>
> I think I've mentioned here a while back that
> John Lawler informed me 40 years ago that in Utah
> one lays a fort in the fart.  I found it hard to
> believe, but evidently it's true for at least
> some Utahns.

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