Heard on local NE PA news

[Wilson Gray]

Arnold, you neglected to note that Schuykill is pronounced roughly
[skukl]. I once thought that that pronunciation was peculiar to
Greater Pittsburgh, but Skookle (Schuykill) County is only a hoot and
a holler from here (Kingston, across the river from Wilkes-Barre).

Too bad. I really enjoyed thinking that it was pronounced "Sky kill." :-)

-Wilson

On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 8:32 PM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Heard on local NE PA news
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Jan 25, 2010, at 3:20 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>
>> Reporter covering flooding of Toby(sp?) Creek, caused by day-long,
>> heavy rains in Wyoming County:
>>
>> "What's it been like, today?"
>>
>> Forty-ish local:
>>
>> "It's just been awful. I've never seen the creek _[krIk]_ like this
>> before!"
>>
>>
>> The first time that I've ever that pronunciation in the wild.
>
> it's sort of famous with dialectologists:
>
> from the 6/10/08 language column in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
>
> .....
> Our dictionary, Webster's New World College, Fourth Edition, lists
> both creek and crick as acceptable pronunciations for creek. But we
> turned to the experts at the Dictionary of American Regional English
> in Madison for the regional breakdown.
>
> "Creek is common everywhere but New England and the Northwest; crick
> is more common in the West, North Midland, and the North except for
> New England," Luanne von Schneidemesser, the dictionary's senior
> editor, wrote in an e-mail. "Both are common in Wisconsin."
>
> http://blogs.jsonline.com/language/archive/2008/06/10/creek-or-crick.aspx
>
> .....
>
> i grew up in eastern Pa., outside of Reading, a mile or so away from
> the Tulpehocken Creek (which flows into the Schuylkill), which was
> locally almost always pronounced /krIk/.
>
> i know it only from white speakers.
>
> arnold
>
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>



--
-Wilson
–––
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.
–Mark Twain

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