[Ads-l] Synchronicity to start the week

[Laurence Horn]

> On Apr 8, 2018, at 11:05 PM, Mark Mandel <mark.a.mandel at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
> No, it's closer to /I/. I seem to have been influenced by phonological
> spellings I've seen that were probably more UK than US
> 
> Mark
> 
> On Sun, Apr 8, 2018, 12:32 PM Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> 
>> As in the (potential) contrast between “daily” and “Daley” (e.g. the
>> former Chicago mayors).  Only for me, “daily” can vary between the /‘deli/
>> (Mark, do you really have final -ɪ in these?  I have -i) and “Daley”
>> pronunciations.  Similarly for “Bailey”.  One that requires the -/eli/
>> pronunciation (when I worked my way through the alphabet) is cèilidh
>> (a.k.a. kaylee) or Kay-Lee, but I don’t have much occasion to pull out that
>> pronunciation in either case, since nobody has ever invited me to any of
>> the former and the latter is a defunct toy store chain.
>> 
>> LH

I don’t know how many of you subscribe to Anu Garg’s A.Word.A.Day web site, but those who do discovered that this morning’s AWAD winner (at https://wordsmith.org/words/today.html) was none other than

ceilidh

PRONUNCIATION:
(KAY-lee)

MEANING:
noun: A social gathering, typically involving folk music, dancing, and storytelling.

I’ve never used the word myself and hadn’t even thought of it for ages before I went through the alphabet looking for rhymes for “Haley” in the light of our thread this weekend, and here it is.

As for -/I/ vs. -/i/, that did always puzzle me in renderings of the final vowel of e.g. “daily” in British transcriptions.  I’m prepared to believe that others have the former, but I only have, and only hear (in the US, anyway) the latter.

LH

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org