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<font size=3>At 06:21 AM 6/20/2003 -0400, you wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite>Bert Vaux ought to have given a
quick glance at DARE which shows "Nth,<br>
N Midl; esp freq in WI." Vaux's report suggests
oversimplification--a<br>
dangerous hazard in popularizing dialect in particular and
linguistics<br>
in general.</blockquote><br>
To be fair to Bert, his dialect claims are based on empirical data--an
on-line survey. One could probably question this kind of
methodology, but he is only reporting what he has found. If you go to his
website (it's actually a group
project--http://hcs.harvard.edu/~golder/dialect/index.html) you will find
maps with dots for responses, and, in fact if you go to the map for
'thing from which you might drink water in a school?' you will find that
indeed the dots are concentrated in the northeast and in the general
region around Milwaukee. He claims to have >10,000 responses for
all responses to that question. It may well be, as he suggests in
an article about him in the Harvard Gazette, that the current (2003)
distribution of 'bubbler' represents relic islands of an earlier, wider
distribution. Presumably DARE represents a somewhat older
generation.<br><br>
Geoff </font></body>
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