EITHER = EETHER or EYETHER?

[Mike Salovesh]

RonButters at AOL.COM wrote:

> In a message dated 7/20/2000 1:17:27 AM, nyinstitute at VIABCP.COM writes:
>
> << Either/EYE/ther entered with Queen Victoria and other Germans, who had a
> different (from traditional English) pronunciation for the "ei" (eye). When
> the Queen spoke this way, others followed. >>
>
> Queen Victoria a German? Huh? At any rate, I'd like to know the source of
> this particular assertion--it seems unlikely that EYETHER is a spelling
> pronunciation based on German, or that Victoria's pronunciation would have
> had much affect in Hoboken.

I would not assert that EYEther had to have come originally from
German.  I don't know that.  EYEther is the spelling pronunciation I
would expect from someone whose first literacy was in German, however.
That could still make a difference in current distributions of the two
pronunciations.

1.  With Ron, I was surprised to see "EYEther" attributed to Queen
Victoria because of her alleged Germanness.  That's NOT the Victoria of
my schoolbooks.  She was English through and through.  Her connections
to "Germans" (the modern nation of Germany didn't exist when she came to
the throne) were nonetheless quite widespread. Victoria's descendants
married into just about all the royal families of Europe, too. (Wasn't
Kaiser Wilhelm one of her descendants?  The hemophilia of the last
Tsarevitch is said to have come directly from the genetic inheritance of
Queen Victoria herself. Und so weiter.)

I seem to recall a more believable claim that the Royal speaker with the
"eyeful" speech was George III.  His pronunciation is supposed to have
come from his German upbringing.  EYEther is said to have gained ground
against EEther because of court sycophants adopted the King's
pronunciation.

There once was a strong counter-current against EYEther in xenophobic
circles.  Col. Robert McCormick, of the Chicago Tribune, was almost
rabidly anti-British. He claimed that "good Americans" should never say
EYEther, because we should remember that our Revolutionary War was
explicitly aimed at ending the influence of George III in America.

2.  I don't know of any statistically valid demonstration of the actual
distribution of either (!) variant in Chicago speech. EYEther occurs
frequently enough to give the _impression_ that it is the "normal"
pronunciation in many Chicago microdialects.  The local dialects I have
in mind are all characteristic of "white" Chicago.

Evaluation of EYEther as a marker of comparatively high status does not
seem to be uniform across Chicago. Some are quite adamant in holding the
EYE variant to be both correct and indicative of high status; others
actually say the reverse. It is quite common for an individual speaker
to switch back and forth between the two variants. This happens even in
the speech of those trying to give the impression of high status through
their pronunciations.

Regardless of whether it is statistically accurate to say EYEther is the
Chicago norm, it wouldn't be surprising to find a higher incidence of
that variant in Chicago than elsewhere in the U.S. Regardless of
ultimate origins, I am convinced that the propagation of the EYE variant
was heavily influenced by German spelling pronunciations of texts
written in English. Chicago had so large a proportion of German speakers
in the past that German was the only language of instruction in some
public schools, and the language of a variety of courses in many Chicago
public schools. A German-leaning pronunciation would have been perfectly
natural.

Chicago public schools ended both monolingual and bilingual instruction
in German during World War I. This was done as a "patriotic" measure.
Public school instruction in other languages was ended at the same time
that German was phased out. The politically powerful Chicagoans of
German descent insisted that unless programs in other languages came to
an end, the step of removing only German from public classrooms would be
discriminatory and unacceptable.  Thus ended the Polish language public
school attended by the woman who functions as my mother-in-law, the
Yiddish language classes attended by some relatives of my parents'
generation, as well as the classes in math and science taught in German
to other relatives between 1900 and 1915.

Given the high proportion of German ancestry in Milwaukee families, the
way "either" is pronounced there might help confirm or deny my
impression that Chicago EYEther was at least reinforced by German
spelling pronunciation.  Does anybody know what the Standard Average
Milwaukeean would be likely to say?  Is it EYEther or is it EEther?

As you might expect, I use both pronunciations myself.

-- mike salovesh                    <salovesh at niu.edu>
PEACE !!!