vowels...

[Beverly Flanigan]

At 02:13 PM 5/1/00 -0700, you wrote:
>Great! This is an example of Southern Vowel Shift, right? What I can't
>figure out is how to deliver this story verbally (to students in class).
>Can anyone help?  The forms spelled as "hell" and "hail" in the story
>should both be pronounced the way "hell" is pronounced by people NOT
>participating in the Southern Vowel Shift, right? But does the punchline
>really disambiguate the word, if the story is heard, rather than read?
>
>-Mai
>
>On Mon, 01 May 2000, Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM wrote:
>
> > One day my seven year old daughter, Megan, decided to tattle
> > on her brother to her teacher: "Mrs. H., last night
> > my brother hit me in the head with a piece of ice and
> > it hurt like hell."
> > Shocked at what she'd heard, Mrs. H. quickly responded,
> > "Excuse me, Megan?"
>(...)
> > "No, Mrs. H., REALLY, my brother hit me with a piece of
> > ice in the head and it hurt like *hail* falling on my head."
>
>Mai Kuha
>Department of English
>Ball State University
>mkuha at altavista.com
>

I'll amend something I just said in a previous reply.  The joke could be
disambiguated orally if the child intended to say 'hell' in her second
response but added a glide in Southern Shift fashion, so that it came out
sounding like 'hail'.  The joke then would lie in the exact inversion of
the two pronunciations from a Northerner's point of view, so that 'hail'
sounds like 'hell' and 'hell' sounds like 'hail'.



_____________________________________________
Beverly Olson Flanigan         Department of Linguistics
Ohio University                     Athens, OH  45701
Ph.: (740) 593-4568              Fax: (740) 593-2967
http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm