flour/flower etc.

[Dennis R. Preston]

I'm not sure why you don't like pretentiousness and foreignness as
connotations, but there are huge differences between "phat" and "fat" and
many other hip-hop (and other youth culture words). See the forthcoming
Journal of Sociolinguistics for a number of articles which focus on the use
of spelling to establish social position and/or identity.

dInIs

>>I still am looking for a case where alternative spellings suggest
>>differences in connotation
>>rather than denotation, where the connotation is something other than
>>"pretentiousness" or "foreignness."
>
>I'm still thinking about it, but someone mentioned "comptroller" already
>here recently. I concede it's a borderline case, but I think this
>alternative spelling of "controller" is old enough and common enough that
>it's lost its "foreign" and "pretentious" connotations -- now it carries
>the connotation of "corporate-ness" or "business", I think. I suspect
>however that it is usually pronounced with 'mp', and this would tend to
>vitiate the example.
>
>On the other side of the coin, there are a lot of alternative
>pronunciations used by US medical personnel (parallel to /vaz/ vs. /veis/
>'vase' etc.). A frequent although -- I think -- minority pronunciation of
>'cervical' among MD's for example is /s at rvaik@l/ with 2nd-syllable stress;
>also 'umbilicus' /Vmb at laik@s/ with 3rd-syllable stress -- etc, etc. My
>favorite example though is 'centimeter' /sant at mit@r/ (1st-syllable stress)
>as if trying to be French: I think this may have been *majority* US MD
>usage 20 years ago; my impression is that it is now losing ground to the
>normal /sEnt at mit@r/. Certainly these were originally
>'pretentious'/'foreign' but one might say that the current connotation
>would be 'medical' (does that imply 'pretentious'? (^_^)). [There are
>hundreds of other examples, and probably I've forgotten some of the best
>ones.]
>
>-- Doug Wilson


Dennis R. Preston
Department of Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA
preston at pilot.msu.edu
Office: (517)353-0740
Fax: (517)432-2736