laxing of high front vowel before /g/ and in quiche

[Laurence Horn]

At 12:33 PM -0400 10/23/00, Dale Coye wrote:
>Someone mentioned as a Pittsburghism the laxing of /i/ to /I/ (upper case i)
>before /g/--

Right; that was me--and, as noted in the dissertation I cited, it's
somewhat more general in Pittsburgh and, I assume, Southern Ohio
(which, as Beverly pointed out, also shares the "Pittsburghese"
monophthongization feature yielding "dahntahn").  The laxing rule
applies before /l/ as well as /g/, and to a range of non-low tense
vowels:  /i/ laxes to [I], /e/ to [E], and /u/ and /o/ both to [U].

>I noticed this feature in my some of my in-laws speech --Dayton
>Ohio (SW Ohio) and wondered how widepsread it is-- is it all of Southern Ohio
>over to Pittsburgh?-- so words like 'fatigue, league, intrigue' sound like
>fatigg, ligg, intrigg.   It also affects the mid-front tense vowel, so
>'bagel, plague' are 'beggel, plegg'-- and an isolated example is 'quiche'
>which is 'kish'-- I don't think 'leash' is laxed, but maybe..   These are
>people born c. 1925, but some of the next generation picked it up too.  So
>anyone know if the younger generation is still doing it or how widespread it
>ever was?
>
I wonder whether "quiche", if it's an outlier, isn't rather a
spellling pronounciation.

larry