positive "anymore"

[Laurence Horn]

At 10:48 AM -0400 10/24/00, Alice Faber wrote:
>  For what it's worth also, I've heard other
>traces of Philadelphia influence in NY sports-radio-speak (and not
>from the hosts who've alternated between working for NY and
>Philadelphia stations!). In particular, one of Mike and the Mad Dog
>(to me, they *are* interchangeable, but they are both, as far as I
>know natives of the NY metropolitan area) regularly hypercorrects the
>vowel in FURry to FERry (e.g. "worry" [wEriy]). I've heard similar
>hypercorrections on Philadelphia all-news stations (e.g., "monitEring
>the situation in Haiti").

This is probably of rather limited interest to other listees, but I
can state with absolute authority that Mike Francesa is from Long
Beach, L.I., where I attended high school in the early 1960's (Mike
is about 10 years younger), and where I temporally sandwiched by more
celebrated LBHS graduates Larry Brown (basketball coach) and Billy
Crystal.  One dialect trait that Mike and that isn't shared by his
elders (Larry B, me, or Billy C) is the [shtrit] pronunciation we've
discussed on the list (assimilation at a distance of the initial
sibilant to the palatal [r] across a voiceless stop, especially /t/).
I think Chris Russo, a.k.a. the Mad Dog, shares this trait but more
as a variable rule; I'm not sure exactly what part of the NY
metropolitan area he hails from.  I've mentioned earlier on the list
my suspicion that Italian-American speakers in the New York area and
other parts of the Northeast are more likely to exhibit this trait
than other speakers, but I can't substantiate this claim.  In any
case, the fact that Mike is the only Long Beach resident of the four
of us mentioned above to have [shCr-] for [sCr-] may be attributable
to age (I think it is an innovation), ethnicity, neither, or both.

larry