Gone feeshin'

[Dennis R. Preston]

Of course, "glacier" doesn't fit into the same category at all as
tensed-raised versions of fish/wish/dish. In fact, it is the opposite
"process." In the /aI/ pronunciation  of the stressed syllable of
"glacier," the onset of the diphthing is laxed and lowered (i.e., moved
from something around /e/ to /a/). In the /fIsh/ - /fiysh/ exchange, the
lax vowel /I/ is raised and tensed to /iy/.

(It's an interesting question, by the way, if this rule is a feeder for the
subsequent /I/ - /iy/ reversal of the Southern Vowel Shift, but that's
another story.)

In the 12th Century when I taught at Ohio State, I was listening to reports
in my syntax seminar (yes, dear friends, even then...) and one of the
students from  southeastern Ohio gave a sample sentence whicd suggested
that someone had taken their dog for a walk on its "leash" (/lIsh/). All
the other students asked if he didn't mean /liysh/, and he explained that
he "didn't talk that way anymore." As I have learned over and over again in
my life (but never seem to remember), you can take the boy out of the
hills, but.....

dInIs

>Actually, after I posted, I remembered that I had earlier remembered
>"leash," so my question should have been limited to the "-ish-" spelling.
>"glaiS at r," of course, fits in the same category as [fiS] for "fish."
>
>At 10:29 PM 9/28/00 +0800, I wrote:
>>At 8:41 PM -0400 9/28/00, Bill Smith wrote:
>>>In the posting below, I wrote a "see below," but omitted the "below.  Here
>>>it is:
>>>Are [aiS] and [IS] English sounds?  Aside from proper nouns (e.g.
>>>"Fleischmann"), foreign words used only in the context of their native
>>>territories (e.g. "Reich"), and dialects in which [I] is raised to [i], I
>>>can't think of any.  Is that due to a failure of my memory retrieval, or do
>>>such words not exist?
>>>Bill
>>>
>>By [IS], do you mean words like "fish" and "wish"?  M[IS]ion
>>accompl[IS]ed.  Can't think of any [aiS] words, though, except proper
>>names (e.g. football coach Sam Wyche, pronounced [wayS].  I assume
>>we're not allowing sandhi combinations as "English sounds" in the
>>relevant sense, as in e.g. "my shirt".  How about "glacier"
>>pronounced [glaiS at r], with an Aussie accent (yes, I've been watching
>>the Olympics).
>>
>>larry
>>


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