blar 'thornbush'

[Mark.Mandel at LHSL.COM]

Does DARE or any other source list an Appalachian word like "blar" or
"blair"?

I spent part of the summer of 1966 in Corbin, Kentucky, and a week of that
time living with a local family. Among the regionalisms I remember is a
word that I would transcribe as [blAr], where the vowel is low center-front
unrounded, quite distinct from the low back unrounded vowel in words like
"star". The people I stayed with spoke of "blars", meaning thornbushes or
areas of thornbushes; I heard the word used away from the thing itself, and
I didn't take down the conversation! It could be a dissimilated form of
"briars".

                  Mark A. Mandel : Senior Linguist
 Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company : speech recognition
 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com