FW: Nebraskans/Standard English

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:05 PM -0500 1/18/02, Alice Faber wrote:
>
>Steve Rushin's column in this week's Sports Illustrated (cover date Jan 21,
>2002) has a similar Northern Cities awareness. The column is entitled
>"Cheesehead Nation" and is about Green Bay Packers fans. It contains the
>following description of one fan: "Van Nguyen is a Midwesterner by way of
>Vietnam, from which he emigrated to Green Bay at age 15. Now 32, he speaks
>in a disarmingly hard-voweled Wiscansin accent." (The "can" in Wisconsin is
>italicized.)

Yes, but to really capture *this* shibboleth, Rushin should render it
not as Wis-CAN-sin but Wi-SCAN-sin or even 'SCANsin.  Crucially, the
local pronounciation resyllabifies the state name (as we've discussed
here before, among other local reduction phenomena from Clumps, Ohio
to TuhRAHNuh.

(As I type this, Dennis ("Sipowicz") Franz is reminding us (in an ad)
"I don't do eee-uhds")

larry