"Revelations"

[Laurence Horn]

At 10:05 AM -0500 3/21/02, GSCole wrote:
>Larry,
>Having once worked in the same plant, in the same work area, decades
>before, I was surprised to hear 'foremens', so my attempts to
>correct/clarify stressed the sounds of 'man' and 'men', breaking the
>word, as in fore-men?  They corrected me, and the 'en' sound was the
>only one used, whether singular or plural.  Foreman, in that area, would
>involve pronouncing the 'a' as it is pronounced in 'hand'.

Sounds convincing.  I was thinking for a minute maybe there was
influence from George Foreman and his family, the Foremans.  But if
"foreman" would really be pronounced more like "mailman" than like
"chairman" in WVa, with secondary (rather than fully reduced) stress
and a digraph rather than a schwa, then my earlier claim about
neutralization of "foreman" and "foremen" wouldn't apply, without
even considering your point that they pronounce the singular as
"fore-men" in citation form.  So it seems they'd have "a foremen" for
the singular, pronounced the way the first three syllables of
"aforemen[tioned]" is for me.

larry