oxen / dachshund

[Mai Kuha]

On 2/12/03 2:50 PM, Matthew Gordon opined:

> (...) I'm not sure what you're thinking about in your comments on the /ay/ and
> the Southern Shift. There is no /ay/ in 'oxen' or 'dachshund' - maybe
> you're thinking about "Ay, chihuahua!"

Right, definitely no /ay/ there. The connection I was aiming for was that
Labov wrote on the Southern Vowel Shift: "[t]he shift begins when /ay/
becomes monophthongized and shifts slightly to the front" ("The Organization
of Dialect Diversity in North America",
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phono_atlas/ICSLP4.html )... so when the farmer
says "I ordered 200 axen" I got to wondering whether this slight fronting
might happen also to /a/s that are not part of /ay/.

BTW, googling "oxen dachshund sprint" turns up a few places where the ad can
be downloaded, this one among them:
http://www.jaycross.com/blog/archives/000621.html

[and not that it matters at all, but my earlier "bug belt buckles" was meant
to be "big belt buckles".]

-Mai