resyllabification

[Laurence Horn]

At 1:15 PM -0500 10/27/03, Herbert Stahlke wrote:
>For me (born in SE Michigan but spent my teen years in mUwOki), this is not
>a matter of initial syllable deletion.  The initial [s] of "sconsin" is
>syllabic.
>
>Herb
>

Yes, I recall that possibility now that you mention it, from my years
(1977-81) in Madison.  And with respect to my previous comment

>There was an article in the Times a few years back suggesting this as
>a shibboleth for Wisconsinites, and at least one of the hosts on
>ESPN's SportsCenter talks about players from "Sconsin", where the
>first (reanalyzed) syllable has been clipped off.  I was just doing
>the reanalysis of "mistake" in class today (the match doesn't go out
>for muh-stake but it does for the transparent mis-took, arguing for
>the resyllabification yielding the st- onset), and it should work for
>Wis-con-sin vs. Wuh-scahn-sin as well (or, obviously, "Sconsin") as
>well.

I knew the article was around here somewhere.  I located it in the
print-flesh and then found the Nexis version excerpted below.  The
observation on the shibboleth is from the (wonderful) novelist Lorrie
Moore, a native New Yorker who has for many years been a writer in
residence at UW-Madison.  (I've left in a little piece of the article
that will be nostalgic for other ex-Madisonians on the list.)
Interesting to see how a non-linguist describes the resyllabification
effects...

--Larry, a former neighbor of Lake Wingra and the Vilas Park Zoo
============================
New York Times

November 28, 1998, Saturday, Late Edition - Final

  SECTION: Section B; Page 9; Column 1; Arts & Ideas/Cultural Desk

  HEADLINE: Life Is Grim? Yes, but Good For a Laugh

  BYLINE:  By BRUCE WEBER

  DATELINE: MADISON, Wis.

  "Wa-SKAHN-sin," Lorrie Moore said, articulating the syllables
carefully, a lesson in local linguistics. "What you do, instead of
breaking the syllables between the S and the C, you break between the
A -- not usually in Wisconsin, of course -- and the S. So it's W-A,
then there's a break, and there's S-K-A, with a nasal A."

  She was entertaining herself, much the way the characters in her
stories and novels often do, playing with words, turning them this
way and that, being impossibly clever. In the stories, it's usually a
sign of a character's nervousness or discomfort or sense of crisis.

  "An attempt to amuse in times of deep unamusement," is the author's
description of the impulse.

  But Ms. Moore herself, a reluctantly transplanted New Yorker walking
the campus of the University of Wisconsin here, where she has taught
in the English department for 14 years, seemed genuinely amused: Look
how well I've assimilated!

  "I came here in the fall of 1984, and really, I thought 'Uh-uh,' "
she said. "I was 27, by far the youngest person in the department.
Everybody then was living the life that I'm living now, where you go
to bed at 9:30 because your kids get you up at 6:30. I actually like
Madison now. But it's a wonderful place to have a kid. When you start
to have a little arthritis in the knees, it's easy to get around."

  Dark-haired and dark-eyed, with a thoughtful expression but a ready
giggle, Ms. Moore, who is 41, has the look and demeanor of a pretty
college girl grown up -- or maybe, in jeans and a peacoat, a soccer
mom, though her son is only 4, a little young for soccer. Her husband
is a lawyer. They live in a house on Lake Wingra, "the most feted" of
Madison's three lakes, she said, though that doesn't sound right.
Lakes Monona and Mendota are larger, more central and better known.
Feted?

  "With an i," she said.