Another "$100 Misunderstanding" (1)

[Wilson Gray]

On Aug 13, 2004, at 4:57 PM, Bethany K. Dumas wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Bethany K. Dumas" <dumasb at UTK.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Another "$100 Misunderstanding" (1)
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>>>> is clearly the preferred - by me, any way - pronunciation.;-) BTW,
>>>> my
>>>> late stepfather, a native of Saint louis, though of Arkansas
>>>> ancestry,
>>>> made this odd distinction in his speech: noun = "IN veh lup"; verb =
>>>> "in VEH lup."
>
> I cannot tell from your spelling what vowels you are indicating, so
> am not
> referring to those - but the
> stress pattern you indicate is the one that I have always used - with
> initial
> syllable stress for the noun,
> and medial syllable stress for the verb. That's why I asked, "Is joke?"

Oh. Okay. What I was trying to express is that my stepfather apparently
took the verb "envelope" - you and I agree as to how this word is
pronounced - and, using that as his base, shifted the stress from the
middle syllable to the leftmost syllable, without making any other
obvious-to-the-untrained-ear phonetic modification. For the noun, I use
a form that could be respelled as "onvelope." Primary stress falls on
the leftmost syllable with a strong secondary stress falling on the
right syllable, so that there is very little difference between my
pronunciation of the syllable -lope and my pronunciation of the word
"lope." My stepfather pronounced the same word with primary stress
likewise falling on the leftmost syllable, with enough secondary stress
on the -e- of the middle syllable to make it clear that he was
maintaining   the e-as-in-get pronunciation. He placed no stress on the
final -lope, so that it remained schwa. He took the verb "envelope" and
a noun out it by simply shifting the primary stress to the leftmost
syllable. For me, the noun "envelope" is one word and the verb
"envelope" is another word that coincidentally has the same spelling.
My stepfather appeared to derive the noun from the verb by a simple
shift leftward of the stress, an ordinary way of deriving nouns from
verbs in English, with no other modification of the verb. So, the noun
can spelled pseudo-phonetically as IN veh lup ( IN = in w/primary
stress, eh = e as in get, u = schwa).

If this more or less matches your pronunciation of the noun, then you
are only the second person that I *personally* know of to use it.
Nevertheless, I ask that you please accept my apologies for having
called it "odd." I should not have placed a value-judgment upon it.

-Wilson

> Bethany
>