the curious phonology of Wisconsin

[Laurence Horn]

At 6:13 PM -0500 11/21/04, Dennis R. Preston wrote:
>Good parsing arnold, but there does appear to be one phonological
>element which Wisconsonites have which is not shared with even their
>close Sotan and (some) Michigander talkalikes. The syllable division
>of the state name is
>
>wI - skan - s at n
>
>not wIs - con - s at n
>
>as the rest of us have it.

or more accurately w at - , with less stress than the out-of-staters
version below.  Note the "transcription" below, from a nice piece
from a few years ago featuring novelist Lorrie Moore:

=====
The 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."
[etc.]
=====

>
>It appears to be lexical rather than general (since they do not do
>funny things with the syllable division for such words as
>'miscalculate').

I've always regarded that as a kind of
familiarity-breeds-least-effort effect, not unanalogous to  "loovull"
below.

larry

>
>Ah mimber whin Ah first wint up there frum Loovull to git me mah PhD
>how odd it sounded. I couldn't even figger out what they was doin fer
>a long time.
>
>Cheeseheads; funny talkers.
>
>dInIs
>