New Jersey Dialects

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Oct 20, 2004, at 9:29 AM, Rachel E. Shuttlesworth wrote:

> I pronounce the days of the week that way as well, but have lived in
> Alabama my entire life.
> Rachel
>
> Mullins, Bill wrote:
>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       "Mullins, Bill" <Bill.Mullins at US.ARMY.MIL>
>> Subject:      New Jersey Dialects
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>> ---------
>>
>> I was on a business trip to Ft. Monmouth a few years ago, and the
>> local
>> "morning crew" deejays were making fun of south Jersey speech.  The
>> particular feature they were picking at was a tendency (which I have
>> no
>> knowledge if it's so or not) to pronounce the names of the days of
>> the week
>> as "Mondee, Tuesdee" etc instead of "Monday, Tuesday".

these pronunciations are all over the place in the u.s. (i don't know
about the rest of the english-speaking world).  they're in AHD4, and
probably in other dictionaries as well. (i'm away from my dictionary
hoard.)

so what we have here is another instance of PITS (People in the Street)
perceiving some extremely widespread colloquial usage, pronunciation,
or lexical item as being a localism. (it's the flip side of PITS not
realizing that some item they use routinely is in fact a localism.)  it
would be nice to have a name for this phenomenon.  i suppose it's too
much to hope for that there is one already.  if not, does anyone want
to suggest a label?

while i'm asking about labels for common phenomena, how about what
happens when people (often, linguists as well as normals) compare two
items side by side and go on laboring to tease out some difference
(phonetic, semantic, social, contextual, whatever) between them, to the
point of inventing -- i'm sometimes inclined to say "hallucinating" --
such differences.  (i'm soon going to post about this phenomenon in
more detail.)  ask people about  the words "sofa" and "couch", and soon
they'll be all over the map with subtle distinctions.  let usageists
fix on "partly" and "partially", and they'll tease out all sorts of
distinctions, different ones for different analysts, many of which have
no basis in actual usage.  get people focused on small phonetic details
distinguishing dialects, and let them think about their pronunciations
of homophones (especially those with different spellings, like
"read"/"reed" or "sea"/"see"), and they're likely to start hearing
differences.  or, from our recent ADS discussions: compare "sort of"
and "kind of"; or compare the noticeable (to you) idiom "in harm's way"
with "in danger".

the side-by-side comparison invites people to seek out differences.
is there a name for this effect?

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)