New Jersey Dialects

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Oct 20, 2004, at 10:08 AM, Alice Faber wrote:

> Bethany K. Dumas said:
>>> 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".
>>
>> What's the difference?
>
> /i/ vs /e/. I have the latter, and the former sounds distinctly
> unnatural to me.

the /e/ versions are what you get if you treat the day names as N-N
compounds, with primary accent on the first element and secondary
accent on the second.

but frequent and opaque compounds are always open for accent reduction.
  unfortunately, word-final unaccented /e/ is not something english
does, so if you're going to have an unaccented syllable, you shift the
vowel up to /i/.

i believe that a respectable number of speakers have restored secondary
accent to the second element while keeping the vowel /i/.

arnold