New Jersey Dialects

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Oct 21, 2004, at 6:38 AM, David Bowie asked, about /di/ vs. /de/ in
day names:

> Which of these is older, i'm wondering--i just looked in Kenyon &
> Knott and
> found *only* the /i/ pronunciation, and Clement Wood's 1936 rhyming
> dictionary also has *only* the /i/ pronunciation. Is /e/ a reading
> pronunciation that's naturalized?

it's pretty much guaranteed that the /de/ pronunciation is older, since
the day names were, after all, originally compounds with "day" /de/ as
the second element.  and it at least used to be the case that the /de/
pronunciation was hugely the dominant one in the u.k., so that when i
lived there, people would look startled at my /di/ pronunciations
(which i quickly learned to formal-ize to /de/).

but the observation about kenyon & knott and wood is very interesting.
it could well have been that the /di/ pronunciation pretty much swept
the u.s. by the early 20th century, but was then abandoned in favor of
the reading pronunciation, which then simply became the norm in some
places and groups.  sort of like "often" with a /t/.

arnold