New Jersey Dialects

[Victoria Neufeldt]

I remember overhearing (sahr-dee), spoken in conversation on a bus in
Toronto in the 70s.  I was amazed -- hadn't really believed in its
existence before, assuming it to be an exaggeration, as in some
dialect renderings in movies.  I don't recall hearing anything quite
like it again in Toronto.

Victoria

Victoria Neufeldt
727 9th Street East
Saskatoon, Sask.
S7H 0M6
Canada
Tel: 306-955-8910




> -----Original Message-----
> From: American Dialect Society
> [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU]On Behalf
> Of Arnold M. Zwicky
> Sent: Wednesday, October 20, 2004 3:52 PM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: Re: New Jersey Dialects
>
>
> 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
>
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