"Connecticut accent" in the Times

[Wilson Gray]

On Sep 9, 2004, at 9:32 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "Connecticut accent" in the Times
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>
>> On Sep 9, 2004, at 5:20 PM, Beverly Flanigan wrote:
>>
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>>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>> Poster:       Beverly Flanigan <flanigan at OHIOU.EDU>
>>> Subject:      Re: "Connecticut accent" in the Times
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>>> --
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>>>
>>> At 04:44 PM 9/9/2004 -0400, you wrote:
>>>
>>>> This probably won't shock you, but I distinguish between "aural" and
>>>> "oral" primarily by context. Their joint use is rare enough in
>>>> actual
>>>> speech that I've never been motivated to learn to distinguish them
>>>> in
>>>> any other way.
>>>>
>>>> BTW, didn't everyone, or every college graduate, at least, once
>>>> upon a
>>>> time, pronounce, e.g. "coral" and "Volvo" as [kOr at l] and [vOlvo]?
>>>> Nowadays, I seem to hear only [kor at l] and [volvo]. People no longer
>>>> identify "Carl Gables" as the loc of the U of Miami or identify the
>>>> "volv" of Volvo with the "volv" of "revolver."
>>>>
>>>> -Wilson Gray
>>>
>>> This college graduate didn't;  "coral" had [o] and "Volvo" had [O],
>>> and
>>> both still do.  (What does being a college grad have to do with it,
>>> anyway?]
>>
>> I had in mind speakers of non-standard dialects who grow up in
>> isolation from mainstream America. Reading alone can expand such a
>> person's vocabulary, but it won't tell that person what the proper
>> pronunciation of that vocabulary is. It takes more than a high-school
>> diploma to accomplish that. Dictionaries are no help, since their
>> pronunciation keys are based on some formal, "standard" dialect
>> different from such a person's home dialect. Furthermore, many
>> seemingly "obvious" pronunciations that don't need to be looked up can
>> turn out to be less than obvious, in the broader world.
>>
>> In any case, for me, "coral" with closed [o] in the initial syllable
>> is
>> "new," in the sense that it wasn't widespread, if it existed at all,
>> during the '40's and '50's, when I was in school. Any educated person
>> of those years distinguished between "choral" and "coral" in speech as
>> well as in writing.
>
> Well, I was in school in that period and made that distinction in
> speech at the time, with "choral" rhyming with "oral" (and "aural")
> and "coral" with "moral", but after getting to Rochester and turning
> all those unrounded (transsyllabic) /ar/s into /Or/s, the only
> distinction between "choral" and "coral" I made was orthographic.
> (Oh, and semantic.)  But I'm not sure this made me less educated.
> (None of these words, then or now, had closed o for me.  Nor did I,
> either then or now, distinguish "horse" from "hoarse" phonologically,
> but I never took that as a sign of lack of education either.)
>
> larry
>
> L
>

"What we have here is a failure to communicate," unfortunately.

-Wilson