pre-velar /ae/ raising (was: slang/slant)

[Paul Johnston]

Joe,
That's interesting.  But don't you get the /a/-fronting part of NCS
(affecting the COT class) out in your area, even where you don't get
many of the other changes?  That's what makes me think there are
multiple foci of the different components of NCS, and the process
looks unified only in retrospect, when it's completed or at least
well on the way.  Incidentally, wearing my historical linguist hat, I
have postulated the same thing about the English Great Vowel Shift--
it is really two (if not more) processes, one of which, in addition,
is multifocal, that got intertwined over then't course of the change,
and our Great Vowel Shift scenario really describes only the end
product.  Roger Lass and others have said similar things too.

Incidentally, the West Michigan pattern of back/bag/bang is :

back-- becomes [eae] or the like, undergoing NCS.  One of the most
salient environments too.

bag--  same deal as back.

bang-- becomes [e]  I actually don't hear very much upgliding
diphthongization, and the vowel is short.  It can be somewhat
centralized, and approaches [I] for some speakers.

egg and vague rhyme under [eI] for a lot of speakers here, but bag
isn't beg.

Paul Johnston
On Nov 1, 2006, at 2:30 PM, Joseph Salmons wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Joseph Salmons <jsalmons at WISC.EDU>
> Subject:      pre-velar /ae/ raising (was: slang/slant)
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>
> Greetings. I've just rejoined ADS-list after being off it for a few
> years, partly prompted by hearing about the interesting recent slang/
> slant discussion. This 'pre-velar raising' is a topic a few of us
> here in Wisconsin are starting to work on, especially Tom Purnell.  I
> hope this message doesn't repeat earlier discussion (or steal Tom's
> thunder), but here's basically how things are looking to us right now:
>
> /ae/ raising before g (and usually eng/angma and sometimes before k)
> can sound like either /ej/ or /E/ to outsiders, and with considerable
> variation across speakers. It is creeping into awareness here, in
> particular with the word 'bag', which is pretty much a stereotype of
> Wisconsin speech for some people. (In addition to the Zeller article,
> Labov et al. discuss it at some length in the Atlas, showing the
> pattern stretching beyond Wisconsin and Minnesota, but looking
> particularly strong here.) One story (I've heard it told by a noted
> member of this society, but independently from others too) involves a
> newcomer going into a grocery store to buy a loaf of bread and some
> milk; he hears the cashier ask “Wanna beg for that?” The newcomer
> wonders, “I have to beg? I just paid for it.” (The Wisconsin-oriented
> language blogger Mr. Verb, http://mr-verb.blogspot.com/, recently
> made a pretty obscure allusion to this pattern in a post, in fact.)
> We get /ae/ merging with /ej/ (the vowel of 'bay') for some speakers,
> which is what Zeller reports. Still it looks like not all raisers
> merge these sounds: Some seem to have the raised /ae/ coming out
> close to (maybe identical with) [E], as the perceptual bag/beg
> confusion would suggest. (But some people with a good ear vehemently
> deny that it ever yields [E].) Some speakers with this pattern also
> show really clear lowering of /ej/ before g, including in
> disyllabics:  vague, bagel, Reagan, segue, etc. For some, v[ae]gue in
> particular is not variable -- it's just how they say that word. My
> sense is that this has to be hypercorrection, but we haven't done
> much on this yet, or gathered much data (though Tom's doing the
> latter right now.)
>
> Matt Gordon raises a number of really good questions about this
> process which we have just started to look at data on: Is it related
> to NCS? From what we've seen so far, the answer is maybe. Note that
> the NCS isn't found as far west as Minnesota, or even western
> Wisconsin, where pre-velar raising is widespread. That suggests that
> it's a different deal.  Is it phonetically different from NCS? It is
> most definitely. Is it older than NCS?  We've looked at /ae/ before /
> g/ and alveolars in some DARE recordings from southeast Wisconsin and
> the oldest speakers show no raising in either environment. With a few
> speakers born somewhat later, we get some suggestive patterns before
> alveolars, like NCS (but notably too early for the usual chronology
> of that shift), and none before /g/. Later, but still before NCS
> should be showing up, we start seeing pre-velar raising. (For the
> phonetically inclined: Tom's working out a way of calculating /ae/
> raising that gets away from the simple 700 hz threshold that's been
> criterial for NCS to date, but that's a topic for a paper by him, not
> an ADS-list post. I suspect that Tom's approach allows us to see
> earlier stirrings of NCS than the 700 hz measure.) But note that
> these historical recordings are from southeastern Wisconsin -- Tom
> has suggested in conversation that pre-velar raising could also have
> started elsewhere (say, Minnesota) and spread down to meet NCS. If
> that's so, it could be older, but then from outside of NCS territory.
>
> We will be working on this for some time to come and hope we'll know
> more before too long. Concretely, we should soon have some audio
> samples of these patterns on the Wisconsin Englishes Project page,
> http://csumc.wisc.edu:16080/wep/.
>
> Oh, finally, Paul Johnston mentioned a possible correlation with
> 'pop' vs. 'soda', but that line cuts north/south through eastern
> Wisconsin, so that we get this 'bag' pattern with 'soda' and 'pop'
> speakers up here.
>
> Onward,
> Joe
> Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures
> 901 University Bay Drive
> University of Wisconsin
> Madison, WI 53705
> http://csumc.wisc.edu/
>
> http://german.lss.wisc.edu/homes/jsalmons/
>
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