~chooldrin

[Tom Zurinskas]

Bev,

Sorry, you lost me, especially the "getting screwed up" part.  But folks are
saying ~chooldrin (~ool as in "wool") all the time as I hear it on TV.  My
bit is that it's a shame that pronunciation is departing from the
alphabetical principle.  It would be nice to have a mechanism to retain it
as ~chill.

About "butter", folks mostly "budder".  Parkay?  Budder.  I have it as an
alternate pronunciation in my dictionary.

There is plenty of data that crime and illiteracy go together.  The whole
thrust of what I do is to make literacy easier.  Simpler.  Enhance "phonemic
awareness."

Would that be Dr. Valerie Yule?

Tom Z




>From: Beverly Flanigan <flanigan at OHIO.EDU>
>Reply-To: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>Subject: Re: ~chooldrin
>Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 16:34:43 -0400
>
>---------------------- Information from the mail header
>-----------------------
>Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>Poster:       Beverly Flanigan <flanigan at OHIO.EDU>
>Subject:      Re: ~chooldrin
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>At 01:01 PM 10/18/2006, you wrote:
> >>From: Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at YAHOO.COM>
> >>
> >>"Southern"?  I've been saying "chooldrin" all my life and will continue
>to
> >>do so long after I am dead.
> >>
> >>   As far as I can remember, my  grandparents pronounced it the same
>way.
> >>I can even remember commenting on the crazy spelling in grade school,
>only
> >>to be told "that's just the way it's spelled."
> >>
> >>   Tom's convinced me to honor the alphabetic principle, however.  From
>now
> >>on, I spell it <chooldrin>.
> >>
> >>   JL
> >
> >No no no.  Hold on pahdnuh.  :-),   In my dream we do tradspeek, spoken
>as
> >traditionally spelled.
> >So we need to hold on to the "chill" in "children".
> >
> >History shows changing spelling doesn't work.  Teddy Roosevelt and Andrew
> >Carnegie together tried and couldn't change even the simplest most
>obvious
> >spelling.  So the only way to go is change pronunciation to fit trad
> >spelling with tradspeek.  That way we end up with a phonetic language
>that's
> >easy to learn.  Literacy increases.  Crime decreases.  What a great
>dream.
> >
> >Tom Z
> >
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>
>Good lord, I hope you don't really believe this, esp. the "crime decreases"
>part.  Our spelling system is phonemic, not phonetic, and to insist that
>people speak and pronounce phonemically (without schwa substitution in
>unstressed syllables (as in 'about') or vowel shifts (as in 'children' to
>chUldren) or consonant changes (as in 'butter' to b^Der, or would you
>prefer bUter?) would screw us all up (oop/Up).  I had a student once, a
>grade school teacher, who insisted that her pupils say 'b^ter', even though
>it obviously didn't work.  (I'm trying to use a compromise phonetic symbol
>system here, obviously--not easy to do when we don't share the universal
>symbol system most of us on this list use professionally--and easy to learn
>from Yule's book!)
>
>By the way, this all smacks of the kind of bias I just heard from a grad
>student of mine, who said a "psycholinguist" told her that black children
>in elementary school typically have a productive vocabulary of 400 words or
>less.  I thought we had demolished that myth 40 years ago!  And those who
>work in literacy know that there are far more serious impediments to
>learning to read than the presumed mismatch between specific phonemes and
>spelling, like the failure to perceive final consonants and the
>morphological meaning they convey (plural -s, aspect markers, etc.)  See
>Wm. Labov's  home page and articles
>therein:  http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wlabov/home.html.
>
>Beverly Flanigan
>Ohio University
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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