~chooldrin

[Jonathan Lighter]

Am I correct in believing that the /ae/ in "father" is still common in Ireland ?

  JL

"Paul A Johnston, Jr." <paul.johnston at WMICH.EDU> wrote:
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----- Original Message -----
From: RonButters at AOL.COM
Date: Thursday, October 19, 2006 10:14 am
Subject: Re: Re: [ADS-L] ~chooldrin

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> In a message dated 10/18/06 9:45:26 PM, truespel at HOTMAIL.COM writes:
>
>
> >
> > There is plenty of data that crime and illiteracy go together.
> >
>
> So obviously crime causes illiteracy, not pronunciation.
>
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> I just thought of a few things, Tom, that you should think about. Your support of an "alphabetic principle" a
nd of "General American"--whatever that is--as a general Standard cannot both stand.

1. How about the Mary/merry/marry problem? These words are spelled differently, and there are dialects (probably yours, if you are from CT) that do have three different pronunciations. Problem: they are regionally marked and NOT "General American". Once you cross those Catskills, they are the same, with [E] or the like and I suppose the majority of Americans do merge them. Of course, Merriam-Webster products distinguish them, but doesn't this have something to do with their (old) headquarters being in Hartford as much as the spelling differences, like ....

2. Does m-w.com counsel, as the schoolbook dictionaries (all Webster) that we used in my school, that and have different vowels? I had a teacher who insisted we have the distinction as IPA [ae] vs. IPA [a(:)], even though she (from Sullivan, IL near Decatur) and the kids (from Chicagoland) pronounced them with the sam
e vowel--as good "General American" speakers do. We laughed at her wanting to turn us into Brits. Again, the distinction gives a regionally marked pronunciation, though the General American alternative "obeys the alphabetic principle", but so would [ae] in father, which no one has had since the eighteenth century.

By the way, I do have a distinction between cat and ask, true to my N NJ/SE Ny origins, but not the one Webster had in mind. Ask goes with bad, can, half, class, bath, ham, cab, bag; cat goes with cap and back. I have yet another vowel in pal (a long version of cat). For "General American" (read MI/N OH), all of these are the same, sounding kind of like my ask. If you are from W CT, listen to yourself REALLY closely and see if you really have the same vowel in cat and can....

3. then, of course, there are your road/rowed, mane/main, beat/beet type phenomena. "General American" has them as the same, as does every dialect on this side of the Pool except for
Newfoundland. And yet we spell them differently. Now, I remember you saying we should change our pronunciation to match our spelling. Well, I know of plenty of British trad. dialects that have distinctions: [ro:d] vs. [rOUd]. [me:n] vs. [maeIn], [be:t] vs. [bi:t]. However, how are you going to deal with meet/meat/mate, without sounding even more REALLY regionally marked? Even Newfoundland doesn't have a three-way distinction, never mind any other dialect in the Americas. Now we have to turn to 100-year-old Lincolnshire speakers with [mi:t]/[mi at t]/[me:t].

I think your problem is you're dealing with the wrong language. You need to take up Esperanto, or even Volapu"k. You're not only like King Canute telling the tide to go out, you're trying to scoop it out with a teaspoon as you do so. Face it: English is a human artifact. It's "imperfect". It's (mostly) arbitrary. It's NUTTY. But that's why we linguists love it. And it serves its speakers' purposes just fine,
or we'd all replace it with something else. Sorry 'bout that.

Paul Johnston

P. S. Even Esperanto has dialects and undergoes change..

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