~chooldrin

[Paul Johnston]

Actually, you may be right there, but if so, it's probably a long
one.  I've also heard a lot of (sometimes very front) [a:]'s.

Paul Johnston
On Oct 19, 2006, at 5:51 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at YAHOO.COM>
> Subject:      Re: ~chooldrin
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> 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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> Subject: =?iso-8859-1?B?UmU6IKAgoCCgIFJlOiBbQURTLUxdIH5jaG9vbGRyaW4=?=
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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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>> Subject: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Re:=20=A0=20=A0=20=A0=20Re:=20[ADS-
>> L]=20~chooldri? = =?ISO-8859-1?Q?n?=
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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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