the n word: on its way out?

[Jonathan Lighter]

Heh heh. I kin remember waaaaay back awhen all decent folk said "Negro" and only them that was spoilin' fer a fight said "black."  Yes sirree Robert !  Or have I told that story before ?

Yep. And in my neck of the backwoods, Manhattan USA, the only pronunciation I was ever conscious of was / n i g r o /.  We wouldn't let no hypercorrectin' son of a gun *on* our island.

  Less'n he had plenty o' cash.

  JL

Charles Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Charles Doyle
Subject: Re: the n word: on its way out?
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Oh, I see now! Does that "vigour/niger/rigour/tiger" sequence of rhymes in the Burns poem represent Scottish-dialect pronunciations? /I/ or /aI/ (or something else)? That is, assuming that all four words are supposed to rhyme (according to the scheme of the rest of the poem), rather than just "vigour/rigour" and "niger/tiger."

As for the phonology of "negro" > "nigra": I've always suspected that the pronunciation of "negro" with an emphatic /i/ was a hyper-correct attempt to differentiate the speaker's utterance from "nigger," but I have no real basis for that supposition. For the /I/ manifested orthographically as "e" before /g/, we may compare "renege." The terminal /o/ to a schwa (or whatever) is something Southerners, of course, quite regularly do with "o"-final words.

--Charlie
___________________________________________________________

---- Original message ----
>Date: Thu, 8 Mar 2007 15:25:03 -0500
>From: Jesse Sheidlower
>Subject: Re: the n word: on its way out?
>
>On Thu, Mar 08, 2007 at 03:18:17PM -0500, Charles Doyle wrote:
>>
>> OK, I'll ask: What does it mean to rhyme with "vigour,
>> rigour, tiger"?? Is the reference to Winnie the Poo's
>> (fake)feline companion?
>
>No, it just means that in the Burnes poem, the word "niger"
>rhymes with these other words. The note was attached to this
>specific quotation, not to the word in general.
>
>Jesse Sheidlower
>OED

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