Hockey

[Wilson Gray]

I agree with Alice.

-Wilson

On 5/18/07, Alice Faber <faber at haskins.yale.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Alice Faber <faber at HASKINS.YALE.EDU>
> Organization: Haskins Laboratories
> Subject:      Re: Hockey
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> James Harbeck wrote:
> >> On a Seinfeld episode from 1995, Michael Richards is talking about hockey
> >> tickets and he pronounces the sport as "hawk-y." Has anyone ever noticed
> >> this pronunciation of this word or similarly constructed words? IMDB
> >> lists
> >> him as originating from Los Angeles, for what that's worth.
> >
> > This surely betrays my Canadian phonemic stuntedness (we don't have a
> > separate phoneme for the open o, meaning "caught" and "cot" are
> > phonemically identical in CanEng), but can you give more detail on
> > how Richards pronounces it and how you would pronounce it? In Canada,
> > generally (I don't want to rule out a few regional variations, but
> > for the most part CanEng is pretty homogeneous), the first three
> > phonemes of "hockey" are identical with "hawk". So, because I wasn't
> > paying attention to this detail when I lived in the US (and I try not
> > to watch TV shows where they talk about hockey), I'm not sure which
> > of the two words has which sound for you...
>
> For those of us who distinguish COT from CAUGHT, HOCKEY would typically
> be in the COT class, with a low central unrounded vowel (except for
> advanced Northern Cities speakers, who might have a rather fronted
> vowel). Without recalling the specific Seinfeld episode, I suspect that
> Richards used a backish, perhaps somewhat rounded vowel. However, if his
> native speech lacks a contrast, it's likely that his native vowel (in
> both HOCKEY and HAWK) is closer to the low central unrounded vowel
> (unless he's really from Boston!), and that the rounded vowel represents
> an imperfect attempt to produce the contrast.
>
>
>
> --
> ==============================================================================
> Alice Faber
> faber at haskins.yale.edu
> Haskins Laboratories                                  tel: (203)
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