antedating (?) "Katy, bar the door" (1890)

[Mark Mandel]

Why would he represent a low-central vowel with +rr? It seems to me more
like an arrhotic speaker trying to represent a rhotic pronunciation.

I just tried to Google the phrase, but the only hit was your post of
2004-02-17 (archived at
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0402c&L=ads-l&P=5368 ).

"harrd" has a lot of porn hits. "harrd" with "Whittier" had one from Google
Books that looked promising, but it turns out to be an OCR error for
"shared" (
http://books.google.com/books?id=R33LsbqlTd4C&pg=PA115&lpg=PA115&dq=harrd+whittier&source=web&ots=cHqbzGy7MH&sig=nM1vJu2uq4IdHaPc24vGzyfvvhE
)

Back to work now.

m a m

On 10/3/07, Beverly Flanigan < flanigan at ohio.edu> wrote:
>
> A similar thing happens in early New England literature, right?  I recall
> being puzzled as a teenager by Whittier's "harrd hearrt" (close, I think,
> though I don't have the poem, or its title, handy).  Fifty years and
> linguistic training on, I assume it was meant to indicate the low central
> vowel /a/, with of course no /r/ at all, but when I was young and naive, I
> pronounced it [hOrd hOrt].
>
> Beverly
>

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