southmore

[Mark Mandel]

Do you mean, BE speakers treating /sauf/  as the "correct" pronunciation of
"south" and hypercorrecting to that?

m a m

On 9/17/07, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> That's funny! Over the course of my life, soufmo(r) [saufmo(r)] has
> been the usual BE pronunciation of "sophomore." The obvious
> (hyper)correction is "southmore." But I've never heard it. It's always
> been either the BE pronunciation or the standard pronunciation. My WAG
> is that the BE pronunciation is actually a hypercorrection of sE
> "soph'more" [sOfmor]! Therefore, there's no motivation for
> "southmore," since the colored "know" that the [f] is really /f/ and
> not the outcome of BE /T/ > [f].
>
> -Wilson
>

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