southmore

[Wilson Gray]

As the "correct" BE pronunciation, yes. On the basis of my own
experience, dialect speakers can both fail to hear a standard
distinction, such as that between [in] and [en] or that between [T]
and [f], and even believe that the standard pronunciation of a word is
either wrong or doesn't even exist, as in the pronunciations of
"epoch" = "ee-pok" and "speedometer" = "speedo-meter." My late father
told me that a "Jewish (at that time, UW had a campus chapter of the
KKK and it was highly unlikely that any "white Christian" student
would have gone out of his way to help a black, country boy from the
Deep South) fella," when he was a student at the University of
Wisconsin, helped him to lose what he called his "Alabama brogue."
"*Tried* to help" is probably a better description, since my father
was a sowfmo, bofe, dis, dat, dese, dose, etc. speaker all of his
life.

-Wilson


On 9/19/07, Mark Mandel <thnidu at gmail.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Mark Mandel <thnidu at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: southmore
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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
> >
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>


--
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
                                              -Sam'l Clemens

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org