southmore
Laurence Horn
laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Thu Sep 20 19:11:31 UTC 2007
At 11:57 AM -0700 9/20/07, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
>On Sep 20, 2007, at 11:43 AM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>
>>I'm going to let the spelling alone, since I have no idea how people
>>who say [sauf], etc., spell it,...
>
>the spelling would be relevant as an indication of the analysis that
>these speakers have for [saufmo(r)]. do they think its first element
>is the name of a compass point?
I was thinking some speakers, especially non-rhotic ones, might
assume the same sort of idea is involved with "southmore" as with the
essentially rhyming and (apparently) equally non-compositional
"southpaw". (The latter *is* in fact compositional in its origin,
but quite opaquely so.)
LH
------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
More information about the Ads-l
mailing list