phonological features; was What's in a Name? The Black Panthers in Israel

Mark Mandel thnidu at GMAIL.COM
Fri Jul 4 18:18:48 UTC 2008


On Thu, Jul 3, 2008 at 11:36 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> From: Mark Mandel <thnidu at gmail.com>
>
> >I pronounce "your(s)" and "you're" identically, so far as I can tell.
>
> Do you mean that there's a third way?:
> 1) your(s) [yowr(z)]; you're [yuwr]
> 2) your(s) [yuwr(z)]; you're [yowr]
> 3) your(s) [yuwr(z); you're [yuwr] or your(s) [yowr(z)]; you're [yowr]

4: your((s) [yowr(z)]; you're [yowr]

>[...]
>
>Yes. But what I'm getting at is that I had no idea that "your(s)"
>[yowr(s)] was considered "lower class or country" by some speakers.
>>>From my at-that-time inexperienced point of view, Al Capp's spelling
>of "your(s)" as "yore(s)" in eye-dialect was completely mysterious,
>since it implied that there were speakers who didn't use "yore(s)" as
>the ordinary standard pronunciation and I didn't know of the existence
>of any such speakers till I was in my twenties.

Larry Horn replied:

> It's hard to know what to conclude from eye-dialect spellings,
> though, given the convention of using "wuz" for "was", presumably to
> indicate that if there *were* a nonstandard pronunciation of "was",
> the speaker would use it.

What he said.

m a m

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