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

[Marc Velasco]

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]


I *think* I use both.

If asked how to pronounce, I would say your [yowr] and you're [yowr]; but in
practice, I probably use [yuwr] often.

(Btw, I read [yuwr] as [yer], ... sounds like "get 'r done" and not like a
fast speaking version of "ewe were".)




You're going to hurt yourself:

[Yowr] going to hurt yourself.

[Yer] gonna hurt yourself.

And I imagine I'd pronounce the yourself as [yerself] in both cases.

But I've never thought about that before.


On Fri, Jul 4, 2008 at 11:02 AM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Fwd: phonological features; was What's in a Name? The
> Black
>              Panthers in Israel
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 11:36 PM -0400 7/3/08, Wilson Gray wrote:
> >---------- Forwarded message ----------
> >From: Mark Mandel <thnidu at gmail.com>
> >Date: Thu, Jul 3, 2008 at 8:51 PM
> >Subject: Re: phonological features; was What's in a Name? The Black
> >Panthers in Israel
> >To: Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com>
> >
> >
> >On Thu, Jul 3, 2008 at 8:45 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>Sorry, Mark. "Old age is creepin' up on me. I'm not like I used to be."
> >>>
> >>>  If I understand your question, I personally say:
> >>>
> >>>  "Is this your [yowr] hat? this hat is yours [yowrz]."
> >>>
> >>>  "You're [yuwr] the one."
> >>>
> >>>  But *lots* of other people, especially Northern-white speakers, to my
> >>>  ear, say:
> >>>
> >>>  "Is this your [yuwr] hat? This hat is yours [yuwrz]."
> >>>
> >>>  "You're [yowr] the one."
> >>>
> >>>  I was caught completely off-guard by this mirror-image pronunciation,
> >>>  when I first heard it used by my barracks-mates in the Army, and it
> >>>  used to drive me bleeping NUTS!
> >
> >
> >>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]
> >
> >>>
> >>>  But I should have known that it existed. Else, why would comic-strip
> >>>  hillbillies from places like "Dogpatch," Kentucky, be drawn as using,
> >>>  e.g., "yore," instead of "your," unless the author-artist, Al Capp
> >>>  (Alfred Gerald Caplin, of New Haven, CT), considered it to be
> >>>  non-standardly typical of backwoods speech? And he wouldn't have
> >>>  considered it to be hickishly non-standard, if he used it himself.
> >
> >
> >>Perhaps as eye dialect, like "vittles" for the (British) standard
> >>pronunciation of "victuals" when used by a lower->class or country
> >>character (e.g., Sam Weller).
> >
> >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.
> >
> 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.  And then there's "luv".
>
> LH
>
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