/l/ vocalization

[George Thompson]

There was a book on Dallas' Deep Ellum a while ago:
Deep Ellum and Central Track: Where the Black and White Worlds of Dallas Converged, by Alan B. Govenar and Jay F. Brakefield, University of North Texas Press, c1998.

My spelling checker offered to correct "ellum" to "ell um" -- I didn't know that spell checkers could have speech impediments.

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.

----- Original Message -----
From: Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
Date: Thursday, March 20, 2008 11:48 pm
Subject: Re: /l/ vocalization
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU


> At 10:59 PM -0400 3/20/08, Mark Mandel wrote:
> >On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 6:28 AM, Dennis Preston <preston at msu.edu> wrote:
> >
> >>  Wilson,
> >>
> >>  I've always taken these to be hypercorrections by those of us who
> >>  vocalilze our postvocallic /l/s. They were very common pronunciations
> >>  in my parts of the South Midlands (Southern IL & IN, and Northern
> and
> >>  Western KY among older working class speakers, white and black.
> >
> >"Ellum" is attested from New England 150 years ago:
> >
> >>  The hubs of logs from the "Settler's ellum," --
> >>  Last of its timber, -- they could n't sell 'em,
> >>
>
> A lot older than Deep Ellum Blues.  But those blues are named for the
> eponymous street and neighborhood in Dallas--how far back does that
> go?
>
> LH
>
> >
> >>From "The Deacon's Masterpiece Or, The Wonderful 'One-Hoss Shay': A
> >Logical Story", by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. 1858.
> >
> >poem: http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/Oliver-Wendell-Holmes/16658
> >date:
> >http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1972/1/1972_1_108.shtml
> >
> >--
> >Mark Mandel
> >
> >------------------------------------------------------------
> >The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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