ADS-L Digest - 21 May 2008 to 22 May 2008 (#2008-144)

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Sat May 24 00:10:28 UTC 2008


At 4:21 PM +0000 5/23/08, Tom Zurinskas wrote:
>Actually, there's not a single instance in my truespel database
>where tradstreeng "oo" is pronounced as long o, or "oh" ~oe.
>
Curiously, there are 50 million hits for "sooo" (three o's rather
than two), as an emphatic form of "so". (Well, at least the first 3
million; I didn't check the rest.)  Thus "sooo sexy", "sooo cute",
"sooo gorgeous", "sooo 2000/last year/last week".  In any case, these
are [so:], not [su:].

But there are also 115,000 hits for "soo sexy", 1,650,000 for "soo
cute", 35,600 for "soo gorgeous", etc., all [so:] as well.  (Not to
be confused with the Soo in Michigan, which really is [su:], and
officially <Sault>.)

So(o(o)) i think you might want to expand your database...

LH

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