A nice Southernism . . .

[Wilson Gray]

Randy, Charlie is right WRT East-Texas English. If I were talking to
you, I'd say [wasp] and [b^lb], because I wouldn't want to sound
"colored," as it were. But, talking to Charlie, who's accustomed to
the various Southern styles of speech, I'd say [wOs, wOsiz] 'n' [b^:b,
bu^:bz]]. In the second case, both the loss of the /l/ and the
following voiced consonant cause lengthening of the /^/.

As fate would have it, I didn't hear [b^:b] used for the female breast
until I was a senior in high school. Since the speaker was also black,
I naturally assumed that he was saying "bulb," obviously a reasonable
slang term for a woman's breast.

Not until some forty years later, as I was browsing through HDAS, did
I discover that the term actually is "bub"! Nevertheless, I'd bet
money that, for a whole lot of people who live where the Spanish moss
hangs from the live-oak trees, the word is spelled "bulb."

As for the noun, "clothes," IMO, the correct pronunciation is [klowz],
falling together with the verb, "close." The pronunciation, [klowDz],
is that of the verb, "clothes," as in "a harlequin clothes himself in
motley."

-Wilson

On Wed, Sep 3, 2008 at 11:16 PM, LanDi Liu <strangeguitars at gmail.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       LanDi Liu <strangeguitars at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: A nice Southernism . . .
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 12:11 AM,  <ronbutters at aol.com> wrote:
>> However, CONSONANT CLUSTER is a well known term in linguistics. And FINAL CONSONANT CLUSTER SIMPLIFICATION is the usual term employed to name the rule that describes the phenomenon in English whereby a word-final consonant is variably deleted iff it is alike in voicing with the consonant that immediately precedes it (i.e., both must be either voiced or not voiced) .
>
> You're saying that anytime you have this situation at the end of a word:
>
> {unvoiced consonant} + {unvoiced consonant}
>
> or
>
> {voiced consonant} + {voiced consonant}
>
> that the second consonant can be deleted?
>
> So (according to your rule) for the word "wasp", you can just say
> [was]?  And for "bulb", you can just say [b^l]?
>
> I'm pretty sure I've never heard anybody in any English dialect say
> either of those, or anything similar.  The final consonant cluster
> reduction rule that I'm aware of only affects [t] and [d], and it
> doesn't have much to do with voicing, but rather what kinds of
> consonants are next to the [t] or [d] in question.  It's not simple
> enough to make a one-sentence rule about; and the processes involved
> form a "process continuum" that ranges from speaking in citation forms
> to slurred and unintelligible speech.
>
> --
> Randy Alexander
> Jilin City, China
> My Manchu studies blog:
> http://www.bjshengr.com/manchu
>
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