A nice Southernism . . .

sagehen sagehen at WESTELCOM.COM
Thu Sep 4 16:04:09 UTC 2008


on 9/4/08 10:22 AM, Laurence Horn at laurence.horn at YALE.EDU wrote:

> At 10:12 AM -0400 9/4/08, Wilson Gray wrote:
>> 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."
>
> It may be worth noting that Wilson's last minimal pair, the reduced
> [klowz] for the (frequent) plural noun vs. the unreduced [klowDz] for
> the (rare) verb form, is extremely widespread in U. S. English,
> unlike the other, more regionally restricted reductions we've been
> discussing.  It's so general that it forms the background for one of
> my favorite examples of children's eggcorny back-formations, "a
> (nice,...) clo" (for 'an article of clothing').
>
> LH
>
>> 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
>>>
~~~~~~~~~
This discussion reminds me that I was wondering recently how widespread
the pronunciation "comfterble" for comfortable is.  I'm sure it occurs thre
or four times as often in my own speech as a more deliberate, spelling
-conscious  one does.
AM

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