Square from Delaware, etc

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Fri Sep 5 00:22:30 UTC 2008


At 8:02 PM -0400 9/4/08, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>At 9/4/2008 07:19 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>>At 1:16 PM -0700 9/4/08, Brian Hitchcock wrote:
>>>Re the below:  What sense is "lane" being used in, that rhymes with
>>>"Spokane"? (ie, with  "man", "can", etc)?
>>
>>I gather it's the "Spokane" that's pronounced in a weird way
>>(/spokeyn/), not the "lane".
>
>So now, in addition to all my other faults, I have weird speech?  Is
>that a term of art from linguistics, like "slurred speech" or
>"unintelligible speech"?  :-)

Yup, 'weird(ly)' is an obscure technical term, meaning "not like me".

>
>Frankly, I think anyone who said "a lane from Spokane" and didn't
>rhyme the two would be weird.

No doubt.  Maybe they should split the difference and pronounce them
both to rhyme with "Seattle".

LH

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