Perogative

[Wilson Gray]

Is that [pi rEkwIzIt] or [p@ rEkwIzIt]? So far, I haven't heard this,
knock wood. I assume that [p@ rEkwIzIt] is the perferred
pernunciation. [pi rEkwIzIt] is too weird to catch on. But you never
know.

As a child, I used to pronounce "modern" as "morden." But I had only
underlying /mOd at n/ to work with. It was hard to guess where to insert
the ahruh.

Apropos of nothing, it cracks me up to hear the rapper's name, R.
Kelly, pronounced as [_ar at _ kElI], even though I realize that, to
[ar@]-speakers, having once been one, myself, [ar] sounds just as
foolish. (_Aah_ Kellih? Who in hail is that?)

-Wilson

On Fri, Sep 12, 2008 at 10:43 AM, Arnold M. Zwicky
<zwicky at csli.stanford.edu> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Perogative
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Sep 11, 2008, at 11:03 PM, Benjamin Barrett wrote:
>
>> I assume Shania Twain's pronunciation of prerogative (pero) in "Man,
>> I  Feel Like a Woman" follows popular culture. That's my
>> pronunciation, too...
>
> and lots of other people's (and it gets spelled that way too) --
> enough that it gets an entry in Brians's Common Errors.  and it's in
> Nancy Hall's list of examples in her paper "R-dissimilation in
> English" (available at: http://www.csulb.edu/~nhall2/ ), where Hall
> credits Ben Zimmer and the "R's are us" list at: barelybad.com/
> words1.htm#rsareus
>
> "perequisite" for "prerequisite" is also reasonably common, but it's
> not in Brians, Hall, or rsareus.
>
> arnold
>
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