Odd rhyme claim

Wed Dec 16 19:59:27 UTC 2009

I think, by George, Paul's got it.

The regional speakers in _American Tongues_, about which I'd
forgotten, are very well selected.

And the Chesapeake Bay people in the _Story of English_ are easily the
pinnacle of that series.

JL
--
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 2:29 PM, Paul Johnston <paul.johnston at wmich.edu>wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Paul Johnston <paul.johnston at WMICH.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Odd rhyme claim
>
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>
> We're dealing with an America where, Noah Webster notwithstanding,
> British English still played a role in shaping linguistic norms,
> particularly in New England.  The Boston Brahmins' near-RP recorded
> in the film American Tongues, I would think, would be pretty close to
> the way a University educated Bostonian might speak at this time--
> allowing for changes that were going on in British English as well
> (Edward VII, according to Hallam's transcriptions, was variably
> rhotic, as were elocutionists following Sheridan or Walker's 18th
> century norms).  RP as we know it was probably already formed, or
> well along in its development, so the differences in British English
> from Gimson's conservative RP would have been minor--upgliding
> diphthongs for /e o/, but little or no o-fronting (cf. Batchelor
> 1809), non-rhoticity already adopted, little smoothing of "fire" or
> "flower" to monophthongs, a contrast between an /O:/ ( or maybe a
> lower vowel) in NORTH and an /O@/ in FORCE.  The question is: what
> about LOT and THOUGHT?  in British RP at this time, LOT was probably
> what it is today--a low back rounded vowel, which I will use the
> symbol [D] for (I don't know what it is in computer conventions).
> Boston speech matches that, both in vernacular and Brahmin
> varieties.  So I think that's what Emerson would have had in his
> restressed partriOT.  THOUGHT probably was undergoing change,
> however, in RP.  The 18th century sources point to a long version of
> LOT = [D:] (and late 17th century ones to that, or unrounded [A:].)
> This raises to [O:] in the late 18th/early 19th century, tensing (I
> would call present-day RP [O:] a tense, or better, a peripheral
> vowel) in the 20th.   So it looks like your "thot" spellings reflect
> a conservative pronunciation.  The other thing going on is that
> Wells's CLOTH class, words like soft, cloth, cross, are also shifting
> in RP from THOUGHT words to LOT words, diverging from what Southern
> British English vernaculars have--and incidentally, what American
> ones underlyingly have.  This process picked up other words on the
> way in some areas--my native tongue has THOUGHT in dog and LOT in all
> other -og words.
>
> Now in New England, the relationship between LOT, THOUGHT, and NORTH
> is a tricky one.  Some dialects (and I'd say Click and Clack's) merge
> them all, though FORCE is different.  Others (Providence?) have LOT
> as an [D], and at least some THOUGHT words as [O@] to go with FORCE,
> and increasingly NORTH.  This last vowel can raise too: my first name
> is just as much [po at L~pU at L] in Seekonk, MA as it is back home in New
> Jersey.  Boston lies in between, and though LOT is [D], NORTH is
> [D:], and FORCE is [O@] (no raising), there seems to be a lot of
> lexically-conditioned variation in Boston vernacular in THOUGHT.
> Offhand, though, I'd say the older form is [D], though I'm no native
> speaker.  There'd be even more variation in Boston Brahmin speech,
> and particularly in the 19c. due to the compromise of RP and local
> norms this variety is, as well as the above-mentioned variability in
> RP.  So I'd say a rhyme on [D], with or without a length difference,
> is just fine for Emerson, given the restressing of patriot.
>
> Then again, it could be just a spelling pronunciation.
>
> Yours,
> Paul Johnston
>
> On Dec 16, 2009, at 8:40 AM, Amy West wrote:
>
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> > -----------------------
> > Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > Poster:       Amy West <medievalist at W-STS.COM>
> > Subject:      Re: Odd rhyme claim
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > ---------
> >
> > I can't speak to the Magliozzi's accent, but the \pay-tree-ought\
> > pron. sounds either like a stage elocution pronunciation to me or a
> > (forced) upper-crust pron.
> >
> > ---Amy West
> > (in Worcester, with Boston relations)
> >
> >> Date:    Tue, 15 Dec 2009 23:56:19 -0500
> >> From:    "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
> >> Subject: Re: Odd rhyme claim
> >>
> >> At 12/15/2009 11:00 PM, Jerome Foster wrote:
> >>> For a current example listen to Click and Clack, the Magliozzi
> >>> brothers on
> >>> NPR.
> >>
> >> Do they say "ought" ("awt") -- which I can't relate to "patriot",
> >> even in New England, or "ott", as in the baseball player Mel -- which
> >> I can imagine in New England for both "patriot" and "thought"
> >> ("thott" -- the vowel a little like "cah" for "carr"?)  I'll have to
> >> listen next Saturday.
> >>
> >> Joel
> >
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