Eggcorn? "warn" > "worn"

Paul Johnston paul.johnston at WMICH.EDU
Tue Feb 10 17:41:04 UTC 2009


Quite often, the speakers themselves will believe in these
crossovers, too, and since these situations involve either overlap
(merger-in-progress with variability, near-merger) or variability in
the realization of the merger, crossovers can occur in a given
utterance.  The Brooklyn case is a good case in point.  I've also
heard Liverpudlians insist that they say "where they were" as [w@:
Dei wE:], since merger under either [@:] or [E:] is possible, and
there is variability (somewhat sociolinguistically constrained) as to
which one may occur.  You can also have near-mergers that can involve
crossovers too--I remember seeing a paper to that effect about COT
and CAUGHT in Utah, where realizations of CAUGHT were sometimes
fronter than COT, but there was a slight difference in centralization
that kept them distinct.  The speakers, however, often heard the two
as merged.  There, of course, is a whole literature on this kind of
thing.

Incidentally, is Brooklyn [@r] for [@i] a hypercorrect form in
origin, or is it a closing of the second element, as Belfast "nar"
for "now" [nai~naei] is?  Roger Lass points out the New York /r/ in
these cases is palatal anyway among rhotic New Yorkers, and in the
past I've heard in-between forms among genteel New York women born
around 1880-1900 (my mother, grandmother, great-aunts and older
cousins), where there's still a hint of the [i] in hurt, but
technically, you're hearing a very palatal approximant.  It sounded
like an [@i] to fully-rhotic me, and I used to tease them: "oh, it
choips like a boid, does it?"  You hear it in the speech (ordinary
speech, not when he's playing a gangster or something) of people like
Humphrey Bogart too.

Paul Johnston
On Feb 10, 2009, at 11:23 AM, Mark Mandel wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Mark Mandel <thnidu at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Eggcorn? "warn" > "worn"
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> ---------
>
> This reminds me of the stereotypical description of "Brooklynese" that
> I used to hear:
> that /OI/ was pronounced as [@r], and /@r/ was pronounced as [OI].
> For example, "Da deep fryah berled ovah, an' I got boined by da erl."
>
> ISTM that such interchanges are most likely actually mergers, filtered
> through the ear and mind of the non-merging beholder. Like so:
>
> 1. Actual interchanges are unlikely though not impossible, since the
> diachrony would require at some point either
>  a) identical values for the interchanging phonemes, at which point
> they would have merged, or
>  b) a do-si-do, where they develop through at least two dimensions,
> avoiding merger, and then wind up at each other's former positions in
> both.
> (Or so I remember from way back in what might have been John Ohala's
> Phonology 101.)
> So how do these perceptions get started?
>
> 2. (Hypothesis/WAG mode.) To a non-merging speaker who is used to
> (let's say) F1=680 in the vowel of "card" and 480 in "cord", an
> intermediate value of 580 will be on the boundary. Hearing something
> so far off his norm for what he expects, he will interpret it in each
> case as the other vowel phoneme: an interchange.
>
> Hm?
>
> Of course, the thought of contradicting John Lawler gives me the
> willies. Did he say that there was an actual interchange (I DID say
> "unlikely though not impossible"), or that it sounded that way to a
> non-merging speaker?
>
> Mark Mandel
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 10:17 AM, Laurence Horn
> <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>>
>> At 12:02 AM -0500 2/10/09, Neal Whitman wrote:
>>> I haven't read the full article, but there's probably more on
>>> this topic in
>>> David Bowie's spring 2008 American Speech article on the 'cord/
>>> card merger'
>>> in Utah. (Or for the more scatologically minded, the 'fort/fart'
>>> merger.)
>>>
>>> Neal
>>
>> I think I've mentioned here a while back that
>> John Lawler informed me 40 years ago that in Utah
>> one lays a fort in the fart.  I found it hard to
>> believe, but evidently it's true for at least
>> some Utahns.
>
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