pronunciation of "Worcester" (Mass.) (was: ADS-L Digest - 22 Feb 2009 to 23 Feb 2009 (#2009-55))

[Laurence Horn]

At 11:50 AM -0500 2/25/09, Mark Mandel wrote:
>On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 11:36 AM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>  FWIW, a friend of mine, a native of Worcester, pronounces the name
>>  something like "Wistuh." I heard the same or, at least, a very similar
>>  pronunciation, used here in Boston by a guy who said that he had been
>>  to - not "lived in" - "Wistuh." I'd expect a lower vowel than what is
>>  probably an unrounded /u/. Naturally, another possibility is that my
>>  hearing simply isn't what it used to be.
>>
>>  -Wilson
>>
>
>Now, that rings a bell.
>
>For 20 years or so I lived in Framingham, Mass., which is halfway between
>Boston and Worcester. I think that vowel is close to a lax barred i -- high
>central unrounded (but probably not spread). So /'w+st@/, using '+' for
>barred i and '@' for schwa. Might even be unrounded back, a lax turned m.
>
>(Did IPA drop barred cap i, or was it ever official? I certainly remember
>seeing and using it.

On my chart, there's both a cap I and a (lower-case) barred i, the
former where we'd guess it should be (with the cap Y as the rounded
version) and the latter a high central unrounded vowel, of which the
rounded counterpart is barred u.  Then there are the back pair, the
upside-down m we were both referring to and the usual [u].  But
there's no cap barred i as far as (the) i can see.

>And by analogy to that and to cap i and cap Y, I like
>to think of the phone formally written as llax turned m as a Cyrillic "sha",

It sha looks like one.  No little hook on the lower right that would
turn it into a shcha.

LH

>U+0448.)
>
>m a m
>
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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org