Pronuncations

Barbara Need bhneed at GMAIL.COM
Thu Jan 15 19:16:36 UTC 2009


Some years ago I was teaching an Intro to Linguistics using the OSU
Language Files. one of the exercises listed alternative pronunciations
and asked students to say which they used and which was "correct". One
of the pairs was just this pair of variants. The student who got this
as we went around the class confessed to using the t-less
pronunciation, "but I know it's wrong".

Barbara

Barbara Need
(in frigid Chicago!)

On 15 Jan 2009, at 12:25 PM, Damien Hall wrote:

> Received from the Linguistic Anthropology (LINGANTH) list today:
>
> On Jan 15 2009, Robert Lawless wrote:
>
>> For all you guys who teach college-age students and (if you're
>> listening) hear them talk:  Is the pronunciation of often with "t"
>> becoming more common with the younger generation? (I think most of us
>> old foggies don't pronounce the "t".) I believe linguists refer to
>> this
>> as "spelling pronunciation." I suppose then that pronouncing
>> sophomore
>> as two syllables would be anti-spelling pronunciation. Although I and
>> most of my colleagues pronounce it with three syllables, seemingly
>> all
>> the sophmores here use only two syllables. (My daughter, who's a
>> sophmore in high school corrected me the other day when I called
>> her a
>> sophomore.)
>
> I don't know about these points, but maybe somebody here on the
> American
> Dialect Society list has some intuition from their own students, or
> knows
> about the history of the pronunciations of these two words? For
> myself:
>
> - I think I (M, 34, but British, not American) usually pronounce
> 'often'
> with no /t/
>
> - I have no native intuition about 'sophomore', since it's not a
> word that
> most Brits know; myself, I had come across it but had no idea of
> what it
> meant exactly, apart from knowing that it referred to one or several
> years
> in education, until I came to the US. FYI, in British Universities the
> years are just referred to by their ordinal numbers, except that in
> some
> places the people in their last year are called Finalists (because
> that's
> when their Final Exams are). We split the secondary years
> differently from
> Americans, so that you enter secondary school at 11 and can leave at
> 16 or
> 18, but there's no necessary break between those ages; the second
> year of
> that process, when pupils are 12-13 years old, is, again, just
> called the
> Second Year.
>
> Replies, I suppose, to Robert directly, and maybe copied to this list.
>
> Damien

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