"bone marror"

[Geoff Nathan]

I've always been struck by the eye dialect in the songs of the musical 'Oklahoma', where words such as 'willow' and 'window' are spelled 'willer' and 'winder' ('and an old weeping willer is laughing at me')  And the original Broadway cast recording reflects those intended pronunciations.
And of course, there's 'feller' and Old Yeller
On the other hand, I have /o/ (tense o) in most of those words.  But then I was raised in r-ful Toronto by r-less parents.  Go figure.

Geoff

Geoffrey S. Nathan
Faculty Liaison, C&IT
and Associate Professor, Linguistics Program
+1 (313) 577-1259 (C&IT)
+1 (313) 577-8621 (English/Linguistics)

----- "Damien Hall" <djh514 at YORK.AC.UK> wrote:

> From: "Damien Hall" <djh514 at YORK.AC.UK>
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Sent: Saturday, July 18, 2009 6:31:39 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
> Subject: "bone marror"
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Damien Hall <djh514 at YORK.AC.UK>
> Subject:      "bone marror"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Wilson said:
>
> >This is only my opinion, based only on my personal experience, but I
> >think that the modulo is unnecessary. R-less folk don't say marrow
> >borrow  Storrow  tomorow  Morrow or any other words of this type
> with
> >final [ou]
>
> Many speakers of British English do. Not in all environments, granted,
> and
> not in fast speech sometimes, but I think I would still say [bOrou
> stOrou
> (t@)mOrou] more often than [bOr@ stOr@ (t@)mOr@]. I'm especially sure
> of
> this for proper names, like Storrow, which I can't imagine
> pronouncing
> [stOr@] in 'citation form'. All of this comes with the caveat that
> introspection is very unreliable, of course, but I'm still saying it!
>
> [...]
>
> >Words in -ow are
> >pronounced with [-@]
>
> I think this is more categorical in AmE than in other Englishes. My
> father-in-law (Chestertown, MD, on Chesapeake Bay, late '20s), for
> example,
> says _window_ /wInd@/ (NB the slashes this time, not square brackets),
> and
> so this representation and pronunciation is now part of my wife's
> lexicon
> (Berkeley Heights, NJ, 1960s) for this lexical item, even though she
> otherwise has _-ow_ > /ou/ as far as I know.
>
> Damien
>
> --
> Damien Hall
>
> University of York
> Department of Language and Linguistic Science
> Heslington
> YORK
> YO10 5DD
> UK
>
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