Stanley Crouch ...

[Herb Stahlke]

I thought of that, but we didn't speak German at home.  My family
stopped speaking German at home in 1942, about when I was born.  My
father, second generation German-American and bilingual, like my
mother, was a small town Lutheran pastor a ways south of Detroit and
he conducted services in both German and English every Sunday.  About
every two weeks during the war FBI agents would come down from Detroit
to attend German services to make sure nothing subversive was going
on.  My elder sbilings grew up with German at home, but I did not.

Herb

On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 1:56 PM, Mark Mandel<thnidu at gmail.com> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Mark Mandel <thnidu at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Stanley Crouch ...
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 1:33 PM, Herb Stahlke<hfwstahlke at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Wilson,
>>
>> I heard that "emphatic devoicing" from my own children when they were
>> young, "middle" becoming "mittle," for example. Â So it may generalize
>> beyond BE speakers. Â My children are fourth generation
>> German-Americans.
>
> That word together with that descent suggests another possibility for
> this case: that your children have heard the German word "Mittel" used
> in English, either in isolation or in some fixed phrases, and taken it
> for the "correct" or careful pronunciation of "middle".
>
> m a m
>
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