velarized /l/ and Billy Holiday

[ronbutters at AOL.COM]

Monosyllabic [kul] is the rule for many whites, with variable syllabic [l]. Also one finds labialized /l/, depend ing on region and other social variables. Race figures in, but not categorically.
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-----Original Message-----
From: Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>

Date:         Fri, 6 Mar 2009 14:58:15
To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Subject:      Re: [ADS-L] velarized /l/ and Billy Holiday


arnold, what accounts for the disyllabic pronunciation of_-ool_
preferred by white speakers?

Some of the other things that I've wondered about, which, in this
case, has essentially nothing to do with race, how do the
professionals deal with such oddities as

The fact that siblings may have very different idiolects. My brothers
and I each speak a different variety of both BE and sE.

The fact that "Deacon" - as he called himself when he was doing
standup - Andy Griffith, from Mount Airy, NC, sounds to me amazing
like a former colleague, with whom I worked for over twelve years,
from Lubbock, TX.

A person whose singing is perfectly clear can speak in such a way that
you really have to know the dialect in order to understand him; a
white example is the Texan, B.J. Thomas, who sang, Raindrops Keep
Falling on My Head just as clearly and local-accent-free as any random
sE speaker might. In an interview, however, he "sounded like he had a
mouth full of cush," as black - and, perhaps, white, too - East Texans
say, when speaking in what was, no doubt, his home dialect.. It was as
amazing as hearing The Two Johns - Baugh and Rickford - switch between
Se and BE. (FWIW, I'm not impressed by their command of sE. What I
find notable is that they've managed to keep their BE pure. My BE is,
to a certain extent, corrupted by sE, both phonetically and
syntactically. Like, I now have to *practice* pronouncing "three" as
[TRi], wherein [R] may consist of as many as four or five taps
(actually, a pronunciation used by *all* speakers that I'd ever heard,
till I moved to Boston), instead of as [Tri], in which [r] is merely a
kind of "ur'-like sound making "three" sound like "thur ee."

This is not to say that I think that these questions are, to any
degree, insoluble problems for people who have actual *knowledge* of
dialectology. Rather, I'm merely wondered about these things.

At first, I was fascinated, not understanding how that pronunciation
could be done. So, I practiced saying it till, before I knew it, I was
using that pronunciation as my normal one, helped along by the fact
that my wife and her family use the "thur ee" pronunciation. Now, I
have to monitor my speech to make sure that I'm using the original
pronunciation. (Back in the day, language / linguistic texts used to
describe trilled /r/ as being  /r/ pronounced as English /r/ after
"th." I don't think that the writers would have used that description,
had their been the current large body of "thur ee" speakers, for whom
this description is meaningless.

Or maybe they would have, anyway. I once read a linguistic text by a
Jesuit professor from Georgetown that claimed that "noon" was
pronounced as [nIwn]. Say what?! Well, it *is* pronounced that way,
here in the Northeast.

I had occasion to chat with said professor at the '73 Michigan Summer
LSA. He mentioned that he had seen me at various other linguistic
happenings "and I've been wondering what you're doing here."

This question struck me as astoundingly, unbelievably, incredibly,
stunningly, astonishingly, I-can't-believe-what-I'm-hearing, amazingly
racist. But later, when I tried to whine about this to friends, I
found that no one else found this question to be at all out of place
or uncalled-for. Apparently, everyone else was in agreement with the
implication that the presence of a black person at a linguistic
conference was something so out of the ordinary that it should be
expected that his presence there could be questioned or even be
challenged.

Is the LSA, therefore, a racist organization made up of racists?

Of course not! But the experience of the United States by a black
person is simply different from the experience of the United States by
a white person: different expectations, different reactions.

What can you do?

-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
-Mark Twain



On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 9:13 AM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:    American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:    Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:   Re: velarized /l/ and Billy Holiday
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Mar 5, 2009, at 10:13 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>
>> My WAG is that it's a feature of her dialect. BE doesn't have the
>> style of articulation that makes the pronunciation of, e.g. "cool" by
>> (Northern) white speakers sound to us like 'koo-wool" and causes BE
>> "cool" to sound like "coo" to white speakers. As a further
>> consequence, some BE speakers overcorrect, e.g. "table" to "taber"
>> [tEIbr].
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 10:06 PM, Herb Stahlke <hfwstahlke at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> This afternoon I was listening to a recording of Billy Holiday
>>> singing
>>> "Crazy he calls me." Â In the line "The impossible will take a little
>>> while" she has a schwa before the final /l/ of "impossible" and I
>>> don't hear any distinctive velarization of the /l/...
>
> this is complicated. first, what causes AAVE "cool" to sound like
> "coo" to white speakers is standardly said to be the vocalization of
> the /l/ -- which is a further development of *dark* (velarized)
> postvocalic /l/.
>
> but, second, there's some suggestion in the literature (that i've been
> able to find on the net quickly) that /l/ (in several positions) used
> to be lighter in AAVE (and some southern white varieties) but has been
> darkening. so Billy Holiday's light /l/s might reflect an earlier
> AAVE system.
>
> arnold
>
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>

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