either

[Tom Zurinskas]

Lately I've been hearing the word "either" pronounce EYE-ther on TV.  I would go for the long e EE-ther and always thought it predominated in US. Is someone teaching media folk a different lingo.


Tom Zurinskas, USA - CT20, TN3, NJ33, FL5+
see truespel.com













----------------------------------------
> Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2009 14:24:53 -0400
> From: bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU
> Subject: Re: The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: Benjamin Zimmer
> Subject: Re: The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 1:52 PM, Herb Stahlke wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 1:34 PM, Baker, John wrote:
>>>
>>> I recently was surprised to hear my adult nephew and niece
>>> pronounce "texted" with two syllables. I am forced to admit the logic
>>> of that pronunciation, since I pronounce "text" and "texted" as
>>> homophones, but it still sounds weird to me.
>>
>> I found your pronunciation of the past tense of "text" surprising.
>> Morphologically you're treating "text" as a member of the cut/hurt
>> class of weak verbs that are invariant in their principal parts. It
>> would be the only such verb ending in a consonant cluster, although it
>> does have the requisite final coronal.
>
> A commenter on the Visual Thesaurus website recently expressed
> discomfort with "texted". Dennis Baron's Web of Language piece on the
> anniversary of the telephone was reposted there, and a commenter
> wrote:
>
> "On the other hand, the last sentence of your penultimate paragraph
> may represent the first time I have seen 'texted' in print, and I am
> not sure I have ever heard it used orally to express the past tense of
> the verb 'text'. Though that construction may follow grammatical
> convention, something about it sounds decidedly awkward, like a child
> practicing the language and exploring the possibility that the past
> tense of 'read' must be 'readed'."
>
> http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/dictionary/1768/
> (subscription req'd)
>
>
> --Ben Zimmer
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
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