either

[Jocelyn Limpert]

P.S. I, of course, meant "pretentious" below -- my brain and fingers must
have been distracted.

On 3/11/09, Jocelyn Limpert <jocelyn.limpert at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Oh, my -- I thought that it has disappeared into word "heaven" or "hell"
> years ago, whevever currently "dead" words or pronunciations go when they
> lose their life.
>
> It always sounded so pretenscious -- sort of like pronouncing "tomato" with
> the "ah" sound, as opposed to the long "a" sound.
>
> It for some reason reminds me of people trying to use "proper" speech,
> which is more often than not incorrect -- as in saying "between him and I"
> for "between him and me" -- that sort of thing.
>
>
>  On 3/11/09, Tom Zurinskas <truespel at hotmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Tom Zurinskas <truespel at HOTMAIL.COM>
>> Subject:      either
>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> 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
>> >
>> > ------------------------------------------------------------
>> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
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>
>

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