sumetary

[Laurence Horn]

At 6:54 AM +0000 3/31/09, Tom Zurinskas wrote:
>Thanks, Herb, for that interesting clip in which Bill ~Lubbaaf talks
>about the Great Lake Northern Cities Vowel Shift (for short vowels).
>(I didn't see his last name spelled but I can spell it phonetically
>in truespel).  He says that around the great lakes cities certain
>vowels are changing.  This area contains cities such as Cleveland,
>Detroit, Syracuse, Rochester, Buffaloe (about 34M people).  It used
>to be the USA English standard pronunciation for media.  Some
>examples are:
>
>saying "block" the same as "black"
>saying "buses" the same as "bosses"
>
>Other short vowels are swapping too.  ~Lubbaaf says we are growing
>apart linguistically even with massive media exposure.  To me this
>is a bad thing.  It should be changed and can be changed.
>
>I speculate that the main reason for this is that many schools have
>dropped phonetic or phonic instruction for teaching reading and gone
>with "whole language" or "whole word" approach.  This forbids
>teaching the alphabetic principle that letters stand for sounds, so
>kids are taught that they have to learn words visually, and thus
>pronunciation is not linked to spelling and can vary capriciously.
>Huge mistake.
>

And of course we know from the findings of historical linguistics
that there's a strong correlation between the presence or absence of
phonic instruction and the likelihood of sound change...   ;-)


LH

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