antedating "hobo" 1885

[Tom Zurinskas]

What's great about truespel phonetics is that it's spreadsheet friendly.

Using the 62k word list (column A) I searched the tradstreeng (letters in sequence in traditional spelling) for o?o as in hobo (the ? stands for any letter) and got 1,269 hits.  Of those I searched the foestreeng (phonetic string) of ~oe?oe (column B) as in hobo (long o followed by any letter and then another long o) and got 159 hits.

But for those words of the tradform ?o?o (where ? stands for any letter, all were ~?oe?oe (both vowels were long o's), mono being an exception.

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




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> Date: Mon, 25 May 2009 15:08:27 -0400
> From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
> Subject: Re: antedating "hobo" 1885
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: Laurence Horn
> Subject: Re: antedating "hobo" 1885
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 10:11 AM -0400 5/25/09, Mark Mandel wrote:
>>"color" and "honor" do not follow the pattern .
>>
>>m a m
>
> No, and the ones that do all stem from stemless prefixes or from
> non-nativized loanwords, I venture to guess. "Mono" is the clearest
> example, pronounced /mano/ (in the U.S.) whether it's short for
> "mononucleosis", "monaural"/"monophonic" (stereo vs. mono), or
> anything else. And while (as the OED confirms) the slur "homo" is
> always /homo/, even if uttered by a British slurrer who would
> pronounce the full label with an initial /ha-/, the Latin _homo
> (sapiens)_ may be either /hamo/ or /homo/.
>
> LH
>
>>
>>On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 10:39 PM, Randy Alexander
>> wrote:
>>> On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 11:52 PM, Mark Mandel wrote:
>>>> Subject: ? ? ? Re: antedating "hobo" 1885
>>>> Interesting that the writer feels it necessary to describe the
>>>> pronunciation of the vowels. I would have taken that for granted.
>>>
>>> While yes, most of the words in English that follow that pattern have two
>>> "long" o's, some do not, like color, honor, and for most speakers, mono.
>>
>>------------------------------------------------------------
>>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
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