dialectology in linguistics

[Wilson Gray]

In a post WRT Mark Liberman's _Pen_ or _pin_ post on LanguageLog,

Kirk Hazen wrote,

"Socially in the US South, the pin/pen merger often goes
unstigmatized, except by occasional outsiders. What does appear on the
social radar, and can be concurrent with "the pin/pen merger, is the
movement of the Southern Vowel Shift for these two vowels. In the
Southern Vowel Shift, consider both vowels moving towards the front of
the "mouth and gaining an offglide to become a diphthong. So that
[bit] may sound more like [bee-it] and [bet] may sound more like
[bait] or [baa-it]."

I've googled Prof. Hazen, so I'm fully aware that he's no random
poster and I'm truly sorry that I'm not in a position to discover what
beef Smitherman and that asshole - my opinion of him as a person and
not as a scholar - Spearman have with him.

Nevertheless, I'm flummoxed by this paragraph. Does he *really* mean
to say that the pin/pen merger "*often* goes unstigmatized," thereby
implying that this merger sometimes *is* stigmatized "behind the sun,"
as the colored say, though perhaps only by occasional outsiders? And
Southerners ordinarily notice the (relatively-recent?!) Southern Vowel
Shift?! To quote Richard Pryor, "Is the boy crazy?!"

Maybe because, like Smitherman and [insulting reference] Spearman, I'm
colored, I'm genetically predisposed to be unable to understand WTF
his underlying thought is. Or something, such as a difference in
Weltanschauung, trivial. Or maybe WV and TN are just different from E
TX.

-Wilson

On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 4:59 PM, 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:      dialectology in linguistics
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> from Roger Shuy on Language Log recently, following up on a truly gigantic pin/pen thread:
>
> RS, 7/28/10: Language variability: pin vs pen and beyond:
>
>  http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2493
>
> NOTE: ROGER HASN'T READ OR POSTED TO THIS LIST IN QUITE SOME TIME.  NOTHING YOU SAY HERE WILL GET TO HIM.
>
> arnold
>
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>



--
-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

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