"Authentic pronunciation" (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Wilson Gray]

On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 10:25 AM, Mullins, Bill AMRDEC
<Bill.Mullins at us.army.mil> wrote:
> I've got relatives in East Tennessee who would say
> "Aint Judy". Â I've had acquaintances from Memphis who would say (in
> AAVE) "Ont Judy" (probably short for on-TEE).

I have relatives in East Texas who would say "Aint [Name]."

"_T_ for Texas, _T_ for Tennessee," as the old blues line-filler goes.

I use BE "Ont [Name]," but, FWIW - IMO, this is a mere question of
"different strokes" - I think that "auntie," pronounced "ON-tee,
AN-tee, eynih," is just the ordinary diminutive of "aunt." As it
happens, I've never heard "EYN-tih" aut sim., but I don't care to
claim that it's non-occurrent. I may very well have heard it and not
noticed it. Doesn't anybody be monitoring every word of every
conversation all the time..

My full brother, whom I've known since I was about eighteen months old
and with whom I was in contact 24/7/365 or -6 till we were in our
twenties, often catches my attention because he uses "ant." "Ant"?!
WTF?! How'd *that* happen?

Another mystery is that he says "million" as [mI at lj@n], whereas I say
[mILjIn]. I consider either pronunciation to be standard. The mystery
is why he's chosen to disrespect his elder brother by using different
pronunciations. ;-)

You know, I have to say, I've been reading, since at least the Pei day
<har! har!>, that black people pretty generally use "ont" instead of
"ant." I've tried not to bother myself about this, since I prefer to
use "ont." However, over my lifetime, it's been my personal experience
that "ant," usually Southernized as "aint," is really *not* noticeably
less-common than "ont."

OTOH, IME, I've almost never heard "ont" used by white people. My WAG
is that, because "ont" is so rare in white speech, it  *seems* to
white researchers that BE-speakers are big "ont"-users, when the fact
of the matter is that "ont"/"ant" is more like
"EH-conomic"/"EE-conomic" than like 75% "ont"/25% "ant" or some such.

Of course, I'm only the merest dabbler in this field and I realize
that there may well be strong evidence that I'm not aware of, because
I'm not even well-read - I was truly *astounded* to discover, as I
flipped through it, that Skeats's "English Dialects" was *not* about
American English; it was a real W.T.F.?!!! moment  - let alone
formally-trained, in dialectology, that makes hash of my impression.

--
-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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