In defense of local dialects. Or not.

[Paul Johnston]

I've noticed [taen] (with retracted [ae]) a lot from my Michigan-born students.  Especially the women.  It's part of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift-- you get either retraction (to [E] with two dots, roughly where Scottish "tin" is), or retraction + lowering, giving you [taen] with two dots, roughly my NY/NJ vowel in "cat".   But has it spread beyond the Great Lakes, anyone?

Paul Johnston
On Oct 6, 2010, at 3:21 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      In defense of local dialects. Or not.
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> From zdnet/blog:
>
> "That's what firewalls are _fore_."
>
> Unfortunately, in many cases in which the wrong spelling of a homonym
> appears, the cause is reliance on some spell-check app, so
>
> Youneverknow.
>
> But, abstracting away from that, no St. Louisan of my era would ever
> make the error cited, since we have a clear distinction between _far
> for_ [fOr] and _fore four_ [for].
>
> BTW, has anyone else ever noticed that there are some AmE speakers who
> pronounce _10_ as "tan," instead of as "tin"? ;-)
> --
> -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
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org