meranghy

[William Palmer]

The "spelling pronunciation:" reminds of a woman at my last job, who was
organizing an office party and volunteered her dept to bring the "whores
davores".

Bill Palmer

On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 3:46 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: meranghy
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 3:10 PM -0500 2/16/11, Victor Steinbok wrote:
> >I know next to nothing about accents--I can probably tell apart some of
> >the locals along upper Atlantic Coast, but, beyond that, I'm lost--I
> >would probably confuse accents from Texas, Tennessee and Maryland. [Save
> >the jokes about what it is that I *do* know for later...] But I can tell
> >an annoying accent when I hear one--because it is, well, annoying. The
> >most annoying accent in a cooking show belongs to Ingrid Hoffmann, who
> >has dual TV shows on the Cooking Channel and on Galavision (essentially
> >the same show in different languages). I am not sure where the annoying
> >part comes from--she grew up in Cali and lives in Miami, so maybe she
> >picked it up from the Miami snowbirds. But when she drops Spanish words
> >(e.g., "jalapeno") in her English-language show, she sounds like Jimmy
> >Smits in his infamous SNL episode--it sounds exaggerated even though I
> >am sure it's impeccable Spanish (for some dialect).
> >
> >But this is not the part that got me today--instead, it was her
> >pronunciation of "meringue". What I heard was "mehRANghy", with a
> >classic [Midwestern?] open [æ] and a very distinct [ž] at the end [not a
> >schwa, which did appear in the first syllable]. I've heard some odd
> >pronunciations of that word, but this one was a head-scratcher [for me],
> >particularly from a long-time TV personality and restaurateur.
> >
> >VS-)
> >
> Except for the last comment about the speaker
> being a food person, this would strike me as a
> simple spelling pronunciation, although then
> you'd expect the stressed vowel to be [I] rather
> than the more traditional [ae].  But maybe it's
> been influenced by the almost-eponymous dance?
>
> Puzzled,
> LH
>
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-- 
Bill Palmer
4 Timberlyne Road
Chapel Hill NC 27514
919-929-7431
919-593-5195 (Mobile)

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