eye dialect was RE: nekkid

[Charles C Doyle]

But who gets to decide what pronunciations a "marked" and what "unmarked"?  That's the question that Wilson and I were raising.

For some of us, the pronunciation [nEkId] is, so to speak, unmarked; so the spelling "nekkid" is, for us, eye dialect.

And some of us don't pronunce "was" as if spelled "wuz."

--Charlie

________________________________________
From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of Gordon, Matthew J. [GordonMJ at MISSOURI.EDU]
Sent: Sunday, March 13, 2011 6:02 PM


By way of clarification:
"eye dialect" refers to respelling of words to reflect their unmarked pronunciation (e.g. wuz, iz, uv for was, is, of). The label comes from the fact that such forms appear to represent distinctive regional or social dialects but in fact represent the "standard" pronunciation. Thus, they are dialect for the eye not for the ear.

Pronouncing words according to their spelling is usually called "spelling pronunciation."

I think it's hard to argue that 'nekkid' is intended as eye dialect since it respells the word to represent a marked pronunciation (with /E/ instead of the unmarked /e/).


-Matt Gordon
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From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Tom Zurinskas [truespel at HOTMAIL.COM]
Sent: Sunday, March 13, 2011 4:01 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: nekkid

Isn't "eye dialect" more like "mouth dialect".  It ain't one's eyes doing the talking.  Folks are just spelling how they talk, what their mouths are doing.  Their mouths do the talking, not their eyes.

Shouldn't "eye dialect" refer to mispronouncing a word because of it's spelling, like saying for "Arkansas" are-CAN-zis (~Aarkkanzis) instead of ARE-kin-saw (~Aarkinsau).  That way the "eye" is creating the dialect from what it sees.

I would assume "nekked" or "nekid" or "neckid" would work as well.  It's not a real word, so why not?  It's dialectspel, spelling how your talking in a tradspel (traditional spelling) kind of way.


Tom Zurinskas, Conn 20 yrs, then Tenn 3, NJ 33, now FL 9.
The FREE English-based phonetic converters, URL and text , are at truespel.com


 >
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster: Charles C Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU>
> Subject: Re: nekkid
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> And the synecdoche "butt naked" parallels the Middle English idiom "belly naked"--obsolete, as far as I am aware.
>
> --Charlie
>
> ________________________________________
> From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of Charles C Doyle [cdoyle at UGA.EDU]
> Sent: Sunday, March 13, 2011 10:58 AM
>
>
> I've always sort of liked "butt naked"! It's so vivid, picturesque . . . .
>
> --Charlie
>
> ________________________________________
> From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of Wilson Gray [hwgray at GMAIL.COM]
> Sent: Saturday, March 12, 2011 6:17 PM
> Well, that's all right, I reckon. Now, if there were only a way to
> delete from the AmE-speaking language-organ the abominable reanalysis,
> _butt-_nekkid!;-)
> --
> -Wilson
>
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