eye dialect was RE: nekkid

Mon Mar 14 12:22:02 UTC 2011

from wikipedia

"Eye dialect is the use of non-standard spelling for speech to draw attention to pronunciation, often in regard to the literary technique of using non-standard spelling to approximate a pronunciation that is actually no different from the standard pronunciation but has the effect of dialectal, foreign, or uneducated speech."

This makes no sense.  How could using a special spelling "no different from standard pronunciation" make it "dialectal, foreign or uneducated" Unless the standard is that way?  But that would make it a nonstandard standard.

My take is that "eye dialect" as defined is merely a form of tradspel phonetics.  It's a writing system.  So this form of phonetics could be called tradnetics, so to speak.  The problem here is that not all English sounds have consistent tradspel forms, so they can never be spelled in "eye dialect".  Basically truespel phonetics steps in here to standardize eye dialect using a phonetics based on English tradspel.

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

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> Date: Sun, 13 Mar 2011 17:34:26 -0500
> From: GordonMJ at MISSOURI.EDU
> Subject: Re: eye dialect was RE: nekkid
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: "Gordon, Matthew J."
> Subject: Re: eye dialect was RE: nekkid
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> The author gets to decide. People who pronounce 'naked' as [nEkId] may interpret 'nekkid' as eye dialect, but that doesn't mean the author intended it as such. Many readers today would look at spellings like "wut, w'at, wot' as eye dialect for "what," but they were used in the 19th-cen. to indicate marked pronunciations.
>
> -Matt
> ________________________________________
> 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 5:14 PM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: Re: eye dialect was RE: nekkid
>
> 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
> ________________________________________
> 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
> > Poster: Charles C Doyle
> > 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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