eye dialect was RE: nekkid

[Paul Johnston]

Josh Billings used <iz> (and <waz>) in the 19th century. He was very fond of eye dialect, although there were some spellings reflecting real non-standard pronunciations too.  But compared to contemporaries like Artemas Ward and Mark Twain,  his ratio of eye dialect to non-Standard dialectal forms was high.

Paul Johnston
On Mar 14, 2011, at 2:41 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: eye dialect was RE: nekkid
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Sun, Mar 13, 2011 at 11:33 PM, Charles C Doyle <cdoyle at uga.edu> quoted:
>>
>> "eye dialect" refers to respelling of words to reflect their unmarked pronunciation (e.g. _wuz_, ... _uv_ for was, ... of)
>
>
> Who was it who decided that these two pronunciations are "unmarked"?
> Is the spelling _iz_ ever used as the eye-dialect pronunciation of
> _is_? Is there a variety of English in which a citation-pronunciation
> other than [Iz] exists, such that its speakers would be motivated to
> use _iz_ in their representations of quoted speech to signal to the
> reader that outgroup speech is intended?
>
> --
> -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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