Colin Powell

[Michael Newman]

If someone has some documentation of what they "corrected," it would be interesting for my book on New York City English. I do have a speech manual, the one recommended by Hubbell, who wrote a dialectal description of NYCE, but I was disappointed to find nothing specific on NYCE.

Here's what I've been able to pick up just anecdotally:

intrusive g and r
dentalized /d/, /t/ and possibly /s/ and /n/.
and now dark  onset /l/.



Michael Newman
Associate Professor of Linguistics
Queens College/CUNY
michael.newman at qc.cuny.edu



On Sep 8, 2011, at 8:05 PM, Joel S. Berson wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
> Subject:      Re: Colin Powell
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 9/8/2011 02:50 PM, Alice Faber wrote:
>> And I think we've previously discussed on this list the (in)famous City
>> College speech screening and classes, even in my father's day, in the
>> 30's, more like what we might call accent reduction, though they were
>> tinged with a lot of unfortunate assumptions about what constituted
>> proper speech.
>
> Even in my day, in the 1950s, and at Columbia College -- although I
> was over the bar at the screening (despite growing up in the
> Bronx)  and so cannot say anything at all about what the remedial
> classes were like.  (My only problem, according to the interviewer,
> was too much G in NG.)
>
> I never thought to enquire whether they pre-screened the
> freshmen.  E.g., if you came out of Andover, Exeter, Groton, Milton
> Academy, et al., and were white (and didn't say "Hahvahd Yahd", I
> suppose), you passed through without having to orate.  If you were
> from the Bronx or Brooklyn, or Jewish, or black, you had to go
> through the vetting.
>
> Joel
>
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