"_every_ since"

[Wilson Gray]

On Mon, Jun 11, 2012 at 9:54 AM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:
> it's hard to believe that none of these writers are white northerners

Youneverknow.

As for the origin of "_every_ since," my intuition/WAG is that it's
one of those strange hypercorrections that you often get. Here, the
influencer would be phrases like "every time, every day," in which the
pronunciation of _every_ usually varies along [EvrI  Evr@ EvI Ev@],
vs. simple _ever_ [Ev@], among people who know that they don't speak
"proper English." What's correct is difficult to discover, but
everybody knows that there are /0/'s that should be /r/'s and /@/'s
that ought to be /I/'s.

As I've mentioned, I myself was once fully persuaded that _God_ was
pronounced "guard," after I  discovered the existence of post-vocalic
/r/, the difference in spelling between "God" and "guard" being of no
more import than that between, e.g. "mite" and "might." AFAIK, I may
be the only person in the English-seaking world ever to speak "God" as
"guard." No one corrected this any more than anyone "in the community"
corrects, e.g. "jurdge, jedge, murch, mech" instead of "judge, much."
even though this change is entirely rule-governed and by no means
random.

--
-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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