London rhymes

[Laurence Horn]

On Jul 9, 2012, at 2:11 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 9, 2012 at 12:05 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>> So this presupposes the ability to rhyme [pEl mEl] with [gEl] (as in "bell", "hell"), right?
>
> Abstracting away from Prof. Stone's correction - seems reasonable to
> me. It's in line with the way that some dialects of BrE strike my ear.
> It also provides an account of a misspelling of "girl," _gall_, that
> I've noted in the writings of random non-native speakers. If you know
> the pronunciation of "Pall Mall" and that _girl_ rhymes with it, then
> spelling _girl_ as "gall" makes more sense, IMO, than assuming a
> mispelling of AmE "gal" in otherwise fairly-formal writing, where no
> American would use "gal."
>
I was reminded by this discussion of a comment of Jespersen's about women's and men's phonetics in his notorious chapter "The Woman" from his _Language: Its Nature and Origin_ (1922):

"In present-day English there are said to be a few differences in pronunciation between the two sexes; thus according to Daniel Jones, _soft_ is pronounced with a long vowel [sO:ft] by men and with a short vowel [sOft] by women, similarly [gE at l] is said to be a special ladies' pronunciation of _girl_, which men usually pronounce [g3:l]…"

(where E = IPA epsilon and 3 = backward epsilon)
No comment from Jespersen or Daniel Jones on whether and how the sexes differ in pronouncing "Pall Mall".

LH

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