top and tail

[Wilson Gray]

On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 12:53 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> Funny you should ask.  I don't (natively), but I've encountered both, =
> the latter just yesterday.  The Carolina Chocolate Drops, a great =
> trio/quartet of performers playing traditional and eclectic music, came =
> through New Haven this summer and played a great set on the Green, =
> featuring "Cornbread and Butter Beans"*, one of their signature songs =
> they've also recorded on a CD we just acquired--"Genuine Negro Jig"--and =
> my wife was asking me if I knew what butter beans are.  I tried to =
> describe them based on the version I've had in restaurants and the Yale
> dining halls--sort of like lima beans but yellowish/beigish instead of
> green--but there are probably more accurate descriptions out there.

Piling coincidence uon coincidence, as it happns, I'm familiar with
the Carolina Chocolate Drops and their music. There's a PBS special -
hosted by Steve Martin, America's banjovangelist - on the banjo that's
re-run from time to time. The 'Drops are featured in it.

IAC, getting back to dialectology, I noticed that members of the
'Drops and other black speakers tended to say [b&ndZ@], probably the
pronunciation represented by _banjer_ in the Uncle Remus school of
phonetic transcription. But, as a child in Texas, I learned "bangjo"
[b&INdZoU], to the extent that it interfered with my learning to read
the word. I saw _bangjo_ where "banjo" was written.

Yes, I do think that speaking a dialect *does* interfere with learning
to read, but as the preceding indicates, only in fairly-trivial ways.
Another problem is guessing the pronunciation of "big" words read, but
never heard in the wild, such as "INTERpret[ation]." This is a problem
for Southerners without repect to race, creed, color, previous
condition of servitude, place of birth, or sexual orienrarion.

 Back in Berlin, a Spec 5 from the "'motherfuckin'" - no idea why they
were always referred to that way - motor pool and a white native of
Anniston, Ala., was lecturing the troops on the European rules of the
road. In his talk, he several times warned us about ['pid@ ,str&IN at z].
WTF? Is he saying "peter-stringers"? Context eventually revealed that
he was saying "PEEda STREEyans" ['pid@ ,strij at nz] < _pedestrian_.

Was he, somehow, unaware of the pronunciation, [p@'dEstrijan]. I'd bet
money that he was as aware of that pronunciation as anyone else is.
But, for him - as well as for me, at one time, in this very case -
there was simply no connection between the written form of the word
and its "proper" spoken form.

"How can this be?" you ask. "What is this ne'er-the-twain-shall-meet
shit? Ask a psycholinguist.

OTOH, this appears not to be the case, if the word is short enough.
The first time that I heard "b'nahl," I knew immediately that I was
hearing _banal_, a word that I was familiar with theretofore only
under the mindspeak - but, in this case, received, though labeled
"obsolete" by the OED Online; FWIW, I learned the word ca. 1951 and
first heard it spoken in 1970 - pronunciation, "beynl."

OTTH, a Davis classmate, from Tuscaloosa, Ala., said that she once had
to ask her high-school hygiene teacher what the "bloodsails" that he
was discussing were. She had known only the [-sEl] pronunciation used
by her father, an MD and a native of Lebanon, not Alabama.
Nevertheless, you'd expect the mapping to be trivial, in this case.

Youneverknow.



--
-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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