Dialect-clash

[Paul Johnston]

I don't know of any British dialect that says [blu:di] (though it was StdE in the 17th century!)--[blUdi]'s quite common--the whole North and most of the Midlands says that, and there were traditional Northern dialects that had kind of the equivalent of [blu:di] in that the vowel was the same as words like boot, moon--but this vowel was usually [I@].  You might have gotten [blIUdI] in Cumbrian or South Durham, which is close, but I doubt those doctor programs were set in 18c-early 20c Carlisle or Hartlepool somehow.

Paul Johnston
On May 26, 2012, at 5:58 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:      Dialect-clash
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Back around 1962, a former German-"linguist" barracksmate who had
> taken a "European out" was "living on the economy" in West Berlin by
> teaching English at a local Berlitz School. He was annoyed because his
> expertise as a native-speaker of English.
>
> By some chance, my buddy had occasion to speak the word, _bloody_.
> Naturally, he pronounced it [bl^di] and was about to proceed, when one
> of his "doob" students interrupted him.
>
> "Excuse, please, sir. You make a mistake. Is that word not pronounced [blu:di]?"
>
> "[blu:di]?! No! It's pronounced *[bl^di]*!"
>
> "Well, sir, perhaps *you* are thinking this, because *you* are an
> *American*! If you were English, you would say, '[blu:di]'!"
>
> The rest is left to the reader's imagination.
>
> From time to time, I've made reference to a set of medical reality
> shows on the tube that I subsume under the rubric, "The Doctors." Some
> of these programs of British origin.
>
> On The British Doctors, it's struck me that the only pronunciation of
> "bloody" that I've heard used so far is, for all practical purposes,
> [blu:di]. Cf., e.g. the dialect used on consult-your-local-listings
> Bizarre ER.
>
> 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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