Provenance of /Or/ > [ar] / __@ ?

[Wilson Gray]

That looks like Saint Louis Corridor to me. I grew up in Saint Louis
city, ca. 1942-1962. When I was in high school in 1955, a teacher who
was a native of Omaha remarked to the class that we St. Louisans had a
strange way of speaking. For example, instead of "F[o]rest P[a]rk," we
said "F[a]rest P[o]rk."

In fact, we said "F[ar]est P[a]rk," of course.

When I was in grade school, we tried to avoid having to say in class
any number between 39 and fifty, since, needless to say, "forty" was
necessarily pronounced "farty."

--
-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



On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 9:24 PM, Neal Whitman <nwhitman at ameritech.net> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Neal Whitman <nwhitman at AMERITECH.NET>
> Subject:      Provenance of /Or/ > [ar] / __@ ?
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> I'm sure this has been analyzed somewhere at some point, but I don't know where.
> What is the dialect that has /O/ lowering to [a] in a stressed vowel preceding
> /r/ and an unstressed vowel? In other words, the dialect that pronounces
> "forest" as "farrest," "Florida" as "Flarrida", "Oregon" as "Ahregun,"
> "horrible" etc. as "harrible" etc., "authority" as "autharity", but still has
> [O] in "fort", "lore," etc.? What is this realization called?
>
>
> I've been vaguely aware of it for many years, but have begun to notice it more,
> especially among certain NPR speakers. I even heard one guy on Planet Money talk
> about a "flarrist" (florist), which is right in line with the phonetic
> environment I described, but was still a new pronunciation to me.
>
> Neal
>
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