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

[Wilson Gray]

Apropos of nothing, when I learned _short_ [Sart] as slang for "car,"
back in Saint Louis, I at first thought that the word was "shark."

I was probably caught up in Sherlock Holmes-think. There's no obvious
relationship between either _short_ or _shark_ and "car." But, once
that I had exhausted all other possible explications, the only
possibility left was "shark."

A *shark*, after all, is also an automobile.

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


On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 8:31 AM, Charles C Doyle <cdoyle at uga.edu> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Charles C Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Provenance of /Or/ > [ar] / __@ ?
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Could be!
>
> --Charlie
>
> ________________________________________
> From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of David A. Daniel [dad at POKERWIZ.COM]
> Sent: Monday, November 19, 2012 8:26 AM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Isn't that "Orange you glad I didn't say banana?"
> DAD
>
>
> Poster:       Charles C Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Provenance of /Or/ > [ar] / __@ ?
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ---
>
> I'm reminded of the "knock-knock" joke that culminates in the punch line
> "Aren't you glad I didn't say 'orange'?"
>
> --Charlie
>
> Sent: Saturday, November 17, 2012 11:17 AM
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ---
>
> On Nov 17, 2012, at 6:38 AM, Ben Zimmer wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 1:36 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>>>
>>> On Nov 16, 2012, at 6:24 PM, Neal Whitman wrote:
>>>
>>>> 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?
>>>>
>>>
>>> It's what I grew up with in NYC, although I've shifted over to [O] most
> of the time for
>>> these; I suspect I go back and forth (on "Florida", "orange", "forest")
> even though I
>>> think of myself as an open-o employer for these (the first group, that
> is; I've never
>>> varied on [O] for "fort" or "lore").  I think of "AH-rinj" as the locus
> classicus, but as I
>>> recall it was getting mocked for my [a] in "corridor" as a freshman in
> Rochester that
>>> led to my abandoning my native vowels in this frame.  I'm sure I never
> say "flarrist",
>>> but I probably did before the fall of 1961.
>>
>> Along with NYC, the use of unrounded [A] for the "tomorrow"/"orange"
>> class typifies Philadelphia and the Carolinas:
>>
>>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_vowel_changes_before_historic_
> r#Historic_.22short_o.22_before_intervocalic_r
>>
>> --
>> Ben Zimmer
>> http://benzimmer.com/
>
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